Becoming Mick Jagger on the Chichester Festival Theatre stage

“I graduated in July this year. I did a BA at RADA and it was just amazing. I had so much fun and it was just the best three years. It really made me want to act and I did a workshop for this play during my training. And I was very fortunate that (CFT artistic director and Redlands director) Justin (Audibert) wanted me to be in the show. I found out that I had got it, I think, in April or May. And how could you not want to do it? To be Mick Jagger in a play especially in a space such as the Festival Theatre which is such a brilliant technical challenge.

“My dad is a big Stones fan and I grew up listening to Stones songs but I find it interesting to work out how much I knew about them before and how much I know about them now. I didn't know the absolute details but I've read the details now. I suppose I just knew Mick Jagger in a similar way to the way you know a lot of people in the public eye. But you have got to get the way he moves, his lips, his slight frame, and just feeling your way into becoming the young Mick Jagger has been absolutely fascinating. When I did the workshop there was freedom because you could try whatever you wanted to try and just offer things but when the play was announced it was quite daunting that I was going to be playing someone who is still alive and is such a iconic figure. It was terrifying. But there is also a sense that once you have done the research it frees you.”

And again the movement is key: “You've got to realise that he went through the early 60s to the late 60s with a certain type of movement that was very influenced by people like Tina Turner and James Brown and Little Richard, all those people that informed him. You've got to have those narrow quick moving legs and allowing your top to flow more. There's a lot of strutting though actually it was really in the 70s that he started the strutting, in the early 70s when he embraced his femininity. That's when he embraced that catwalk element, and for this it's a question of how much you allow that to come into the play, how much you allow the Mick Jagger that everybody knows to come in when this is really before that. And I think authenticity has to be the helm of everything you do, but there's definitely a place where you want that pigeon chested strut to come in.”

As for becoming the character: “I think there's quite a lot of bravery in making the simplest choices because they are the most truthful especially in the scenes where he is not dancing, in the interviews where there is like a kind of code switch. He speaks in one way to one person and then in other ways to others.”

Important too is the fact that the Stones drugs bust and the threat of prison had such an impact on Mick: “Keith got the worst deal. He got a year and Mick got three months but Mick was devastated. He cried on the podium and he cried all the way through. It is the antithesis to the persona that he had. He could be outrageous but as soon as reality hits and the concept of danger and the fact that it was very scary, the thought of going to prison, he changed. And I think there is something really earnest and truthful about how he showed his emotions at that point even if he couldn't control them.

“I think Mick was someone who wanted fame and fortune in the early days. It started about the music but then it became about the sustainability of the music and making The Stones the biggest band in the world – and this was a massive threat to them at this point, the threat of prison.”