What’s it like to expire every evening, often in devastating, drawn-out scenes? Nathan Lane, Josette Simon and more talk about how playing death messes with their minds – and describe the ‘de-role’ rituals that bring them back
Death is an act most of us will perform only once. But for actors, it can be a regular occurrence. On stage, their character’s demise may come with a sudden gunshot or be devastatingly drawn out and come with a rousing speech. But how does it feel to die night after night after night in such roles?
In the National Theatre’s 2017 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Nathan Lane played Roy Cohn, the real-life political fixer who denied his diagnosis of Aids until the very end. “He thinks he’s indestructible,” says Lane, who faced a double challenge. In the play, Cohn attempts to get the last laugh by faking his own death, before the real one comes along. Lane was required to lie in a hospital bed on stage. “I pulled out an IV,” he recalls, “and this blood would spurt out. And I had to have these body tremors. It has an effect on you psychologically. There’s something about lying in a hospital bed and gown. You do start to feel sick.”
