Stage Door Jonny

In this week’s chat Jonny takes a stroll down memory lane with acclaimed director Dominic Cooke. They both started at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 90’s and Dominic rose to become artistic director of the Royal Court, Olivier-award winner, CBE and now the director of a new blockbuster stage production based on The Biggest TV Show in History. No not Seinfeld. Jonny and Dominic chat abo...

In the second part of Jonny’s chat with director Dominic Cooke they discuss getting the end of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom wrong, some strategies actors use to avoid being vulnerable, Sophie Okonedo and giving her performance up to the gods, experiencing vulnerability as a director and having to be dragged back to see his own shows, his fears for free expression in young writers right now, his long c...

In the second act of Jonny’s chat with Dame Harriet Walter the conversation ranges over: age in the theatre; Harriet’s extraordinary encounter with her childhood hero, Rudolf Nureyev; being rejected by drama schools and what made her carry on; what she does and doesn’t want from a director; being robbed of time and power by other actors onstage; her search for a great comedy - and how the world ex...

This week’s guest is none other than a walking trifecta: a Dame, a national treasure and a star of Succession. Dame Harriet Walter sits down with Jonny and powers through a windy chimney and the sound of a little light bricklaying to talk about the unforgettable visual images of theatre; Rebecca Frecknall’s production of The House of Bernarda Alba; how she stays connected to the life of the play n...

In the first Act of this week’s conversation Jonny talks to the pride of Nempnett Thrubwell, the internationally renowned director of Mamma Mia on stage and screen, Phyllida Lloyd. Phyllida directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady but her visionary work in the theatre long preceded that. Phyllida’s remembers Jonny in a pond, talks about her most recent stage...

Welcome to Act 2 of Jonny’s chat with Phyllida Lloyd (unless you left at the interval, like Phyllida sometimes does…). Phyllida discusses her dreams of a Rusisian theatre commune, her relationship with Harriet Walter, and whether it’s always easy to direct a friend, chasing the artistic utopia of her schooldays with her famous trilogy of all-female Shakespeares, the one woman show that change...

The most cracked out of all theatre junkies is Jonny’s guest this week. At least 10,000 nights in the theatre and counting after over 50 years as the doyen of British theatre critics, Michael Billington was THE arbiter of critical taste for the entirety of Jonny’s life. In this chat Michael opens up about his trouble with mime, air-kissing C list celebrities, how even critics are joining in the ri...

The second part of Jonny’s chat with Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola recorded live at Jermyn Street Theatre introduces the potent memory and presiding spirit of Emily’s extraordinary father, Sir John Mortimer. From his heckling of Sarah Kane’s legendary “Blasted” to his meeting with Tom Cruise, from Alessandro’s Broadway debut opposite Helen Mirren and a catalytic biting incident, from an eld...

Welcome to this season’s first live recording! This episode is brought to you in association with the wonderful people at Jermyn Street Theatre in London and if there’s a more richly enjoyable podcast released this week, we want to hear it. Jonny talks to the blissfully honest, vulnerably human and wildly entertaining power couple that is Emily Mortimer (Mary Poppins, Paddington 3, Lovely and Amaz...

Join Jonny in the Old Vic dressing room of one our finest - and most fragrant - actors, Bertie Carvel. Bertie is a double Olivier and Tony Award winning star and as deep a thinker about his life in the theatre as he is a transformational chameleon onstage. He and Jonny share a forensic discussion about larping, the inner body, Bertie’s magic trick, why he now reads his reviews (and why he thinks a...

Welcome to the big kick off of SDJ Season 3! Who better to launch us than one of the most electric young actors there is, Paapa Essiedu. Paapa welcomed Jonny into his bijou dressing room in London’s National Theatre and the conversation ranged over: drinking during a show, Paapa’s risky superstition, how Jamie Lloyd doesn’t want you to know where to stand, what a famous director in the audience ca...

We bring you important intel about a forthcoming live show with Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola at the Jermyn Street Theatre, as well as the next season of Stage Door Jonny, which is coming in January 2024. Tickets for for Jonny, Emily and Alessandro's conversation are available by clicking here . Until Sunday, or indeed January! It's good to be (almost) back ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...

