'My teeth pinged out': Gwilym Lee on playing Gareth Southgate in Dear England
When Gwilym Lee signed on to take over from Joseph Fiennes, playing England’s transformative football manager Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s remounted and rewritten play Dear England at the National this year, his dad came up with a joke. “He said you’ve got to de-Fiennes the role, or re-de-Fiennes it,” smiles Lee, 41, his chiseled jaw now adorned with a Southgate-esque beard.
He has also been fitted for the manager’s famous waistcoat and has a “small [dental] bridge” to replicate his horsey teeth. “In a moment of high stakes in rehearsals it pinged out of my mouth the other day, but I managed to catch it and pop it back in,” Lee adds. Good save, I say. “I’ve got denture glue now,” he frowns, “which is a little glimpse into the future.”
Like a new broom taking on the England job, he has to make the part of Southgate his own, and to that end he’s avoided watching Fiennes’s performance on NT Live. “He’s a brilliant actor and he created the role,” Lee says. “But I have to find it for myself. And you know, for the first time, this play now has an ending.” The original 2023 version held an optimism for England’s chances in the 2024 World Cup in Germany, but the ever-prolific Graham (whose credits this year already include Punch at the Young Vic and Brian and Maggie on Channel 4) has now rewritten it to include the squad’s defeat in that tournament and Southgate’s resignation.
Lee has form in playing real people, having starred as Brian May to Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury in Bryan Singer’s 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody, and played a composite of Catherine the Great’s lovers Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin in Hulu’s The Great. He can also currently be seen as Bill Stirling, the older and slightly less mad brother of the Special Air Service founder David Stirling, in the second series of SAS Rogue Heroes.
Bohemian Rhapsody allowed Lee, a passable acoustic guitarist, to strike up a friendship with Queen’s shaggy-haired plank spanker. And he recently also had a respect-paying lunch with David Stirling’s son Archie (along with actress Rachael Stirling, Archie’s daughter with the late Diana Rigg). “He said he found the likeness [to his father] uncanny, which is all I could hope for. You have to do justice to fictional characters too, but when it’s real people there is a sense of responsibility, so for him to say that was really brilliant.”
Lee was born in Bristol to Welsh parents but raised in Sutton Coldfield: “Gareth Southgate lived just down the road from us when he played for Aston Villa, so you used to see him around quite a bit”. Despite this connection Lee, like Fiennes before him, sensed Southgate might not want to meet the man playing him so did not seek him out. It’s thought Southgate didn’t see the play in its first iteration, unlike Gary Lineker, who is also depicted onstage.
“When it was first staged, he was still in the manager role, so it might have been weird,” says Lee. “He seems very retiring and it would probably be against his nature to see a play about himself. But you never know. After the National we’re taking the show to the Lowry in Salford, which is close to his home in Harrogate. I’d love him to come and see it and to meet him, because I’m a huge admirer.”
That admiration stems more from Southgate’s status as a positive male role model – at a time when the world seems woefully short of them – than his achievements on the field. “I can't say that I'm a huge football fan, but I do get behind England during tournaments, even more so when he was at the helm,” Lee says. “Part of his achievement and his legacy was that he made football more accessible, and less of an aggressive world.
“He’s got that quiet intelligence, that soft leadership. And he had really difficult conversations about identity, nationality, leadership and masculinity at a really tricky time in Britain's history. Racism [toward players like Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka] is a huge part of the story and he didn’t shy away from it and encouraged the players not to shy away from it.”
The play takes its title from the open letter, beginning “Dear England fans”, that Southgate penned to supporters and the wider nation as the pandemic took hold in 2020, a rallying cry for togetherness and hope. “He was leading at a time that maybe perhaps others weren't leading,” Lee says. “To stand on the Olivier stage and share those arguments, those philosophies, is a real privilege.
“Towards the end of his tenure, there was lots of criticism and judgment, but now that some of the dust has settled, hopefully some of those people might swallow their words and realise the magnitude of what he managed to do.” (As a closing thought on playing real people, Lee notes that both May and Southgate were given knighthoods after he played them or was announced to be playing them: “I’m just saying that so everyone wants to cast me in their biopics.”)
Professionally, Lee is odd one out in a medical family. “My dad was a paediatrician, my mum was a haematologist, my brother became a neonatologist at St Thomas's and my sister was a paediatric nurse,” he says. He was tempted by medicine himself but discovered through the now defunct Birmingham branch of the Central Junior Television Workshop that he had more of a flair for performance than for science. That said, he thinks medical personnel and actors have more in common than you’d think: they need to be present in the moment and react quickly and empathically.
“Obviously, doctors are dealing with real things and high stakes,” he adds quickly, “and that was part of the conversation I was having with myself when I was 15 or 16 and wanted to be an actor. My dad goes into hospital and literally saves lives. How can I justify wanting to go on stage and prance about?” Getting cast aged 16 as one of the young princes in an RSC production of Richard III at nearby Stratford-upon-Avon, then on tour across the country, sealed the deal.
His early successes were in classical theatre; he was commended in the prestigious Ian Charleson Awards for performances in the National’s 2008 Oedipus and as Laertes in Jude Law’s 2009 Hamlet; then he won it for his Edgar to Derek Jacobi’s King Lear in 2010. But given he’s 6’2, lean and handsome, TV came calling pretty soon. He had extended stints in Midsomer Murders and Jamestown before Bohemian Rhapsody came along. Lee and the three other actors who played Queen in the film remain in a WhatsApp group and meet regularly: “That film was so special it forged us in an unbreakable way.” Seeing Malek in the current Oedipus at the Old Vic made him yearn for the stage, and classical roles again.
“I’m so proud of him,” he says. “I haven’t been on stage for seven years but for him it’s, like, 20 years so it’s a huge deal that he’s done it. And it’s the sort of thing I want to get back to doing. The last time I was in the theatre was 2017, but then I did a couple of film and TV jobs, then Covid came along, and then I became a father.” His son is three and Lee has been with the boy’s mother for “oh, a long time”; but she is not in the business and they like to keep details of their life private.
They live in Tottenham: “I can see Spurs’ stadium from the top of my road.” As an adoptive Londoner, he thinks the best thing about the city is that all the world’s culture and cuisine is on your doorstep. The worst is “the litter. But God, that’s such a twee, middle-class thing to say.” If things get on top of him, cycling past St Paul’s improves his mood.
The breeziness of Lee’s conversation belies the underlying reality of the industry he largely works in. Film and TV production have been battered across the globe by Covid and the writers’ and actors’ strikes and further damaged in the UK by Brexit. Commissions are down from both heritage channels and streamers. “There was this grim phrase going around last year, ‘survive to ‘25’,” he says. “Which is a bleak thing to say, because your bank manager is not listening to that. We've got to make a living, and it's been really hard.
“I think we've gone through a boom of TV and of film, and we're now recalibrating, post writers’ strike and post-COVID. There are some positives to it: a lot of work that was being made got lost due to the sheer volume of what was going out. So now good work will be recognised, but a lot of people in the industry got used to a level of work that just isn’t there now.” Having said which, he’s called back to don his waistcoat and dental bridge and become again the galvanizing, rallying force that is Gareth Southgate.
Dear England is at The National Theatre until 24 May
