20 JUNE 2024
Layton Williams: ‘I was followed back to my flat by a fan. It scared me’
The ‘Strictly’ star talks about playing the Emcee in ‘Cabaret’, being thrown out of stage school and coming to terms with being gay
When Layton Williams was growing up on a council estate in Bury, he was one of the lads. He and his friends would play football, knock-a-door-run, man hunt (“it’s like hide and seek but bigger”). And then he would go over to his stepmum’s and make outfits for his dolls. “I couldn’t do that in front of the boys,” says the 29-year-old now. “I would have been tormented. I was smarter than that. I wanted a simpler life. I was just like, ‘I’m gonna sit pretty and just get along.’”
It’s not that he didn’t enjoy hanging out with his friends. “Sometimes behind closed doors I am a bit of a lad,” he says. In a couple of hours he’ll put on a corset, lurid blue eyeshadow, lipstick and brown leather gloves and play the slippery, lascivious Emcee in Cabaret – but for now he’s sprawled on the sofa of his dressing room in a black hoodie, Nike shorts and trainers. “I’m not always the Layton that people think they know. I do have a chill button. And I guess that’s what I tapped into when I was a kid.”
The problem was, there was another side to him desperate to come out. “Oh my god, imagine if I was able to be out and queer and just say, ‘I don’t fancy girls, I fancy boys,’” he says, shaking his head. “Or ‘I like playing with Barbies and not action men’. How different life would have been.”
If only eight-year-old Williams could have watched his 28-year-old self on Strictly Come Dancing. Sure, he caught flack at the start of last year’s series of the celebrity dance competition for having an “unfair advantage”, given his theatre background, but it was hard to care when he and his dance partner Nikita Kuzman (the only same-sex pairing that year) gave such thrilling, intimate, joyful performances every week. He danced a fiery samba, a sexual tension-laden tango, a playful quickstep, his outfits running the gamut from plunging sequinned jumpsuit to suit, tie and braces.
“The way that I was dancing and holding myself was very true to who I am,” says Williams, who in person is just as warm, buoyant and prone to bursting into song as you’d imagine if you watched him on Strictly. “Sometimes I’m super-feminine, sometimes I’m super-masculine. Sometimes I step onto the red carpet and I’m in a dress, I’m in a gown, I’m in a crop top. Sometimes I’m in a three-piece suit. I was really adamant that I wanted to do that when I was on Strictly, because I wanted to normalise someone being whoever they wanted to be.”
It worked. “People still come up to me and say, ‘My child’s queer and they’re wearing a dress with the girls’, or ‘he’s wearing his pink watch’, or ‘I have to put his lippy on’,” says Williams. “I get inundated with messages. I genuinely didn’t set out thinking that would be happening. Never did I think, you know, a lad from Aberdeen would be shaking my hand going, ‘Well done son’” – he says this in a burly Scottish voice. “I don’t think you can deny when you see something that is just pure joyous – unless you’re an actual bigot, which, shout out, there are.”
Maybe it’s those bigots that 12-year-old Williams had in mind when he appeared on The Paul O’Grady Show nearly two decades ago, and turned his nose up at wearing a tutu. He was on there promoting his starring role as Billy Elliot on the West End, and Vernon Kay suggested he put one on. “Oh no, it’s not for me,” he said awkwardly, before swiftly getting back to showing Kay how to jeté. Inside he was dying to wear it, but there was no way he’d let the boys back in Bury see that.
Billy Elliot was Williams’ big break. He’d been going to a local theatre group for about six months when he saw an advert for an audition for the role of Billy – a Geordie boy from a coal mining family who discovers a love of ballet – in the stage musical. He’d never done an audition before, and when he walked into the room and saw a sea of white faces vying to play Billy, he wanted to turn around and go straight home. “My stepdad was basically like, ‘Get in there now, because we’ve come to London from Bury. Get in there. Do it.’ And thank god I did because the rest is kind of history. Shout out [director] Stephen Daldry for taking a gamble on me. I don’t even know what they saw honestly, because I genuinely didn’t do ballet or tap or anything that they asked of me.” Raw talent, then? “I guess. And that’s what Billy Elliot is. It’s art imitating life.”
He trained for nine months to learn the plies and pas de bourrées and backflips required to play the dancing prodigy, and he stayed in the lead role – during which time he lived in a house with the other Billies, including Tom Holland, who’s currently appearing down the road in Romeo & Juliet – for two years. It was around then that he first met other gay people. “I was like, ‘So you lot are just living your best life, with your boyfriends, happy, unafraid, thriving? I was like, ‘I need a bit of that.’ From there I was like” – he breaks out singing – “Riiiise like a phoenix!”
