Oliver J. Hembrough
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Age: 30, and a self-described late entrant into the acting sweepstakes. "I was floating around doing nothing for about 10 years," says Hembrough, whose conversion moment came during an art and design foundation course in which he was flailing in Bath. "I had a meeting with our head tutor who said, ‘I don't really think you're going to pass this course,' and I suddenly thought, I'd really love to be an actor.”
Hometown: Bristol in England's West Country. Hembrough is the youngest of four children. "I was born in Bristol, I was brought up in Bristol, I went to college in Bristol." As fate would have it, scarcely had he moved to London two years ago before he was getting acting jobs in or near—you guessed it—Bristol: Le Grand Meaulnes on radio for the BBC in Bristol, adapted from the Alain Fournier novel, and nine weeks at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter, where Hembrough has now done three plays, including Macbeth. That was the show he was in, playing Malcolm, when the recalls came for Mamma Mia! "We were performing in a park over the summer because the theater was being refurbished and because we had a bit of a wet summer, we got thoroughly soaked; it was Macbeth, so that worked quite well."
Currently: Making his West End debut as Sky in Mamma Mia!, the long-running ABBA-scored hit musical about romance and issues of paternity on a Greek island. "It's kind of taken me by surprise," Hembrough says, that he ended up making his London splash in this show. "I certainly haven't got ABBA on my iPod but if it came on at a party, I would be more than happy to dance to it." What is on his iPod: Martin Carthy, the folk singer late of Steeleye Span. But after five weeks' rehearsal and two weeks of performances at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Hembrough jokes that "I find myself singing ABBA to my girlfriend at 2am and waking up thinking about dance moves."
Dancing Man: Hembrough describes this gig so far as "absolutely incredibly hard work. I was envisaging it being a lot easier—a lot more glamorous and a lot more ‘West End,' but it's actually been hard work. It's just physically demanding doing all the dancing, not being a particularly hot dancer and having trained at an acting school and not a dance school. I did a musical for my graduation show"—Stephen Sondheim's Company—"when I left the Bristol Old Vic, so had a little bit of experience doing musicals. It wasn't so much a shock that I got a part in a musical as it was that I was in the West End in such a big established show." Vocally, it falls to Hembrough's Sky to sing "Lay All Your Love On Me" to Katie Brayben's Sophie in act one, "and then obviously I'm part of the big finale, the big finish."
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Hembrough's hair, he reports, "has been shorn" in order to play Sky, which marks quite a contrast to his days as a child actor playing Edward Morland—the younger brother with the long hair—in the BBC's 1986 adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, Northanger Abbey, starring Katharine Schlesinger and Robert Hardy. "I was good, actually, though I was edited quite heavily," says the actor, who soon thereafter gave up acting for a good decade or more. "I went through a phase where when they wanted a cute little boy, I could do the cute little boy thing, but when I grew out of that, I wasn't old enough to be doing any decent teen parts and I wasn't a cute little boy any more." What did he do intead? "I left school and, strangely enough, rode horses and was in a band; I did lots of flitting about."
Doing Time: He's contracted to the production for 15 months—until June 2009—which represents far and away the most sustained period of employment for Hembrough so far. And afterward? "I don't know. I'll just see where this takes me when the contract finishes,” he says. “Obviously, I trained as a straight actor, and my heart still lies with Shakespeare and classical text and running around with swords and things like that. But this has been great. It's a totally different type of work—physically tiring as opposed to mentally tiring." No need to keep up that gym membership, presumably, when one can derive the same benefits on stage eight times a week. "Absolutely," he laughs. "I haven't been to the gym for two months. I just get home and go straight to sleep."