Tim Driesen

AGE: 30. He laughs: "I have a good moisturizer."

HOMETOWN: Near Antwerp, north of Brussels, where the Never Forget player grew up speaking Dutch and French, with English only as a third language. Driesen moved to London when he was 18 to study on a full scholarship at Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom, Surrey, "and I've been lucky enough to have been working in Britain ever since." What about his native accent? "When I've consumed too much alcohol or am a little bit tired, it can slip in slightly. In this country, you need to support a good British accent, and there's been added pressure on this show to do a good Mancunian accent," he says, referring to the northern English Manchester sound. How is he faring? "No one's questioned it, which is good."

CURRENTLY: Clocking in 250 performances (and counting) as Adrian Banks, the likeably nerdy, puppyish Mark Owen equivalent in Never Forget, the sweetly silly musical set to the back catalogue of the U.K. boy band sensation, Take That. The production continues at the Savoy Theatre through November 15 before transferring to the Lyric Theatre on November 20 for an open-ended run. Driesen, like all the male principals, has been with the show since its first preview over a year ago in Cardiff, Wales. "Obviously, it's come a long way since then." What hasn't changed, he reports, are the reactions of a largely female audience. "It's quite phenomenal to have a show where the response has been that consistent"—nightly ovations and the odd wolf whistle here and there. Driesen laughs. "Any time you get a big group of women in an audience and someone comes out half-naked, there will be at least one scream somewhere; it happens in this show three or four times." Driesen, for his part, reports on sharing a dressing room with the musical's resident hunk, Eaton James, who plays a stripper called Dirty Harry. "Eaton's got this phenomenal body; he's in the gym six times a week. I'm in the gym three, maybe four times a week, but I do like my cakes,” he admits. “I just have to enjoy life a little bit."

ADRIAN, OR CHANGE: While acknowledging that Never Forget "is not Shakespeare; the show is what it is," Driesen at the same time maintains that "of all the guys in the show, I've got the biggest character journey to go on: the geeky nerd who's got very low self-confidence; Adrian doesn't know where he stands in the world. He's got a lot of hurdles to overcome, starting with becoming conscientious of the fact that there is more to life than pleasing a woman who doesn't want to be pleased. It's quite nice to play the changing character and that change in confidence."

HOW DID YOU GET HERE FROM THERE?: Driesen grew up the older of two children of a policeman dad and a mother who is a teacher. "Every year there would be a school trip to London and Canterbury, so I had quite a nice affinity with Britain already." What about coming from Belgium, where there is, he says, "not a great theater culture in general and no real music theater education"? What there is instead, he explains, is "a heavy accent on either acting or, as it were, cabaret. If you were writing your own songs or making up your own programs—that was highly looked upon. Musical theater was something people looked down upon." It was during his teenage years that Driesen saw a few shows in Holland (The Phantom of the Opera was one), "and musical theater crept into my blood. It just overwhelmed me as something that you don't get with the cinema or a straight play. I thought, I can sing a bit, dance a bit, act a bit. Why don't I train in all three?"

TOUT DE SWEET: For those less familiar with the Take That thing, Driesen explains that he is playing in effect "the sweetheart of the group: Mark was always the one where people would say, ‘Oh, he's lovely.' He did Celebrity Big Brother, and people absolutely adored him. He's kind of the cutie one of the band." Is Driesen by extension the sweetheart of this cast? He laughs. "I have no idea—you'll have to ask them." One thing that's clear is that his interest in the show continues unabated, given that all the male leads' contracts continue through April. "The audience reaction gets you through everything. With some shows, you go, ‘Oh God, not one more performance,' but this is not ever like that. With this type of show, it's so feel-good that it makes us feel good. You can't really go wrong with it."