Amid the delights of Nicholas Hytner’s all-conquering production of Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre was an intriguing mystery. Who the hell was Andrew Richardson, the complete unknown making a charismatic professional stage debut as Sky Masterson? How did a total newcomer effortlessly hold his own against the musical talents of Marisha Wallace and Celinde Schoenmaker, and the comic timing of Daniel Mays? Where did this fully formed leading man come from?
Two weeks after leaving the show, Richardson, 28, talks to me about backstage visits from Hugh Jackman, Helena Bonham Carter and Florence Pugh, and unpacks his history. ‘I was born in Canada but my family is British, from Sunderland,’ he says. ‘I grew up on a decommissioned farm in Derbyshire but my dad travelled a lot for work so we lived in 15 homes by the time I was 11 — Australia, Pittsburgh, Florida.
‘Me and my three siblings were homeschooled by my mum until at 11 I went to the Royal Ballet School. I loved dancing but learnt really quickly that I didn’t love it enough to train six hours a day every day for the rest of my life. So I went to a boarding school in Derbyshire and at 13 I played the lead in a Tom Stoppard play, On the Razzle, which we took to the Edinburgh Fringe, where I saw five shows a day, theatre at its worst and its best, and I thought: this is my group of people.’
When his family moved to the US, Richardson attended Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, and studied drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ‘Then I went to New York to try and be an actor,’ he smiles. ‘For four years I couldn’t get into any theatre auditions: just couldn’t hack it.’ He shot some independent films, working his way up the cast list. ‘I was Driver Number Two, then Man Number One, then I was Adam and then I was in fully named roles.’
When the pandemic laid waste to the New York arts economy, Richardson withdrew to North Carolina, disenchanted with acting. He was writing music and considering his options when a British agent friend offered to send him up for some UK jobs — ‘I quite literally said, anything but musicals…’ After a taped and in-person audition for Guys & Dolls, he heard he’d been cast as Sky while visiting his partner of five years, Fay van Baar, a dancer with Nederlands Dans Theater. The news came via his mum. ‘When I go through callbacks and I know I am down to the last few, I turn my phone off, because otherwise I’m just waiting for news,’ he says, as if this is completely normal.
Richardson is an intriguing mix of open and enigmatic, humble and breezy. He claims not to know exactly what his dad does for a living, talks about how lucky he’s been and how hard it was to create Sky, yet seems to sail through life on a different frequency from the rest of us. ‘I’m directing a movie now, which is totally different,’ he says blithely. ‘It’s a short film with Imelda Staunton and [German actress] Leonie Benesch, written by my brother Nicholas.
‘We created it as a series concept over the pandemic then decided we wanted to film it ourselves.’ He’s got a ‘shopping agreement’ [an option deal] with a producer for the series — of course he has — but ideally what he’d like to do next is perform in a straight play, then perhaps some Shakespeare, ‘and my dream role when I’m older is Cyrano de Bergerac’. I honestly wouldn’t bet against him.
