Imagine Olivia Colman, the Oscar-winning actress who can hold millions of viewers glued to their screens, standing backstage at a theatre… secretly wishing the fire alarm would go off so she wouldn’t have to perform.
That’s exactly how Colman describes her feelings about stage work.
The English star, known for powerful roles in ‘The Crown’, ‘The Favourite’, and most recently ‘Wonka’, has opened up about the one kind of acting she feels she simply cannot do.
And it may surprise fans. She says she is “terrible” at theatre and actually hates it.
Colman shared this candid confession while promoting her upcoming film ‘The Roses’. She joined her co-star Benedict Cumberbatch on ‘Dish’, a podcast hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett.
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The conversation drifted towards jobs the guests had disliked. While Benedict and Angela joked about their stressful days working in kitchens, hoping for fire alarms so they could escape, Olivia Colman admitted that’s exactly how she feels about plays.
“I’m like that with most theatre,” she revealed, laughing at her own honesty. Asked by Benedict to explain further, Colman didn’t hold back. “Oh, most plays. I’m terrible! I have quite a short attention span, so doing months of the same words, I struggle with. I’m scared for a long time, and then once the fear finishes, I’m so bored. Which is awful.”
Her dislike for theatre isn’t just talk. She even recalled a real moment when a fire alarm interrupted a play. Instead of panic, she felt a wave of relief. “I was out of my costume in seconds,” she remembered. “‘Surely we can’t go back?’ But they got us all back on stage. I was like, ‘Argh’. And had to put my costume back on.”
Colman has very few theatre credits. While her career in film and television is stacked with memorable performances, she has only appeared in four plays.
In 2000, she took on the role of Cathleen in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’. It wasn’t until 2009 that she returned to the stage in Richard Bean’s ‘England People Very Nice’. Shortly after, she played Myra Arundel in ‘Hay Fever’.
Her last stage role came in 2017, when she starred as Jenny in ‘Mosquitoes’. Since then, she has stayed away from theatre entirely.