The homecoming
With his debut play, an actor and former theatre usher’s career comes full circle
Before he was an actor — and now, with his first play, Black Superhero, opening at London’s Royal Court, a playwright — Danny Lee Wynter was an usher at the theatre that would end up staging his debut. It was the early 2000s, and he was studying on a scholarship at Lamda, the prestigious London drama school whose alumni include Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor. But the ushering gig, he says, sitting in his airy living room in Forest Gate, east London, groaning bookshelves on one wall and a cluster of pictures over the sofa, was transformative.
“I can’t overstate it — the job at the Royal Court sits alongside my experience of going to drama school. Seeing those plays and being around actors, directors, and the whole creative teams around them, that’s a big deal,” says Wynter, who wears a bright white T-shirt and mauve nail polish. “I remember, at the premiere production of A Number, the Caryl Churchill play, selling ice creams and seeing an older guy stood there in tears. I asked if he was all right and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s my son.’ It was Daniel Craig’s dad. All that stuff has seeped into me.”
Wynter, 40, who has an easy manner and the steady enunciation of the classically trained, calls himself “fake posh”: he grew up on an Essex council estate, with “quite a dysfunctional motherfather unit”, where “all the art we received came through the television”. Yet he showed ambition, and resolve, early on. While a performing-arts student at Middlesex University, he took out an ad in Spotlight, the actors’ directory, and was offered a role in The Bill. “It was something like ‘Drug Dealer Number 2’, and I thought ‘No fucking way,’” he recalls. “I’m here reading plays by Debbie Tucker Green, Pinter, Suzan-Lori Parks; there’s no way I’m going to reduce myself and do that.” He pauses. “Which was hard, because I love The Bill.”
Nevertheless, his acting career kicked off soon after. Still at Lamda, he was cast in two Stephen Poliakoff dramas for the BBC, Joe’s Palace and Capturing Mary, and he’s had numerous prestigious roles on stage and screen since, including an Olivier Award-nominated performance in the National Theatre’s 2021 revival of Larry Kramer’s 1980s Aids crisis drama, The Normal Heart. Playwrighting, though, has taken longer. He’s always written, he says, but it was the encouragement of a playwright friend who finally got him to take it public. (Their rallying cry? “Danny, if you don’t do something, and do something soon, it’s going to get ugly.”)
Black Superhero, in which Wynter will also star, is a stirring, funny and sexually charged drama about a group of Black and mixed-race male actor friends whose dynamic is disrupted when new feelings develop between them and, as Wynter describes it, “a grenade is thrown in”. (It also, as the title suggests, takes the odd spectacular and fantastical turn.) His time at the Royal Court again proved instructive: “I would watch plays on a regular basis, sometimes 15, 20 times over, and I quickly realised that the white queer experience was very well represented at that time. The black queer experience was put front and centre less.” Here was his chance to show it with honesty, directness and tenderness. “I love the idea of intimacy between black bodies on stage, be that clothed or unclothed,” he says.
After Wynter wrote the bulk of the play during lockdowns, a friend passed it on to the artistic director of the Royal Court who, within two weeks, set up a phone call. The circularity of it all is pleasing, Wynter says: “The theatre I had my beginnings in staging my play is definitely pretty up there for me.” As for how it is received, he is resolute; whatever anyone thinks of it, the very fact of its existence is a win. “I’ve got to a point, as a black queer artist, who’s come from where I’ve come from, of ‘Fuck it’,” he says, calmly. “With Black Superhero I have created the space for myself that I wanted to see, and that I hadn’t been given.”
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‘Black Superhero’ runs from 4 March at the Royal Court, London; royalcourttheatre.com