Richard Cant: ‘Taking As You Like It to post-revolutionary Romania was like being in the Beatles’

Richard Cant’s calendar is filling up fast. Last week, it was announced that the 60-year-old actor will be joining Ncuti Gatwa, Sharon D Clarke and Hugh Skinner in Max Webster’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre in November. Before that, he is playing Malvolio in Owen Horsley’s production of Twelfth Night at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre until mid-June.

“The Importance of Being Earnest is a really exciting prospect,” Cant says. “I’ve never done any Oscar Wilde. Until last year [when Cant starred in Daniel Raggett’s revival of The Vortex at Chichester Festival Theatre], I’d never done any Noël Coward, either. It just goes to show that if you hang around long enough, it all comes your way eventually.”

Born in Kent in 1964, Cant is the son of actor and children’s television presenter Brian Cant, host of BBC Two’s Play School for 21 years. His mother, Mary, was an actor, too. Performing, Cant explains, was “in my blood, as they say”. He studied drama at the University of Bristol, then trained as an actor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

‘People were so excited by As You Like It in Romania. We had to climb out of the dressing room window’

Over the past three decades, Cant’s career has been “two-thirds theatre, one-third screen”. On stage, he appeared in Cheek by Jowl’s all-male As You Like It in 1991, Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997, War Horse in the West End in 2012, My Night with Reg at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2014 and The Normal Heart at the NT in 2021. 

His screen credits include Channel 4’s It’s a Sin and the pilot episode of Midsomer Murders, in which he memorably played a sinister undertaker. In October, he was praised for his performance as Merle Miller in James Corley’s adaptation of the American writer’s essay What It Means to Be a Homosexual, at Wilton’s Music Hall. 

“I’m thankful I’ve had the chance,” Cant, who is gay, says of his roles in My Night with Reg, The Normal Heart and What It Means. “If you are a gay actor and you get gay roles, that’s great, because it didn’t happen when I was young. Back then, I couldn’t get seen for things that clearly I was well suited to. Of course, anyone can play anyone within reason, but it is nice to feel that there is an area you can bring your experience to.”

Last year, it was revealed that Cant was in a relationship with writer and radio presenter Reverend Richard Coles, after the pair met on a dating site. “He’s very busy and I’m very busy, but we do go to the theatre together when we get the chance,” Cant says. “To be honest, he is so busy that it is me going to see him do stuff more often than not.”
Continues...