How to… be a great panto villain

1 Breaking from bad

No matter how many bad deeds you get up to in your villain role, you still need to get the audience secretly to like you and even feel a little bit sorry for you. To make that connection, I always try to work in some references to the character’s background and motivation –something to explain why they turned bad.

In Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent’s backstory is that she was spurned by the king, so her villainy really stems from unrequited love. I love audience interaction, but sometimes I deliberately play an exchange so they get to ‘win’. For instance, I’ll throw in a line such as “I’m very beautiful,” just so hundreds of voices can yell back “Oh no you’re not!”.

2 Really bad characters need to be really good actors

It’s very easy to play a panto villain as an out-and-out caricature, but I’ve never lost touch with the realistic qualities of the character. Just as with any other plot, for a panto to work properly there has to be some sense of danger and tension, so that there is a degree of audience investment in wanting to see if the story will end happily ever after (even if they secretly know already it will). A well-played villain can make all the difference in keeping them guessing up until the final scene.

3 Love to be hated

Although I have played fairy godmothers and other goodies in the past, I eventually began to be cast more often as the villain. I love playing this kind of role because it is such good fun, and baddies often get the best lines and costumes. I must admit that in my early panto days when I was more used to being the good character on stage and screen, it took me a while to get used to being booed – but I quickly realised that in the baddie business, the louder the boos, the better your performance is going down. These days my panto motto is, as Mae West might have put it: “When I’m good I’m very good – but when I’m bad I’m better.”

Vicki Michelle was speaking to John Byrne. She is playing Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln, from December 7, 2015 to January 10, 2016