Michael Therriault
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Age: 34
Currently: Playing Gollum in the stage version of The Lord of the Rings at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It's a role he already played to award-winning success in the original Toronto production last year, where he won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Actor. “What’s exciting about this show is that it pushes all the boundaries of what we know as standard music theatre,” says the actor.
Hometown: “My hometown is now Toronto, but I was born and bred in a town about 30 minutes outside of it, called Oakville.” Despite his surname, he says, “I’m an English-speaking Canadian—I know a little French, but not very much. I studied it and my father speaks it, but we never spoke it at home.” During his London stint in The Lord of the Rings, he’s staying in Whitechapel, just east of the city.
Becoming an Actor: Therriault discovered he wanted to be an actor early on, and it was while watching Fame on TV when he was in the sixth grade that he first thought of getting some professional training. “The short version of this story is that I said to my parents there must be a school like that I could go to in Canada, and opened the phone book and found three schools in Toronto who sent me stuff. I showed it to my parents and asked if I could go, and they said no. About two years later, I was in the final year of grade school and a friend was going to an audition, so I went with him. I got into two schools, and told my parents I had done so, but they still said I couldn’t go. It took an hour and a half by public transportation to get to Toronto, but my principal arranged to cover the transportation costs and tuition fees through the school board, and then talked my parents into it so I got to go.” He duly did a music theatre major and a dance minor, graduating in 1995. There followed two years of “working in coffee shops and doing summer theatre” until he got his big break: joining the company of the annual Stratford Festival.
Michael Therriault in
The Lord of the Rings
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A Classical Career is Born: Therriault first went to Stratford in 1997, playing Mordred in Camelot and a small role in Filumena, but he got a lucky break. He was spotted by actor William Hutt—“in Canada, he’s like our Olivier”—and unknown to me, he said, “I want this guy to play Ariel when I do The Tempest. And they kept throwing different challenges at me after that.” Therriault went on to play Henry VI, Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Konstantin in The Seagull and Lord Alfred Douglas in a one-man show, Oscar Remembered. The latter brought him to London for the first time seven years ago. “I came here to do some research. There’s a soundbite of [Douglas] speaking in the British Library, so I thought I’d come to hear it and visit the places we talk about in the play, like Oxford and Reading.”
Blooming in The Producers: Though his seven years at Stratford brought Therriault a great deal of classical experience, he didn't put his musical training to use until he got cast as Leo Bloom in the Canadian premiere of The Producers. “That was a blast—it was really fun! All of a sudden I was singing in a show and people were saying, ‘He can sing?’ They didn’t realise.” But the show only ran for seven months. “Shows are having trouble now lasting in Toronto,” he says. He won the role of Motel in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, but just before heading to New York to start work, he went to the original casting call for The Lord of the Rings. “Pretty much every short guy auditioned for Frodo, so I did too, but it wasn’t really sitting. And I tried for Sam as well, but that didn’t work either. I asked if I could read for Gollum, and after I did two lines, I told them to forget it. But at the end of the call, Matthew Warchus asked me to stay after everyone had gone and try Gollum again. We all sat around in a circle, and Matthew and Peter Darling, the choreographer, asked me if I could put Gollum into a sentence. This sounds terrible to put in words, but I thought about picturing a black man being held by white supremacists—people who he doesn’t think should be helping him were helping him, so he’s a man totally in conflict with himself. They then said, can you physicalise that? We explored that for a long time, then I read again, and this time it clicked. It was then that I realised how the physical thing would be a huge part of how to attack this part.”
Transformation: A huge exercise in painted-on body makeup and glued-on pieces helped him to achieve the desired effect. “But it took over two hours to put on, and every time I was offstage we were repainting because it would start to sweat. On a two-show day, I was in make-up for 12 or 13 hours. And my skin started to get really irritated by the glue—I was glued everywhere. So this time around, I’m using a body suit, which looks very similar, but is a lot faster. Now it takes an hour to do the head and put on the suit.” But beyond the literal transformation, Therriault’s role also requires a lot of physicality. How does he keep fit? “McDonalds!” he quips, then adds more seriously, “you know, it is mostly being in the theatre itself. I should be going to the gym but I haven’t been, but it’s just about doing the work and going to the physio when necessary as quickly as possible. In Toronto, that was a big part of it—you have to stay on top of anything that starts to hurt and get it checked out right away. You are constantly assessing where things are at, because you are really throwing your body around and doing things that you shouldn’t be doing.”
Challenges and Changes: The show has been completely overhauled since its Toronto premiere. “It really has been improved—the storytelling is clearer and the flow of it is better, so it’s great that we’ve had the opportunity to do it again.” He is reunited with James Loye and Peter Howe, the English actors who play Frodo and Sam respectively, and with whom he has most of his scenes. “I never saw most of the reset of the cast till we were in tech in Toronto—I’d say, ‘I’m in this company, what’s your name?’ But with James and Peter, because we now know each other so well, we’ve not been nervous about trying things in a different way this time.” Of Loye’s Frodo, the role he originally auditioned for himself, he says, “It’s the hardest part in the show, I think, and I can’t imagine anyone doing it better than James.” And of the show in general, he says, “There are things that people are doing that are truly astounding.” But anyone who sees The Lord of the Rings finds what Therriault is doing the most astounding of all. Therriault, for his part, is simply astounded to be in London. “It’s amazing to see how much theatre you have here. It definitely makes Toronto feel like there should be tumbleweed going through it—London makes Toronto feel so small and unpopulated!”