Interview: Actor & writer Sam McArdle on The Manny and how it helped him bounce back into acting
17/03/2024
Sam McArdle had given up acting and started writing a play for 'something to do'. He ended up performing that play, The Manny, at the King's Head Theatre last year and a successful run in Dublin followed.
Ahead of The Manny's return to London at the Pleasance Theatre this week, I jumped on a video call to ask Sam about the play, the process of creating it, getting back into acting and what his ideal role would be.
You can watch the full interview here.
How did you decide what real parts of your experiences as a male nanny to include and what to leave out when you were writing The Manny?
Just the juiciest parts. I really wanted to keep in the bits about the child who is obsessed with World War II and then the bits about going to the school gates and seeing the other mannies literally trying to muscle in on your territory.
It's like a networking event. Picking up the mums at the school gate and working out, okay, I can get more shifts by working for them. I thought that was interesting and funny.
What parts did I want to leave out? The image of the male nanny is much more salacious than actually what the job entails.
So I left out a lot of the mundane day-to-day things of picking up the kids from school, cooking them dinner, making sure they do their homework. That would be a crap play.
Were you always writing The Manny for yourself to perform? And how did that inform the process?
No one else is going to play the Manny. No way.
To be honest, I just started writing it. I'd quit acting completely, and it was just something to do, and it's almost a form of therapy.
And then, after I got the bare bones of the script, I did a play reading during COVID, those ghastly Zoom play readings.
I thought, 'Oh, this feels really nice and good'. I felt like my old self was coming back.
And then I made a decision like the guy in The Bear, Richie, in the fourth episode, something in me just flicked, and I said, 'I've got to make a change and get back to London, put the show on, and I've got to see if I can still do it'.
So from there, after the first draught, it was something I wanted to do to express how I've been feeling the last couple of years.
I wanted The Manny to be the Apollo Creed to my Rocky, to help me get back up on my feet after getting beaten up by Mr. T. What I really wanted was to be an actor again.
If things got a bit stressful or when financial backers or theatres pulled out, I just kept imagining that one day I'll be bringing it back to London, which is serendipitous because that's where you came to see the show at the King's Head.
The last time I'd been in London was at that theatre, and I botched up an audition.
To be there again now, healing the ground and putting the show on, was a really fun, interesting train of events.
We brought the show to Dublin last year and sold it out, which was brilliant. And now we're bringing it back to the Pleasance.
I can't believe we brought it this far.
What's one thing that might surprise someone who's never been involved with theatre about the process?
I took a few years out from acting and got a job as a project manager. A project manager has to see the brief, work out what needs to be done every week, work towards the event, so to speak, and plan for success and minimise things going wrong.
When I applied those same principles to producing, writing and performing in the show, there was a lot of overlap. I think what might surprise is, yes, there's a huge creative element to it, but you need to have a business mind as well.
How you shape your product, how you produce it and market it.
You need to have a lot of organisational skills as well as the obvious things like hard work, tenacity and self-belief.
Having those four years when I wasn't acting and every job is a business definitely helped prepare me for doing it now.
It is a creative process, but at the end of the day, you're asking people to give their money to pay for something that you have produced.
Is there a particular role that you would absolutely love to play, and who would you want directing?
In a weird way, doing the show has really helped me get back my self-worth, and I love doing it. There's a part of me thinking, maybe this is all that will happen, and you might just have to leave it at that.
But I really don't think so. I want to get back working more in theatre.
I used to read this series of books called The Dark Tower by Stephen King. It's essentially his Lord of the Rings.
There's a character called Eddie Dean, and I really love the journey he goes on. He starts off at the bottom and goes on an epic quest to become the truest representation of himself.
Obviously someone like Chris Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Chloe Zhao or Kathryn Bigelow directing.
I'm a huge fan of superhero films. When I wasn't acting, and I couldn't even look at film or TV, I was a bit of a Gollum for about 16 months and used to read comic books to make myself feel better.
I wanted to be a superhero growing up, and a lot of the characters, all the great ones, have been done now.
I'd love to have a shot at Daredevil or Ghost Rider. I'm nerding out here.
What are you like as an audience member at the theatre? Can you put the craft and the process to one side and lose yourself in what you are watching?
I've been that person where you can't look at something because you auditioned for it and got close to it. Or you know the person doing it, and they're a punk, and they only got it because daddy knows someone. And I don't want to be that.
I feel like I'm on my second adventure being an actor now. And I made a promise to myself when I got back into acting to not be that guy and just be able to enjoy the art.
I'm not going to watch through gritted teeth because that way I'll break my teeth.
What I'm saying might sound a bit childish, but I think in any profession, especially acting, those childish, unresolved feelings can bubble to the surface.
What is your ideal theatre to watch?
I love it when I see a performer have the confidence and the innocence to experience something in the present and not to present me with a ready-to-go meal of a performance and not make it look like acting.
You should never see the strings. And I think the best representation of that is one of my favourite, if not my favourite actresses, Denise Gough.
I queued up to see People, Places, Things. I love that performance.
That character was a real inspiration for The Manny because, in some ways, it's such an unlikable character.
I just loved how I understood the character. I didn't need to necessarily like the character.
The best theatre I've seen is when the characters are not binary. They're not good or evil, they're just mixed because we're all a bit mixed.
And when I see that theatre, people being in the moment and allowing the other actor to change them, I find that really exciting.
Full interview:
For details and tickets for The Manny at the Pleasance, click here.
Read my review from the run at the King's Head here.
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You can find all my videos - interviews and reviews - on my YouTube channel