While he was still in Billy Elliot, Williams got a scholarship to the Sylvia Young theatre school. He’d go to classes in the day, then perform on stage in the evening. When Billy came to an end, he was cast as Michael Jackson in Thriller Live and as a Princess Diana-obsessed gay teen in the BBC comedy drama Beautiful People, and juggling school and work got even harder. Hyperactive and with a flair for the dramatic that you’d have thought would be fitting for drama school, he was always getting in trouble too. “Take a boy from a normal school in Bury and put them in a private school setting…” he says. “I was not ‘naughty’ at my high school, but in private school suddenly I’m loud, I’m all of these things. I’ve made peace with it now, but sometimes you just gotta let these kids be. I was at theatre school for goodness sake.” In the end, “I got asked to leave.”
Soon afterwards his voice broke, he lost his job in Thriller Live, and he ended up living back in Bury with his grandfather. “I had to go back to my normal school and try and fit back in.” Having come out as gay to his friends in London, he went back into the closet, too. “It was super tough.”
So when he got a place at another drama school, Italia Conti, “I just thought, ‘Don’t fuck this up because if you do, you’re going back to Bury and you’re going to have to start all over again.’” He moved back to London, where he lived with a producer on Beautiful People and her wife, in a “queer household where it was normal to be different. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is where I need to be.’ I finally had a group of friends I could completely be myself around and not have to hide. So from there I was just being me. And the real me. And by the time I was at college” – he ramps up the volume here – “I was Queen Bee, baby!”
At 16, he landed a role as a flamboyant schoolboy (later a teacher) on Bad Education, Jack Whitehall’s sometimes sweet and funny, sometimes lazy and outdated BBC sitcom – a role he’d play on and off for the next decade. It was fun – but the stage is his first love. He’s played Angel in Rent, Seaweed in Hairspray, and, perhaps most famously, the titular teenage drag queen in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (if you’ve got the tube in the past five years, you’ll have seen him on the posters).
Now he’s back in the West End, playing the Emcee in Cabaret, the 1966 musical charting the rise of both sexual liberation and fascism in 1930s Berlin. For Rebecca Frecknall’s revival (which started in 2021 with Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley in the lead roles, and has had a rotating roster of new cast members ever since), The Playhouse Theatre has been remodelled into “The Kit Kat Club”, a delightfully debauched cabaret club, with dancers writhing on top of the bar as you enter via winding dark corridors.
Rhea Norwood is Sally Bowles, a struggling nightclub performer down on her luck, who falls in love with an American writer (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay) just as the Nazis are rising to power. The Emcee is both literal Emcee of the nightclub, and an omniscient, shapeshifting narrator, who not only observes but encourages both the hedonism and the evil around him. He is magnetic to watch. “Some people at the stage door have said, ‘Oh I never thought you’d be able to play menacing,’” says Williams. “I’m like, girl, don’t underestimate me. We can switch it up if we need to.”
Seven people have taken on the role of the Emcee in this production since Eddie Redmayne, but Williams is the first Black person. “We’re not shying away from the fact that I’m a person of colour playing this part,” he says, “and what that would look like in Nazi Germany.” One moment he is spanking a man and telling us to live and let live, the next he’s in a blonde Aryan wig goose-stepping with Nazis. In one particularly disturbing number, a (scarily lifelike) gorilla bounds onto the stage and the Emcee, dressed in black lace and pearls to resemble a sort of sinister skeleton, sings a darkly comic love song to her – before he spits out the gut-punch final line: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
“I used to hate that line – I didn’t even say the word in rehearsals,” says Williams. “It felt like I was saying the N word. It was awful.” How does it feel singing it to an audience? “Icky. The energy and temperature just immediately drops. And some people nervously laugh. You don’t know what to do with your emotions. There’s something about it that’s really powerful, because I’ve led the audience along to get them on my side. And then you’re like, ‘Wow, this person is part of the problem.’”
This is a dark production, then, but Williams tries to leave all that on the stage. “I try not to get too caught up in it all because if you did, it would just be a heavy weight constantly. I’m getting ready in here, I’ve got The Spice Girls on, I’ve got the Pussycat Dolls on. Let it just be free and easy. At the end of the day, I’m obviously nothing like my actual character.”
Every night, he comes off stage and leaves the theatre via the silver-glittering stage door to take pictures with fans. But he’s had some bad experiences doing that in the past. “When I was doing Jamie, I was followed back to my flat. I was frightened. Someone was knocking at 1am. The next day I opened my door, and there was a programme on the floor with a Sharpie. I just thought, ‘What the fuck? That’s such an invasion of privacy.’ It really made me scared for the first time.”
Does he have a message, then, for people coming to see Cabaret who want to hang around and meet him afterwards? “Just be polite, be nice. I’m so happy to do stage door, I do it every night… but if you think that you’re taking the piss, you’re probably taking the piss. It’s as simple as that. I never want to shit on people and fans that come to the shows, because we’re so grateful that they buy the tickets and they’re a huge part of the experience. But unfortunately, some people just take it too far.
“But, you know,” he adds, slapping his thighs, “keep it moving and grooving! And if I need to, I’ll tell them. I ain’t afraid of that.”
Williams is in ‘Cabaret’ at the Playhouse Theatre until 21 September