Mum wants to see Rocky Horror...is she ready for me in a corset?
ORE ODUBA is fizzing with excitement. But then he has just landed a major theatrical role, one he genuinely didn’t see coming his way.
“The show’s been around for almost 50 years now,” he says, “but this is my first foray into the world of Rocky Horror.”
In Richard O’brien’s evergreen, still scandalous musical, Ore will play strait-laced Brad Majors who, with his fiancee, Janet (played by Haley Flaherty), takes a wrong turning on a road trip and lands up in a world of madness and mayhem in a spooky castle. Stephen Webb is Frank-nfurter, resplendent in fishnet stockings, with Philip Franks as the Narrator.
The extensive tour (high)kicks off in Southampton on July 12 and finally comes to rest in Southend on June 6 next year although, at this stage, Ore, 35, has only committed up to and including a week in Llandudno from September 13.
“I’m so excited,” he says, “I can’t really measure it.
“It came as a complete surprise.when it was first mentioned as a possibility, I thought they’d got the wrong name.
“But I suffer from impostor syndrome, always convinced I’m going to get that tap on the shoulder telling me the game’s up.”
‘I got to know my
boy incredibly well in lockdown’
He’s being unduly immodest and is far from being a musicals virgin. He enjoyed great success as Teen Angel in a revival tour of Grease in 2019 and, the same year, toured in musical whodunit Curtains, with Jason Manford.
But then he’d loved performing in musicals at school, carrying off the top prize aged 13 at Dumpton School in Wimborne, Dorset where he was raised by his Nigerian parents.
He later went to the independent day and boarding school, Canford, before studying Sports Science and Social Science at Loughborough University from where he graduated in 2008. Now, he only has one worry. “My mum says she wants to come and see Rocky Horror but she doesn’t really know what it’s about. Is she ready, I ask myself, to see her son end up in a corset, suspenders and stockings?”
By contrast, his wife, Portia, is fully prepared for the spectacle.
“I sent her a picture of me being measured up for my ultimate costume. Let’s put it this way: there aren’t enough laughing emojis to cover her reaction.”
So, he’s got a fine set of pins? A hoot of laughter: “I’ve got thighs like Chris Hoy’s.”
The tour means he’ll be away from home a lot with the onus of looking after the couple’s threeyear-old son, Roman, laid firmly at Portia’s door. Does she mind?
“Are you kidding? After more than 12 months of me being under her feet, she’s gagging to see the back of me. Joking apart,
she couldn’t be more supportive of me,” he says.
A former TV researcher, his wife understands the world her husband inhabits. “Portia is my psychologist, my physiotherapist, my associate choreographer, my unpaid agent, my rock.”
He says the pandemic did have one or two benefits: “One of them was that I got to know my little boy incredibly well.
“For what turned out to be a third of his life, I could watch him from six in the morning until he went to bed at night. Every day you’d notice something different.
A year ago, he was a baby. Now, he’s three going on 13.”
He says he can imagine the day when he and Portia decide to give Roman a baby brother or sister: “We’ve got five brothers and sisters between us so we’re used to large families.”
Ore’s changed professional fortunes are a far cry from CBBC where he started out and myriad jobs fronting sporting events, culminating in the 2016 Olympics.
Later that year he and Joanne Clifton danced their way to the final to raise aloft the glitterball on Strictly. No point asking if the show changed his life. “Oh, only absolutely,” he says.
“I knew I’d been given a launch pad and it was up to me to make something of it. Doors were opening everywhere.”
Ore was chosen to host the One Love benefit concert on June 4, 2017, in memory of the victims of the terror attack at Ariana Grande’s Manchester concert on May 22. “I was proud to be involved after such a tragedy.”
One of the more surprising jobs was his co-presenting role at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May the following year: “It was one of the most special events I’ve been a part of. I clearly remember thinking there’d been a seismic change in the Royal Family. I had never seen so many black people in a church on British television.
“Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, the gospel choir – I found that so moving. It was hugely exciting. It felt like a new beginning, a new chapter.”
Sadly, as we know, the fairy tale is somewhat tarnished. “They are under the most intense scrutiny. The appropriate response from the rest of us should be empathy, not pointing fingers.”
A lot changed for the better, he thinks, with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“What BLM highlighted was that some tendencies and trends, whether intentional or not, have had the effect of marginalising particular communities.
“In showbusiness, TV, theatre – the worlds I work in – I’m really glad to say there has been a heightened awareness of how things should be done although we’re still a long way from where we need to be. But I’d like to think the lockdowns have fostered a collaborative feeling that we’re all in this together.”