Susan McFadden in Grease
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Age: 24
Currently: Playing Sandy Dumbrowski in Grease, a role she won by ITV's reality casting competition, Grease is the Word, in which the public voted that she and Danny Bayne were the ones that they wanted to play the central couple. “I did the first audition on my birthday, February 8, which I remember spending by standing in the freezing cold in the rain queuing up outside a hotel,” she says. “And we did the final TV show in June, so it was quite a long haul to get the role!”
Hometown: McFadden is a native Dubliner that came to London two years ago. Her aim? “It had always been a dream of mine since I was a child to be on a West End stage,” she says. “There’s very little theatre in Ireland and hardly any musical theatre at all,” she adds and explains that is why she wanted to move to London. She now lives in Fulham with her boyfriend, but she didn’t find it easy to break into the London theatre scene. “It was very hard when I arrived. I had to start all over again. I was already established at home w,here I had worked a lot and went from job to job. But I had to give it up and start from the bottom again, getting an agent and starting to go to auditions. I had to have a thick skin to get through it all.” She even found herself on the same auditioning rounds as Connie Fisher, who would win last year’s star search How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? to play the lead in The Sound of Music. “[Connie] was in a Mamma Mia! audition with me,” McFadden recalls, “but she didn’t get the part either.”
Susan McFadden and Danny Bayne in Grease
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Showbiz in the Blood: McFadden’s older brother, Brian, is a founder member of the Irish boy band group Westlife, so show business seems to run in the family. Or does it? “I come from a very big family,” McFadden notes. “My dad was one of 14, and my mum one of 11, so we have loads of cousins and relatives, but of all of us, only Brian and I are performers. My mum sent us to stage school at the age of four as a hobby, but it wasn’t something she planned on us pursuing. She wasn’t a pushy stage mother.”
First Big Break: Nevertheless, McFadden started young, professionally speaking. At the age of 11, she played the title role in Annie in a professional production at Dublin’s Olympia. “I was quite lucky—that’s the part every little girl wants to play,” she exclaims. “And now that I’m older, I’m playing Sandy, which is the other role I’ve always wanted to do.”
Joining the Reality TV Circus: When the opportunity presented itself to audition for Grease is the Word, she was initially reluctant: “The reality TV thing was scary, but in the end, I had been here for just over a year and didn’t know how much longer I could do it—and this was an opportunity, so why not take it?” Six years earlier, she had participated in an Irish reality TV show, You’re a Star. “That was very different,” she explains. “My heart wasn’t in it, though it was a platform that lead to other work in Ireland for me.” But the prize this time was even bigger: the chance to appear in the West End. “To get a lead in a West End show is amazing, and I feel that I have now achieved exactly what I wanted to achieve. To have gone through what we went through to get here makes it even more amazing.” Noting the contest factor of her journey to a West End stage, McFadden adds, “the fact that the public want me to be here means a lot more than being chosen by a panel of producers.”