In 2022, many news outlets reported a human interest story about Elder. In 2007, as a 23-year-old aspiring actor visiting New York City, he was in the standing-room section of the Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee when a stranger approached him, noted his obvious enthusiasm for theater, gave him $200, and told him to spend it the next night on a ticket to a revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Elder did see that show and considered it-and the stranger's kindness-to be the factors that helped him decide to move to New York and pursue acting. By 2022 Elder was starring on Broadway in a different Sondheim revival, Company, alongside Patti LuPone, one of the stars of the Sweeney Todd production that so affected the course of Elder's career; at the same time, Elder was also starring in the HBO series The Gilded Age with Michael Cerveris, who had played the title role in that Sweeney Todd revival. Elder was reunited with Mark Howell, the stranger who had given him the money, and "paid forward" the favor by buying strangers tickets to Company. In July 2022, Elder retold this story on an episode of the WBEZ radio program This American Life that examined acts of kindness from strangers.
