Just days before this engagement at his south London home, Will Young was blissed-out, sunning himself on a beach in southern Mexico. Through his earlier years in the entertainment industry, the musician turned actor, author and activist is not sure he made looking after himself a priority. Now the 44-year-old has self-care rituals that he firmly sticks to. Taking work-free holidays helps, as does regular therapy. “And I quite religiously only look at my diary the night before,” Young says. “Living day to day, so I don’t worry about what’s coming up and panic.”
Having only just finished a tour celebrating the two decades since he won Pop Idol, there is now a book on anxiety in the works and his mental health fundraising initiative Wellstock; and after cuffing himself to a beagle breeding facility in Cambridgeshire last year, he is plotting to get the site shut down permanently. So breaking his own rule on the Oaxaca coast, Young briefly checked the timeline for his upcoming acting gig: a new production of Song from Far Away, a one-man play by the Olivier and Tony award-winning playwright Simon Stephens. “I thought it was opening on 22 March, so felt very relaxed. I was ahead of the game. And then I saw in my calendar: oh fuck, it opens February.” Suffice to say, line-learning kicked off immediately.
Now sitting at a dining table-cum-desk in his airy sitting room – all bleached hair and tan – Young is more relaxed, comfortable in trackies with a packet of Silk Cut, a pint of squash and his script neatly placed in front of him. Well acquainted with the plot, if not all the lines, he talks me through Song from Far Away. Young plays a “closed-down, shut-off, gay Dutch bloke” who has been living in New York for a decade. “Then tragedy strikes,” Young says, “and he has to go home and confront his past, his life and awful relationship with his family back in Amsterdam.”
It is Young’s first live theatre role in a decade. He received his own Olivier nod for his turn in a 2013 production of Cabaret. But it’s his part in a 2007 revival of Noël Coward’s The Vortex in which he sees most similarities. “I played Nicky,” Young recalls, “a drug addict and closeted gay. It was dark, and without doubt affected me.”
When an overzealous voice coach sent him the (mostly) not-so-rave reviews – “What the fuck was he doing?” – for this first stage role, Young was overwhelmed. His inexperience was showing. “Thankfully [veteran actor] Diana Hardcastle played my mum. She took me aside and basically said: ‘If you’re going to be any good, and this is going to work, I’ll have to teach you.’”
Off stage, life then was challenging, too. “I hadn’t even started therapy,” Young says. “It was heavy, and I’m not sure I distanced myself enough.” Since then, he has taken an approach that favours self-preservation. “I remember filming [2005 film] Mrs Henderson Presents, and Bob Hoskins telling me about the risks of getting too close to a character; how you have to separate it. Now I think about it scientifically: movement, accent, voice.”
It’s why in Song from Far Away, Young is avoiding mining personal experience for inspiration. “So far, I can separate,” he says. “This sounds wanky, but you’re just a vessel. For me, it’s about understanding people. I’m trying to pull things from elsewhere, but not from myself. How could I get on stage and do that? I’d go down with the ship.”
An academic approach to acting may be Young’s MO, but – going on synopsis alone, at least – it’s hard not to see potential parallels between fact and fiction. “There’s a brilliant line,” he says, “one of my favourites, at least of those I’ve learned. My character’s mum calls while he’s in New York, to tell him his brother has died.” The monologues are written in the form of letters to the protagonist’s departed sibling. “‘It really wasn’t a convenient time for me when Mum called. So when I called her back I was short on the phone,’” Young recites, dipping into his Dutch-American accent.
“It’s not a convenient time? He has meetings? That tells me everything.” In 2020, Young lost his own twin brother to suicide. “When the police came round to tell me Rupert had died, the first thing I said was: ‘But I’ve just done his ironing.’ It’s heartbreaking, really. What you say in that moment, I think, is revealing. I could make people detest my character with that line. Or I could show how vulnerable he is.”
Dealing with death in the play didn’t deter him. “We need to be better at confronting mortality,” he says, “and it comes down, I think, to whether we can handle our own death. I used to have spiralling panic attacks about mine. Now it doesn’t bother me.” Seeing a shaman helped, Young adds. Anywhere exotic? “Oh no, just some posh lady down the road in Wandsworth who used to work in publishing. Now I’m very relaxed about it all.”
That is not to say Young can’t empathise with his character, certainly when it comes to his struggle to form romantic relationships. His character has a recurring fantasy about a waiter who simply showed him kindness once. He obsesses over a flame from 12 years ago. “I can relate to a lot of that,” Young says. “I’ve been mostly single throughout my life. I don’t feel it now, but there was a time when I was quite ashamed of it. Relatives pityingly asking … ‘Anyone?’ Because of past experiences – abuse at boarding school – I find relationships triggering. I don’t feel damaged, but it was damaging. I don’t know if I can trust someone to do that with.”
This year, Young intends to take a prolonged break from music. After two decades in pop, a period of separation, he believes, feels important. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t love the industry. After all this time I still don’t know if it works for me.” It’s not that he’s in doubt about his vocal chops, standing on stage and belting out his back catalogue. No, that still feels spiritual; there’s no rush like it. “But I don’t like the vulnerability,” he says, “of writing songs, releasing them and the result being judged. I never have. Even if they prove successful.” Banking four UK No 1 albums – his other four all charting in the top three – has done little to make the process less painful.
Finding courage in his musical convictions remains out of reach. “I’ve already got two albums that I’m sitting on. One is totally 80s, and the other is psychedelic folk. I can’t make a choice. It’s debilitating.” With acting, Young reckons his output can speak for itself. “What the audience thinks of me doesn’t matter. I’m not selling myself but someone else. Music is different. There’s pressure to be a brand. I’m even locked out of my social media because I just get drunk and slag people off. As an actor, I don’t need that presence.”
Maybe it’s little surprise, I suggest, that Young’s sensitivity around public approval is particularly pronounced, given that ostensibly his career trajectory was determined by a popularity contest: his Pop Idol victory 21 years ago, seen by 13 million viewers on ITV. “However lucky I’ve been with that side of my career,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “I don’t think I’ll ever have masses of confidence in myself as a pop star. I’d like to stop the music by 50, to be honest.”
It is why Young has cleared his calendar for the next 12 months. He’s hoping to shift the balance of his output. “So yes,” he says, glancing down at his script, “I’m totally throwing myself into this. Rehearsals start in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be prepared. Worst comes to the worst, I’ll get an Autocue.”
