Freddie Fox on taking over Romeo from Richard Madden: "I didn't trip over and I wasn't sick on my shoes"

Freddie Fox talks to Nick Curtis about stepping in to save Kenneth Branagh's Romeo and Juliet at the eleventh hour
The show must go on: Freddie Fox stood in at the eleventh hour to take on the role of Romeo
Daniel Hambury

So, I say to Freddie Fox, how did it feel to save Kenneth Branagh’s West End Romeo and Juliet, stepping into the lead role with 48 hours’ notice? “The first night was like one of those party poppers — an explosion where you have no control over the direction of the streamers,” says the 27-year-old scion of the thespian Fox clan. “The audience were very generous, very appreciative: it was a new experience for them as it was for me. Everybody fed off that energy. Even if it was a little frantic for me, I didn’t trip over my feet and I wasn’t sick on my shoes.”

We’re on the balcony (where else) of the Garrick theatre overlooking Charing Cross Road, and Fox is suavely calm. By contrast, the response of audience members to his performance on social media has been hysterical (“outstanding”, “perfect”, “stunning”, “AMAZING!!!”), while London’s theatre community has been quietly, respectfully awestruck. Such hero-of-the-hour stuff is what showbiz legends are made of.

To recap: as Shakespeare’s lovers, Branagh cast Lily James and Richard Madden, who starred together in his film of Cinderella, and separately in War and Peace and Game of Thrones. First Madden, then his understudy Tom Hanson, injured themselves. Fox, who had played Romeo in Sheffield last year, was with his father Edward, mother Joanna, sister Emilia and her daughter Rose at the family’s holiday home in Dorset “where there is no mobile reception, just an almost Victorian telephone”, that began ringing off the hook on the afternoon of Friday July 22.

On Saturday night, he agreed to take on the role. Fortunately, his mum had a copy of the play in Dorset (being part of a theatrical dynasty has its perks), so he swotted as a car drove him to Lily James’s house to run their lines together on Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning he had a costume fitting, then intense rehearsals including ferocious and detailed fight scenes, before giving his first performance on Tuesday.

It was a triumph — a colleague who was there described his Romeo as “puppyish” and hugely impressive — but an odd one. Fox had to slot into the choreography, rhythms and stage business of a production that had been running for seven weeks. He couldn’t just repeat his performance from the Sheffield production, which was set in the Balkans, but nor did he want to emulate too slavishly Madden’s performance in Branagh’s stylish Dolce Vita staging, which he’d seen on opening night. (It had been hoped Madden would alternate the role with Fox but his injury proved too severe.)

Thankfully, Fox had short cuts into key relationships, having known Lily James and Derek Jacobi, who plays a mature Mercutio and who he jarringly refers to as “Del”, for years. His decision to step into the breach was taken as much out of consideration for their plight — and Madden’s, also a friend — as his wish to play Romeo in the West End for Branagh. “Lil and I are exact contemporaries, born on the same day,” he says. They acted together often and became “best friends” as drama students together at Guildhall. “Lil” also dated his cousin Jack Fox — actor brother of actors Laurence and Lydia, son of Edward’s actor brother James. Do try to keep up!

When I first met Freddie Fox last January, he was in the middle of a purple patch of screen roles: Pride, The Riot Club, an arresting turn as a totemic object of desire to both men and women in Russell T Davies’s series Cucumber. He had also been “linked” to Prince Harry’s ex, Cressida Bonas, had moved out of his parents’ home in west London to his own flat in Islington, and was relishing all the pleasures that burgeoning, post-2012-Olympics London could offer a young man.

This year, everything has changed. He’s been doing a lot of theatre to improve his breadth as an actor, and after Romeo will be seen in a major revival of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties at the Menier Chocolate Factory, co-starring Tom Hollander and directed by Patrick Marber. Next he’ll be directing and producing a short film he’s co-written “about hero worship, based on a very chance meeting I had as a teenager with Burt Reynolds”. He suggests that diversifying from the family business of acting is a result of his restless energy, akin to his cousin Laurence forging a second career in music.

But if Fox does start directing, he may fall foul of Brexit: “Most of the independent films I’ve been involved with all had European subsidy or co-production agreements.” What’s more, as we chat on the Garrick balcony, he winces whenever a siren goes past, partly because he suffers from tinnitus but also because the spate of recent terror attacks have made him nervous, if unwilling to curtail his social life. He’s moved to Kentish Town but is still “paying someone else’s mortgage”, ie, renting. Life is tougher for young people today, even gilded young people such as Freddie Fox.

He watched the break-up of his cousin Laurence’s marriage to Billie Piper play out in the tabloids this year. “They have done what they needed to do,” he tells me. “I love them both very much and they are going about it with great kindness and elegance and humility, with their children in mind. A million families go through it every day, and they are doing it well.” Unsurprisingly, he won’t tell me if he is dating anyone, though he insists he is not dating Bonas: “Definitely not. She’s my friend: if we spend time together I can hardly take the blame for what people surmise. It just happens to be incorrect.”

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The run of Romeo and Juliet ends on Saturday but Fox is already hoping to work with Lily James again. Indeed, he has a play in mind, “but it’s not worth telling you in case it doesn’t come off and I look like a moron”. He’d love to work with Branagh again, too, “but he’ll probably be too busy”. Get him to cast you in one of his superhero movies, I say: surely there must be a part in a Thor spin-off for a blond, chiselled Fox. “That would be lovely,” he smiles. “I’m missing a cape. That’s all I’ve not had yet.”

Romeo and Juliet is at the Garrick Theatre until Saturday, branaghtheatre.com. Citi is the headline sponsor of this year’s Progress 1000.

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