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Did I really say that?” James McArdle is in bits, cringing at the version of himself who 10 years ago vehemently underestimated the role TV would play in the coming years. “I said telly wasn’t the future, did I?” If a laugh can have an accent, Ardle’s – booming and gregarious – is Scottish all the way.
McArdle, 36, has reason to laugh. The Glasgow-born actor may have cut his teeth in theatre, earning acclaim for roles in productions of Angels in America, Platonov, and The Tragedy of Macbeth, but he owes his recent success to telly. Shows such as Sexy Beast and ITV’s Playing Nice helped boost his profile, alongside the wildly successful HBO crime drama Mare of Easttown, a second season of which fans have been begging for since the first came to an end in 2021. (“Um… I’ve heard all sorts,” he offers impishly on the prospect of season two.)
For now, he’s returning to his theatre roots with Bacchae – the National’s bloodthirsty, rap-inflected spin on the ancient Greek tragedy and Indhu Rubasingham’s debut as the theatre’s artistic director. McArdle plays King Pentheus. “A dictator figure, a toxic leader who is unfortunately recognisable enough,” he says. “The play is two and a half thousand years old and it feels not even like a parody or a satire, but a sobering documentary.” Without me giving too much away – does a play from 405 BC need a spoiler warning? – there’s something truly Trumpian about Pentheus. But not only Trumpian, insists McArdle. There are plenty of terrible world leaders around: take your pick.
In a switch-up from his usual mammoth undertakings, Bacchae clocks in at a brisk 145 minutes. Macbeth, by comparison, was three and a half hours long; Angels in America was eight hours split into two. “I think that was part of my twenties. It’s in my past now,” laughs McArdle. That said, it’s not like he’s using his new downtime to relax. In the day, he’s on set shooting the new HBO legal drama War with Sienna Miller and Dominic West, before speeding back to the theatre on a motorbike in time for the evening show.
“It was really intense doing those long plays,” says McArdle. “I remember not being able to sleep towards the end of Macbeth. Other times, I’d wake up and every bone in my body was aching.” While it’s not exactly “masochism” that pulled him towards plays with epic runtimes, he adds, “if you’re really putting yourself through it, there should be something physical about it.”
McArdle doesn’t have to try too hard. At a broad 6ft 2in, he has something physical about him even as he walks into the room, a sports bag slung over his shoulder and a grin slashing through the thicket of his beard. It’s easier to imagine him like this, in the labyrinthine unglamorous backrooms of a theatre, than it is to picture him barking orders from an air-conditioned trailer on set. Was the flashy fame of film and TV something he had steered clear of? “I mean, there’s ego in theatre too!” he laughs. “It’s vanities across the board. I don’t see much difference in them, to be honest. I just go with what feels right and feel lucky that theatre is an option for me, because it can be a really useful way to be seen in a new light.”
Take his role as Tom Stoppard’s pompous playwright in last year’s rug-pulling production of The Real Thing at the Old Vic. “I never thought I’d get asked to play someone like Henry,” he says of the English elitist, for whom Stoppard himself handpicked McArdle. “I really thought I would be playing neurotic Glaswegians all my life, because some actors are and some actors do. I don’t think I’d have been able to do it at the beginning of my career, but now I see it as a challenge that excites me whenever I’m asked to do something far away from myself.”
It’s hard to imagine anything more distant from McArdle’s universe than a galaxy far, far away. The actor only had a bit role in 2015’s Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (and later a meatier one in Andor), but it left a mark. “I remember walking around and seeing this giant, 11ft half-rhinoceros, half-robot walking around,” he says now. “And having to improvise space chat. I needed serious help.”
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Space chat may not be part of McArdle’s linguistic toolbox, but he’s at least au fait with accents. New Yorker, Philly, Irish, Cockney, RP – he’s done the lot. Irish, I mention, has been getting its due lately, thanks to Irish actors like Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Andrew Scott, and Cillian Murphy. Where does McArdle think Scottish lands on the hot accent scale? “It seems to work for me,” he deadpans. “I don’t know why it’d be Irish that’s sexy. From what I’ve heard, people think Scottish – so I’m happy.”
As someone bridging the gap between theatre and screen, McArdle seems well-positioned also to comment on the hot topic troubling the boards lately: A-list casting. Across the West End, Oscar winners and screen stars are in abundance, leading to questions over stunt casting and whether or not it is shutting out lesser-known actors. “Is it controversial?” McArdle asks. “Hasn’t there always been A-list casting? It’s a commercial business and you’ve got to draw people in. I think the only problem comes when a famous person can’t do what they’ve been asked to do, and then it becomes a sort of false endeavour. You know, if you’ve got a hard play and you get someone mad famous to do it and they can’t – then you’re screwed. It looks bad on them and it looks bad on everyone.”
McArdle grew up in Glasgow, the only child of a mum and dad bewildered by his decision to go into the arts. “I think they still are bewildered,” he laughs. “They were always very supportive while also being like, ‘What the hell?’ It’s not part of their world at all.” His grandmother was a different story. “Even though she was from a working-class family, my gran was exposed to more highbrow culture than my parents would have been,” he says. “She could talk about Noel Coward plays, Greek plays. She’d go to see Frank Sinatra live in Glasgow.” Culture, he says, was more accessible then. “It was more a part of life. You’d go to the theatre in the same way you’d go to a football game.”
Fast forward to now, and many of McArdle’s former classmates have ended up as his co-stars. James Norton among them. And if repeat customers are the sign of good business, repeat co-stars are the sign of a good, or at least very friendly, actor. Throughout his career, McArdle has found himself acting opposite familiar faces time and time again, including Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, and Jack Lowden. “I love finding those partnerships that click and asking together, ‘Where can we take this next?’” Hopefully in the case of Winslet, a second season of Mare of Easttown, I joke.
But even if that never transpires, he has something to remember Winslet by: a little blue music box that she gave him for his 30th birthday. Plastered with pictures from Titanic, it plays “My Heart Will Go On” when you open it. “It’s still up on my mantle,” he says. “People always come over and ask where I got it, and I get to say, well actually Kate Winslet gave it to me. Normally, people then roll their eyes,” McArdle says, smiling cheekily, humming along to the opening notes of Celine Dion’s banger ballad. “But I’m like, ‘No, she really did!’”
‘Bacchae’ is on at The National Theatre until 1 November 2025
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