WITH his hot British accent, wonderful vocals and dashing good looks, London-born theatre star Stephen Rahman-Hughes, 47, can easily make the ladies swoon.
However, his appearance doesn’t always work to his advantage, especially in landing roles in England’s West End theatres where his acting career is centred around now.
“Auditioning is already tough enough thanks to the huge competition among actors there. Making things even tougher is my mixed Malay-Welsh lineage,” he said at the Enfiniti Academy Of Performing Arts office in Kota Damansara, Selangor, recently.
“I look different next to everyone else, so I’m restricted and stereotyped into characters that have tanned skin. That is frustrating.”
That was most likely part of the reason he had managed to clinch roles in West End productions, such as Disney’s Aladdin and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams, where he portrayed characters of Arabic and Indian descent, respectively.
“The industry players and patrons at West End have a specific taste.
“Your looks have to match how they imagine your character to be,” Rahman-Hughes said.
“So, if the character I’m auditioning for is Caucasian, most likely I won’t get the job. And sometimes, the casting agent wants an actor who looks and acts exactly like the previous actor, who played the role.”
Rahman-Hughes said this applies to all actors in the United Kingdom.
All he could do was wait and seek out productions that offered roles which suited his looks.
The Puteri Gunung Ledang the Musical star, however, said the problem of stereotyping was changing for the better.
“I notice many productions now have set a quota for their line-up where they would have to include non-Caucasian actors in their productions. Even the long-running Les Misérables now has included black actors in its cast, as well as Asians.
“I believe the colour of an actor’s skin should not matter. What is important is their portrayals,” said Rahman-Hughes, adding that the change could be seen on the small and big screens in recent times.
“All this while, everything is trapped within a box, but now, there is more diverse talent.
“It is ultimately improving the global entertainment industry as a whole, I think,” said the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa star, who was to take on the job of a special movement choreographer for Enfiniti’s latest original production OlaBola The Musical.
He will be returning to England at the end of the month to work on a new short-run theatre in which he portrays a person who suffers from a mental disorder that slowly “kills” him from the inside.