Nathan Stewart-Jarrett on playing a vengeful drag queen: ‘I tried to do the treadmill in heels’

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett wants to talk about adversity, about the marginalised experience and the burden of appearing strong and powerful at all times. But his soup needs a stir. “I burnt it last time,” the star of Candyman and Channel 4’s unruly superhero comedy Misfits tells me. “It was a butternut squash soup and I just roasted the f***ing thing. I thought I got all the burnt bits out, but it was not reviewed well.” He scuttles off to his kitchen, spoon in hand.

The 37-year-old loves a tangent, a pithy one-liner, a wry aside. You’d think it’d make drag a natural fit, the best queens as charismatic on stage as they are when delivering a savage remark in the wings. But in the run-up to shooting his new film Femme, a provocative British thriller about sex, violence and revenge, Stewart-Jarrett realised how tough drag can be.

“I tried to do the treadmill in heels, but it didn’t work out,” he winces. “I had maybe three weeks to prepare.” But, he adds, perfection has no place in drag. “The sound isn’t always great, the lights aren’t always great, people get drunk and fall on you… But you make it work. It would have been a dishonour to the drag queens of the world if I complained about not having enough time. You just need to throw yourself in. Basically, you’ve got to get it. Which, I think, is the name of a Sisqó song.”

Actor. Determined drag queen. Referencer of early Noughties R&B deep cuts. Is there anything Stewart-Jarrett can’t do? On-screen, at least, Femme is his best showcase so far. He plays Jules, a drag artist who is walking home from a gig in his Aphrodite get-up – mini-skirt, nails, braided wig – when he’s set upon and assaulted by a criminal gang. Weeks later, he encounters one of the men (George MacKay’s Preston) in a gay sauna and plots an intricate revenge scheme – gaining Preston’s trust and carrying on a chaotic affair with him, all in the hope of eventually destroying his life. Stewart-Jarrett is captivating in an incredibly tricky role – he’s by turns wounded, poised and devious.

“The script pummelled me,” Stewart-Jarrett says. “In the thriller space, queer characters are usually sent up or killed. That’s a trope. It’s the same with Black characters or the ‘femme fatale’. [Femme] subverts all of that.”

The film also touches on ideas baked into being part of a minority. Jules is lightly chastised by his friends following his assault, told that his trauma and depression is helping his attackers win. Which brings us back to that expectation of strength, the one Stewart-Jarrett seemed so energised by before his soup began to crisp.

“It’s something that any minority will attest to,” he says. “There’s absolutely a moment where you’ve been told that ‘you are strong’. To not let this unseen ‘other’ get the better of us. And especially from what I’ve seen in the gay community, to just dust yourself off and try again… which is an Aaliyah song!” He lets out a quick, loud cackle. “But I don’t think we should be strong all the time. It’s not great, and it’s not being kind to ourselves.”

Stewart-Jarrett, clad in a cosy orange knit, is calling over Zoom from his flat in London. He was born in Wandsworth and spent years with the capital as his professional base – Misfits first, followed by Channel 4’s conspiracy thriller Utopia and Simon Amstell’s sweet romcom Benjamin – before moving to the US. He’s lived in upstate New York for a few years now, having stuck around following the Broadway transfer in 2018 of Tony Kushner’s gargantuan Aids play Angels in America – Stewart-Jarrett had, along with Andrew Garfield and Denise Gough, revived it at London’s National Theatre a year earlier. “It ruined everything for me because it’s just so good,” he jokes. “I became more discerning [afterwards], more brave.”

He segued into Femme mere weeks after completing filming on Culprits, a heist thriller series (currently streaming on Disney+) in which he plays a master criminal turned family man. That the character is queer, engaged to a man and living in blissful suburbia with their two young children, made it feel quietly radical. “Every character I play is Black, that’s a given, but I knew that [those specific details] were important,” he says. “You just don’t see that, kind of ever.”

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He is quick to emphasise, though, that representation in entertainment never exists in a vacuum. “Sometimes people say, ‘Wow, you’re a Black actor on stage at the National, that’s so rare!’ But I’m not the first. It’s happened before. It just happens rarely. Femme, for example, is unusual, but there are queer films. We just don’t connect the dots. If we make the links between what we’re making now and what came before, we can continue to build on it all.” He’d like to get to a point where it isn’t interesting that a show like Culprits is led by a queer Black character married to another queer Black character. “We can’t just have another one of those in 10 years’ time. We’ve got to build on it now so it’s normalised.”

He takes a breath. The mood’s got a bit serious. He won’t stand for it. “Was that almost like a mission statement?” he laughs. “Because it sounded a bit like a mission statement.”

‘Femme’ is in cinemas, and ‘Culprits’ is streaming on Disney+