Geno Segers has departed the Broadway musical “Hadestown” after remarks he made about transgender people resurfaced online.
Segers, who has acted in “Yellowstone” and “Banshee,” was slated to join the Tony Award-winning production on Sept. 1 as Hades, god of the underworld, as part of a new principal cast that includes Jasmin Savoy Brown as Eurydice, Norbert Leo Butz as Hermes, Amber Iman as Persephone, and Kayko as Orpheus.
In a statement on Sunday, per the New York Times, the show announced that “Hadestown” producers and the actor had agreed to part ways and that “additional casting” would be announced.
The departure comes after Segers’ since-deleted social media posts, including videos he uploaded to YouTube, resurfaced online and caused casting backlash that called for the actor to be pulled from the show. In clips featured on OnStage Blog, the actor says, “I’m not against anyone living out their lives the way they want, but I am against their rights superseding the rights of other people — that’s a little bit foul.”
In the clip, he continued to say he didn’t think that transgender people were oppressed and he expressed an issue with identifying pronouns. OnStage Blog host Chris Peterson said that Segers had scrubbed his accounts for the most part but that the actor was posting “anti-trans content” on his X account and Instagram as recently as October.
Iman, who will play Hades’ wife, Persephone, in the production, addressed the news that Segers had been nixed in a since-expired Instagram story on Sunday.
“I wasn’t posting, But I was not quiet,” Iman wrote. “Sometimes you gotta get off social media and demand answers. Cuz I’ll be damned if my ‘husband’ is a clown and we’re not at the circus.”
On Monday, Segers issued an apology on social media. “I wish to extend my most sincere apologies to everyone impacted by my words,” he wrote. “While I never intended to inflict harm, I recognize that the impact of my statements is what matters most.
“I am fully committed to listening, educating myself, and elevating my standards. I will work tirelessly to earn the opportunity to make things right.”
The actor then addressed his former castmates and the show’s producers, asking that they accept his apology for the stress his “actions have brought to this production.”
“I accept full responsibility for my words and acknowledge the necessity of immediate accountability,” he continued. “I extend my wholehearted support to the cast, crew, and my replacement. I wish you all tremendous success during your run. I have complete confidence that each of you will be phenomenal.”
The post-apocalyptic, jazzy New Orleans-style “Hadestown,” written by Anaïs Mitchell, is a mythical love story that follows young lovers Orpheus and Eurydice and the rulers of the underworld, Hades and Persephone.
Film critic Katie Walsh wrote of the 2026 filmed staging of the production: “There are moments when Mitchell’s songs feel eerily prescient: The show’s villain, Hades (Page), rules the underworld of Hadestown as a fascistic industrialist; his Act I closing number is titled ‘Why We Build the Wall.’ Factory workers sing back to him, ‘We build the wall to keep us free,’ a chorus that foretells the Trumpian rhetoric of 2016 and a reminder that these patterns of division and otherization are the eternal tools of the oppressor.”
