When elfin, gay, 27-year-old Jack Wolfe was cast as Gabe, the teenage son of Caissie Levy’s mentally unwell suburban mother in Michael Longhurst’s Donmar production of the Broadway musical Next to Normal, he already ‘had history’ with the show.
‘I grew up in this tiny Welsh town [Cei Newydd] no one has ever heard of and in the kitchen we had the one family desktop computer. Aged 14 I discovered the Tony Awards on YouTube, and watched the Broadway cast doing the big kitchen argument scene over and over,’ he recalls. ‘That Christmas I got the vocal selections book to play on the piano and the soundtrack to listen to in the car. I discovered that musical theatre could be current and real. It was a hugely formative show for me growing up.’
He bought tickets to see the Donmar production before he was called in to audition, convinced there wasn’t a part for him in it. ‘Gabe is usually played as this über-athletic, football-playing hunk,’ he grins. ‘And I don’t think I present that at all.’
Wolfe is the second of four siblings: his mother is a piano teacher who runs a community choir; his father conducts brass bands and plays cornet. The family moved to Yorkshire when he was 15 and he joined a Saturday morning drama group in Wakefield, which helped him get over chronic shyness and anxiety (‘I was a terrified child who wouldn’t speak to anyone’). At 16 he went to Manchester to study piano until ‘I gave it my shot and ran away to London when I was 18’.
I can be badass and queer, get into fights and also have a boyfriend
Before graduating from Mountview drama school in Peckham, he got a professional job workshopping a production of Huckleberry Finn at the Lyric Theatre Belfast (‘the first time I’d been on a plane!). That Christmas he was cast in Pinocchio at the National Theatre and went on to perform in The Snow Queen at the Rose in Kingston, and The Magician’s Elephant for the RSC in 2021. But it was his role this year as Wylan, ‘a demolition expert and sensitive soul, part of a found family of underground criminals and castaways’, in the second series of Netflix’s fantasy drama Shadow and Bone that made him a queer icon.
‘Wylan is able to have baggage and history without it ever being about his queerness and he is never punished for it,’ says Wolfe. ‘That meant a lot to me as a reader of the books and it means a lot that I can inhabit a character who can be badass and queer, get into fights and also have a boyfriend.’
Wolfe says he always knew he was queer even if he didn’t initially know how to define or express it. ‘These are big journeys I am on now and I’m really grateful to be living in a time when conversations around queerness and gender are so open.’ His partner is actor Cavan Clarke.
I ask Wolfe if his boyish looks are a professional advantage or a hindrance and he’s briefly surprised. ‘I’ve never thought about it,’ he says. ‘What’s funny is I started going grey at 14 so my hair is constantly dyed.’ In the future, he’d like to work with Emma Rice of Wise Children, and maybe undertake one of the weightier Shakespeare roles.
‘At drama school I was always Puck or Ariel, but now I’m intrigued about what an exciting challenge it would be to bring myself to a role I never thought I’d be able to play. I’m open to any and all of it.’
