4 days ago
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Bathed in the fluorescent glow of a rehearsal studio on the south bank of the Thames, Keala Settle is embodying a woman redefining herself in the court of public opinion. Cast as former first lady Mary Lincoln in Mrs President, a sombre and haunting stage production that begins a six-week run at London’s Charing Cross theatre this month, she grapples with the turbulent inner world of Abraham Lincoln’s wife, vilified by the media and eager to rewrite herself in the eyes of the US after her husband’s assassination and the civil war.
As an actor, and woman, Settle – known globally for her performance in The Greatest Showman as bearded lady Lettie Lutz – is also done with being what people tell her to be. It has, she explains, taken 10 years to reach this point. But her own encounters with celebrity and grief were the ideal preparation for this psychological drama. “This role – I jumped at it. I’ve never related to anything so closely.”
The 75-minute play meets Lincoln on an anguished journey of self-discovery in the studio of Mathew Brady (Hal Fowler), forefather of photojournalism and celebrity portraiture. Their encounter – resulting in a historic portrait – is imagined by writer John Ransom Phillips and Olivier-nominated director Bronagh Lagan.
It is starkly different from Oh Mary!, the Tony-winning, darkly comic Broadway hit that characterises the same first lady as a drunk wannabe cabaret star in the leadup to her husband’s death, but arrives in the West End, by curious coincidence, at the same time. In Mrs President, though, Settle, 50, hopes that audiences “will see both myself and Mary in a brand new light”. In her case, she hopes they will understand “I’m absolutely going to be who I’m going to be and it will not fit anyone’s mould”, she says.
The message bears more than a passing resemblance to the one at the heart of The Greatest Showman and Settle’s showstopping solo This Is Me, which rocketed her into the cultural canon, won best original song at the Golden Globes and received an Oscar nomination in 2018.
Both this role and that of Mary Lincoln reflect Settle’s own journey to self acceptance. Her Oldham-born father, David, was on a Mormon mission to New Zealand when he met her mother, Susanne; the two had Settle, the first of five children, in Hawaii, later moving to French-speaking Louisiana. As a result, Settle felt she was existing in “two different worlds”.
“I would come home and it would be: we’re learning Māori alphabet and music and Tītī tōrea stick game; then we’d go outside and have to find another identity because this identity was not for outside.”
Settle always wanted to act but also “sang anything and everything” and constantly sought the affection of her recording artist mother, who pushed her down the same path. “I was supposed to be the singer, I had a sister who was supposed to be the doctor, a brother who was supposed to be a lawyer … I think that was the plight of the culture that my mum was raised in and probably not far from the church teachings she believed in.”
Settle’s instinct was to fight against it. This “un-mothering” was another thing that attracted her to the part of Mary Lincoln, who was six when her mother died. Settle’s own mother died a decade ago. “There were similarities for me because my mother was so hell-bent. It was really awkward for me to have someone who I trusted or was supposed to trust, at least, shove me in front of people non-stop,” she remembers.
She was shaped by her many cultural influences and this will to shirk the identity her mother imposed. “That literally is who I am. On top of it were these two people who came from completely different aspects of the world.” In Louisiana, she remembers how people looked at her parents: “Because my mother was a different shade than my father, that played a massive part in what we all saw and sponged up.”
Settle’s parents didn’t want their children to sound like them, yet she watched Fawlty Towers and Are You Being Served? on cable and “always had a British accent”. It is strongly British today (Settle lives in Brighton), carrying hints of Pacific heritage. “Everyone in our communities, wherever we were, referred to my dad as Mr Bean.”
Settle’s career has taken her around the world performing in some of the last decade’s most acclaimed musicals. She was nominated for a Tony for her 2013 Broadway debut as Norma Valverde in Hands on a Hardbody; in 2015, she played the original Becky in Waitress – her mother died on the show’s opening night in Massachusetts. Other credits include Les Misérables and Hairspray and she sang backup for Gladys Knight in Las Vegas. Settle made her West End debut in &Juliet, then Sister Act, and more recently appeared as Miss Coddle, the headmistress of Shiz University, in the movie adaptations of Wicked.
The Greatest Showman, in 2017, was a turning point. “Working on the production of Showman was a dream come true. I never clocked a dream like that.” She describes it as “a gift”. Even so, she struggled with the aftermath. Having never done am-dram or regional theatre, she says, “I was very fortunate to jump [to such a big role] but what my soul craved was the connection of all that stuff that everyone else had been through.”
The upshot was that “when I did Showman I was not ready”. An emotionally charged rehearsal of This Is Me, four months after her mother’s death, went viral but Settle “could not watch it for probably longer than five seconds. I saw myself as a five-year-old girl who had not yet been looked after because four months prior her mother had passed. Her whole world that had told her what to do, where to go, and the reason she went into this industry to piss that woman off was gone. So what do you do now?”
The movie grossed a reported $435m at the box office worldwide and brought Settle global recognition, but she never wanted celebrity, where others “hold the cards, therefore you are what they tell you to be”. Pushing against that can be portrayed, she says “as mania, and the humans that are most susceptible to that misjudged view happen to be women”. She finds parallels, once again, in the public scrutiny faced by Lincoln.
After The Greatest Showman’s fevered release, things got tougher still. Settle suffered a mini-stroke and had 10-hour double bypass brain surgery just a week before the Oscars, where she would perform in a gown fitted from her hospital bed. She was diagnosed with Moyamoya disease, a rare cerebrovascular disorder. “That was a disease that I had no idea I had, that just happened to be fed by what was happening.”
Settle’s diagnosis underscored the sense that she was pushing herself too far. “I’m used to ‘Give, give, give, and when you’re dead, keep giving’. That’s when I went: OK, I’ve got to look after myself.” In the eight years since, the work she has done to process all that she has experienced has left Settle with an appetite for projects that instil a healthy amount of fear. I ask if being afraid is something she now … “welcomes”, she answers before I’ve even had the chance to finish the question.
But didn’t she always welcome it? “Oh my God no. Ran from it. Ran, drank, boozed, pills, all of it.” Today, she says, “I’m looking for projects that internally make my bum twitch but I know I need.”
Creatively, the rare turn from musicals to drama was something she had craved. Without music, she says, “you have to work 10 zillion times as hard to find the tools to make that kind of impact because music has its own healing powers.”
Did she have to go through Showman and all that came before and after to get to this play? “Yes,” she gasps, her eyes tearful. “There’s no way I could do this had I not gone through all of that. I wouldn’t understand it. It’s horrifying but also empowering that I can understand every bit of this story and still have the grace not only for that woman but also for myself, so that whoever comes to see it can step back and say: ‘Hey, it’s not this – it’s this.’”
Which brings us back to the seismic impact of This Is Me. “As much as I sang this song as a character, the way that I lead my life is something a lot of people can’t cope with because it’s not their version of me.” She says this is exactly what Mary Lincoln was going through: “‘We see you as the grieving mother, you’re the maniac, you’re this and you’re that.’”
And Settle says, of both herself and Lincoln: “She takes all of it back by saying: ‘You’re right. I hope you enjoyed the show because I survived it.’”
Mrs President is at Charing Cross theatre, London, to 8 March.
