Matt Rawle

Matt Rawle

Birmingham native Matt Rawle has been a regular West End presence for well over a decade—ever since he left Mountview Drama School early to join the London company of Miss Saigon. Since that time, he's appeared in such diverse musicals as Martin Guerre, director John Crowley’s Donmar revival of Into the Woods, Camelot at the Open Air Theatre and Michael Grandage's superlative revival of Evita, playing Che to his good friend and sometime lodger Elena Roger's Eva Peron. Last summer he took a break from musicals to star as a bisexual doctor named Salim in Baghdad Wedding, Hassan Abdulrazzak's acclaimed play at the Soho Theatre. Now, he's headlining his first musical, playing the title role of the swashbuckling Don Diego de la Vega in Zorro the Musical, adapted from the Isabel Allende novel and playing at the Garrick Theatre. He spoke to Broadway.com one Monday evening during a dinner break in rehearsals, on the same day that he had undergone long-overdue major dental work. Was it in honor of his current stage assignment that he was about to munch a chorizo burger? "I suppose it's kind of apt," the exceedingly genial Rawle said of his choice of nourishment during a conversation encompassing his notably untheatrical background, the ethnic diversity that he presents to casting directors, and "the wild swashbuckling romp, very witty and intelligent" that, he says, is Zorro.

Iraqi, Argentinian, now Spanish: You seem to play every nationality going except British. I’m very impressed.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. As I’ve got older, the parts have got more interesting, which you always hear actors say, but it’s true, really. I’m from the West Midlands where my mum is a florist and my dad a builder, so it’s not like I’m an American actor or public schoolboy. There aren’t any great West Midlands roles for me to play in any case—The Pirate of the Black Country? [Laughs.] So I don’t think I’ve missed out.

Do you have any Latin blood in you anywhere?
My mom is actually from the West Midlands and my father is from Ruislip but his parents were from Wales, so I’m guessing the dark, swarthy thing comes from Wales, where there tends to be a lot of that kind of thing. I’ve never really thought about it, really. It’s just recently that these parts have been coming along, so hopefully you just rise to the challenge. With Baghdad Wedding, Lisa [director Lisa Goldman] asked me to do an Iraqi accent, which is not something you get asked to do every day, so I sort of went for it and got the job. You just have to jump in.

That production deserved a longer life.
I know. They were looking to transfer it or revive it at the beginning of this year but [fellow performer] Sirine [Saba] was pregnant and I couldn’t do it and it just never happened. I went to see The Vertical Hour on Broadway, which touched on a similar subject from a different point of view, and for me that play never struck a chord. It was so much the middle classes talking about a subject that they had very little knowledge about, which isn’t a criticism; it’s just a taste thing. Ours was a play straight from the front line.

It must be nice to move away from musicals and then come back to them.
It was fantastic. The weird thing about the Soho Theatre and me is that after I did Martin Guerre, I got asked to do a play there playing a drag queen, and I turned it down. I didn’t have the confidence to do it. But it’s funny—recently I’ve got my shit together, and I’m far more confident about it all. Now that I’m older and more relaxed, things are coming to me. I’m a better actor, and doors are opening.

Matt Rawle in Zorro

I would imagine Zorro couldn’t be more different in what it asks of you.
Something like Baghdad Wedding was incredibly challenging, [but] Zorro offers so many more difficult and complicated skills. In a play, you just have to be the character, whereas with Zorro, you have to perform magic tricks, you have to sing, swing from the ceiling, quick change, swing from the ceiling again: it’s an assault course of a part.

Are you losing weight?
I actually gained weight in rehearsals: I went to Sicily just before and I think I ate my body weight in Italian food [laughs], so I gained half a stone. But you can bet your life during previews that I won’t keep the weight. I got so thin during Evita, not through any other reason than working hard.

Are you still with Julie-Alanah Brighten?
We're no longer together. We separated when Evita started; it was a very difficult time actually—two people trying to find their way in the world and it didn't work out. It was a really difficult time personally.

But the result was a production that actually earned its place alongside Hal Prince’s legendary original.
The interesting thing with that show was that none of us knew what it was going to be. We knew it was going to be Evita and everyone had in their head what Hal Prince had done with it but we knew that so much of the show was not about the operatics and the visual aspect; it was more about the characters.

Matt Rawle and Elena Roger in Evita

And about Elena’s astonishing performance.
Elena brought something to Evita that had never been brought to it before and that we only began to realize once we were well into performance. She’s constantly recreating herself and coming up with new ideas. Elena was under a lot of pressure on that show and she grew so much over the course of the run. We’ve become very good friends.

How does it feel now to be the above-the-title star of a West End show for the first time? No pressure, I would imagine—you’re the Elena Roger of Zorro.
I’m a bit taller than Elena, especially in heels [laughs], but, yeah, I do feel pressure. This is a huge part. It’s not just a case of standing on stage emoting but I’m sword-fighting, dancing, whip-cracking: men aren’t very good at multitasking, and I have to multitask on this.

Eight times a week, or do you get matinees off a la Eva Peron?
No, I’ll do all of them. I did all of them before on tour, though our show is 70% different from what it was then: the script has had a real rethink. It wasn’t too much for me; if there was any fallout, it was that I had a couple of rope swings that caused me to get a rather stiff neck. Now, having created and played about with the script on the tour, I do feel as if the part is well and truly embedded in my being, and that’s what with getting some rewrites today; it changes all the time. A lot of it has been rewritten for the better. People are going to have a very enjoyable evening.

You sound ready for action.
Well, I feel as if we’ve been through the birthing process with this show, and now I feel as if we’re educating it. I know that people love Zorro, and that was something I never knew before we did the tour. You think of The Princess Bride—people love that kind of thing, and of course they loved the Banderas film. All that plus The Gipsy Kings music and Rafael Amargo’s choreography and the flamenco: it really is a winning combination. This show sort of speaks its own musical language.