In a taxi with…Elliot Cowan
He’s about to play Macbeth at the Globe. But life’s not all toil and trouble for this ambitious young actor
Cabbie Kieran from Chigwell is looking a little concerned. We have parked between London’s Globe theatre and the Thames for photos and Elliot Cowan is clambering all over the cab as if it were a stage prop. He’s a big boy – tall and muscular, lifting himself on to the roof with just his arms. Passers-by ask who the good-looking, bearded man jumping off a taxi is.
It’s not easy to get Elliot Cowan to monkey about. He is a serious, complex actor and he is about to take on a serious, complex role – at only 33, he will play Macbeth this summer at the Globe. ‘It is daunting. But it’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a while and I have consciously cleared the decks for this.’
If you’re wondering how someone you may be only dimly aware of (he played Mr Darcy in last year’s Lost in Austen) has been cast in one of the most famous of theatrical roles, be assured that Elliot’s low-key rise is a deliberate choice: ‘I’ve not been distracted by a long-running TV show, or visits to America for pilot season,’ he explains.
Nor has he succumbed to other potential distractions. Although he has a girlfriend, who works in the arts, he says, ‘I’m still very much about being an actor. That’s why I’m not married with kids.’
'I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am – an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke'
Dressed in cords and battered boots and a pair of wire-framed specs, Elliot
is also sporting a mighty fine beard. ‘A movie I was supposed to be doing got pulled. So I thought I would pursue the beard as another form of artistic expression.’ He roars with laughter. In both his looks and his CV he fits squarely into the school of British actors from a bygone age – public-school educated, Rada-trained, intelligent and with diction as crisp as a frosty morning.
The eldest of three, he was brought up in Colchester and went to board at Uppingham School in Rutland aged 13. He says that his parents – dad a consultant physician, mum an artist – were massive influences in leading him to the stage. ‘We started going to the theatre as early as I can remember. They were very supportive about the arts. Even though momentarily I thought about being a doctor, I was always involved in theatre and did a drama degree. I just didn’t have the guts to go, “Yes, I’m going to be an actor” until I was probably 21.’
He won a place at Rada and on graduating in 2001 spent two years in theatre and small television roles, until he found himself in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, starring Colin Farrell. Elliot was cast as a young Ptolemy – while the older Ptolemy was a little-known actor called Sir Anthony Hopkins.
‘Meeting Hopkins was awesome,’ he says. ‘I had been watching all his old films and trying to ape his voice. I ended up giving an impression of Hopkins to the man himself, who then tried to do an impression of that. It got very surreal.’
Although Alexander was a flop, it didn’t tarnish Elliot’s name. Since then he has gone on to do The Golden Compass and Happy-Go-Lucky, and most recently he played Stanley Kowalski opposite Rachel Weisz in the hit Donmar revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. ‘I played Stanley at school when I was 16. In a sense that’s where the seed was sown. And 15 years later I heard they were putting it on and I was ravenous to do it.’
Director Lucy Bailey saw him in Streetcar and cast him as Macbeth. It’s his biggest role to date. Things are looking sweet. So why so intense, Elliot?
‘I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am – an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element – whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp.’
Camp? If there’s an adjective that doesn’t fit Elliot Cowan, it is camp. ‘Well, it comes out occasionally. When I’m in the right heels…’
Macbeth will open at Shakespeare’s Globe on 23 April. To book, tel: 020 7401 9919 or go to shakespeares-globe.org
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