Jonny rounds off the summer season in style: the first SDJ live show at Jermyn Street Theatre in the heart of London’s West End - and two masters to talk to. Sir Nick Hytner and Sir Simon Russell Beale tell Jonny about the two decades and nine plays of their collaboration. It’s a fascinating insight into the dynamics of one of the great director-actor partnerships of our times. Who is the lover an...

From personal tragedy to Nathan Lane. In the second part of their chat John and Jonny discuss the formers three collaborations with the doyen of the American stage, crashing waves of laughter, having the confidence to play a comedy god with other real comedy gods, Pinter with Juliette Binoche and Liev Schreiber, getting ghosted backstage by Philip Seymour Hoffman and the “undeniability of theatre”...

John Slattery, everyone's favourite louche silver-fox for a four martini lunch is Jonny’s guest this week. They discuss white rappers, directing onstage, a plan to save the theatre, getting naked on stage whilst crying having auto-fluffed with a hairdryer beforehand, the brutal facts of using personal grief as onstage motivation, audition-fear and how to calm it, fighting to get in the room and Jo...

Legends alert. This week Jonny’s guests are the creme de la creme of Broadway musical composing, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Their music for the current Broadway smash Some Like It Hot is still on heavy rotation in the Stage Door household and they’re the musical force behind Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sister Act, Oscar-nominated songs by the bucketload,...

Want to know which public information advert from his childhood rolls off Mark's tongue like the alphabet? How uncanny his Gielgud impression is? Whether any man wants cock in Tod - and what that even means? The madrigals he sang the very first time he was on stage? What wonderful tradition began with Ralph Richardson firing rockets off the roof of the National Theatre? And why Mark will forever r...

In Act 2 of Jonny’s chat with Oscar-winner Kenneth Lonergan, they discuss the high-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Kenny met his best friend and frequent collaborator, Matthew Broderick; Kenny’s misgivings about his acting range; the play of his he had the most fun with; the difficulty of getting started as an unconventional writer and why, despite a time of increasingly strid...

An American master this week everyone. And a little bit of a hero of Jonny’s. Kenneth Lonergan is the writer and directors of three movies, all of them masterpieces, and the playwright of groundbreaking plays like Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth. Hear about birthing his plays, writing as the muscle memory of the brain, why he is fascinated by the state of adolescence, which of his plays started a...

The second part of Jonny’s chat with Dominic West in which Dom talks about following the most successful play of the 21st century, career advice from Anthony Hopkins, snogging Alan Cumming, getting mixed reviews on Broadway, his favourite theatre, being bad at playing posh people, being allergic to crying and why theatre isn’t for psychopaths. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more inform...

Dominic West, ladies and gentlemen! This week, our superbly entertaining West guest talks wearing a turban doing Tamburlaine with Jonny at the RSC, his family background in amateur dramatics, making his father cry, why his mother didn’t want him to do The Wire, falling off the stage in his first professional gig, wishing he could do Hamlet again, running away to join the circus, getting goosed by...

The second half of Jonny’s chat with the revered John Douglas Thompson covers their mutual love for the director Arin Arbus, giving up the use of his eyes to do Beckett with an actor John describes as like being onstage with “ a dog, a baby and a genius”, what Eugene O’Neil’s characters say to each other when John engages them in conversation, what pisses him off about the theatre, what is was lik...

Jonny talks to perhaps the most celebrated classical actor in America today, John Douglas Thompson. No perhaps about it (if you read his reviews), John makes Jonny extremely jealous when he considers the critical raptures that JDT routinely receives. John has played Othello SEVEN times and isn’t done with it yet. But only if a woman directs it. He has trenchant thoughts on critics, won’t do a play...

In Act II of Jonny’s chat with Laura Linney, we discover who her ideal man is; what seminal experience of festive female empowerment pushed her along the path of being an actor; what happened when she got stage fright; what was said to her at the Moscow Art theatre that unlocked a door; her relationship to fear; and what advice she would give a fourth year Juilliard drama student if that student h...

Who better to kick off the Summer Season of Stage Door Jonny than the wonderful Laura Linney? Want to know what work she does to make all her performances on stage and screen so full and lived in? Want to know what she thinks the secret weapon of the theatre is? Ever heard of a delightmare? Want to know why Joanne Woodward wanted to meet Laura in her car? Who her favourite director is? All is reve...