Jak Malone Never Skips The Stage Door

For Jak Malone, being a dedicated fan pays off.

“I knew that some of my favorite writers were making a musical,” says the 31-year-old actor, nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Featured Role for his turn as Hester Leggatt in the new Broadway show Operation Mincemeat. “I knew it was their first musical, and it wasn’t something that they’d done before. They’d written these horror comedy plays that I just really, really connected with, really loved, and I’d been dying to work with them.”

Malone sent in a tape of himself singing, which netted him an audition. “I’d drawn them some fan art for the show, so that’s how they knew me,” adds Malone of his correspondence with David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics. (Cumming, Hodgson, and Roberts also star in the production.) “They let me audition, and I left the room, and they said, ‘Well, he’s better than any of us, so we should get him on board.’”

That’s how Malone found himself in the irreverent British musical comedy, which opened in the West End in 2023 and won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. It’s based on the eponymous World War II plan in which British intelligence officers trick the Nazis into thinking the Allies are planning to invade Greece and Sardinia, when in fact they’re headed for Sicily. (They do this by planting false documents on a corpse dressed as a Royal Marine, which they let wash ashore off the coast of Spain.) As part of the ruse, commanders task secretary Leggatt (Malone), the most senior woman in the department, with writing false love letters to further build a persona around the fake officer.

The love letter scene culminates in a show-stopping number, “Dear Bill,” sung by Malone, which helped earn him the 2024 Olivier for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical. “I was asked to learn it from the demo and sing it on the first day of rehearsals,” recalls Malone, “very casually — ‘We just want to hear you go through it, if that’s OK. We just have an inkling this might work for you.’” They were right.

On his Bob Mackie eBay obsession:

My partner, Jasmine, enabled me to feel secure enough to experiment with my own sense of style and my nails. Now, I’m full tilt everywhere I go.

I’ve really gotten into Bob Mackie. I always thought of Bob Mackie as like “Well, he makes these custom one-off pieces for Cher and for RuPaul and for these huge names.” It was only a couple of months ago that I discovered that he had a line of clothing. I think maybe it was in the ’80s and was more geared toward mature women. It was mass-produced stuff, but if you go on eBay, it’s all on there, and it’s all so cheap. It’s everyday wear with a camp twist — sparkly, lots of textures, lots of gems. I now have 12 of these Bob Mackie pieces in my wardrobe that I’m just so excited to wear and I get compliments every time I wear them.

On acting tips from Bill Nighy:

I know that there are lots of performers who like to take the time to meditate and think and get into character. When I went to drama school, that was the focus — all of this emotional memory and all of this really feeling it. And then the actor Bill Nighy came into our school to do a talk, and I’d struggled with all this stuff that we were learning for years. It turns out that his methodology is no methodology — just go and read the lines and do it. He was like, “Don’t worry about it. Why is everybody worrying? Why are we getting so wrapped up in what we do? Just go out there and be that person.”

On chatting up his co-workers:

I’ve started coming in earlier and earlier than when we started. If a show is at 7, I used to come in at 6. Now I come in at about 20 minutes to 6, because my dressing room is at the very, very top of the building, and it takes me so long to get all the way up the stairs. There’s always people in the corridor, there’s always dressers, and the band is always waiting around. So at each floor, I have a little five-minute conversation.

On his pre-show rituals:

I share a dressing room with David [Cumming], who plays Cholmondeley, and we warm up together. We do a vocal warmup while we do our makeup and we have a chitchat. He and I have shared a dressing room since the West End run, and there’s a lovely closeness there that we have that I think can only be forged by sharing a dressing room with somebody for two years.

On his game-changing tea kettle:

I drink copious amounts of lemon and ginger tea with honey, because as cliché as it is, the tried and proven best thing for your voice is hot, soothing liquids. Our dresser, Jim, who’s an incredible guy and really looks after us, bought us a special kettle because I can’t drink tea right away when it’s really, really hot. He came in one day with this new kettle that has specific temperatures, so I can set the kettle to the lowest one. Oh, my God, it has changed my life.

On his go-to pizza joint:

On a Friday night, I will treat myself and I’ll order a pizza from Joe’s because I’ve become obsessed with New York pizza. I’ve been to Italy, and I’m sorry, New York takes the trophy for pizza. I’ll eat half of it, and then I’ll have the other half the next day for breakfast.

On his New York City bucket list:

Whenever Jasmine and I are in a secondhand bookshop, we check all the Stephen King books in case one of them is signed. Stephen King is by leaps and bounds my favorite author. I have a signed Stephen King — Full Dark, No Stars — but I forked out a fortune for it because my quest to find one organically never worked out. But I want more. My dream is to get one signed “Jak, Best wishes, Stephen King,” but that hasn’t happened yet. I’m always asking around, “Does anyone here know Stephen King? How can we get my name on a book?”

On meaningful stage door interactions:

It’s very, very rare that I’ll miss a stage door. Even if I’m not feeling great and I’m having a bit of a bad day, I’ll still do the stage door, because it usually will cheer me up.

I often meet trans and nonbinary people who feel appreciative that my performance has taught those around them a little bit about how easy it is to just accept somebody for who they tell you that they are. I step out on the stage, and Claire calls me Miss Leggatt, and I have some frilly cuffs on my shirt, some frills around the neck, and a pair of glasses with a pearl glasses chain. I don’t work hard at all to get the audience to believe that I’m a woman. I just say that I am and therefore I am, and everybody goes with it. And the reason they go with it is because it’s the theater, and there’s an unspoken permission that you’re allowed to imagine and you’re allowed to go along with it. So I meet people at the stage door who are thankful for that representation and thankful that people have sneakily learned something about themselves and about the world.

On the power of “Dear Bill”:

The other thing that frequently happens at the stage door is I tend to meet widows and people who’ve experienced loss, and that’s because of the song “Dear Bill.” It’s a song about grief; it’s a letter to somebody who you miss. I refer to it as a magnum opus of quiet grief, and they’ve nailed it to the minutia of how daft it can be to miss somebody, to grieve somebody. How silly you can feel, how angry you can feel, how fed up, how bored. They’ve captured every tiny little ache of what it means to experience a loss.

There’s always hugs; there’s often tears. That’s not something, for a chubby bloke in his 30s who’s trying his best, that I ever counted on. I took this role because I thought it would be cool. And now here I am being the means to an end of somebody’s cathartic moment, and I cherish it really. I’m always so deeply humbled.