10 Minutes with Jack Bardoe

With an impressive young career at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford and the RGS stage, Jack graduated from RADA in 2019 and is now quickly making his mark as an actor. He has held the stage alongside Ciaran Hinds in Brian Friel’s ‘Translations’ at The National Theatre; tipped his top hat as the earnest protagonist alongside an ensemble cast including Dame Harriet Walter, Tamsin Grieg and Tom Wilkinson in ‘Belgravia’; and has just concluded Channel 4’s ‘Screw’ starring Nina Sosanya and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell. We caught up with him in his London flat, which he shares with his brother – rising artist Dylan Bardoe (Morris) OG 2016 – to cast light on the ins and outs of RADA and share his memories of his time at the RGS.

I am. It’s my primary social group and these are the people I see the most as we have all congregated in London. Quite a big group of us made very close friends at school, and this, along with various friends picked up at university, frames the group that I spend most of my time with now.

At the Yvonne Arnold (Guildford) which encouraged me to get involved with it at school. Nancy McClean (RGS Head of Drama) arrived when I started sixth form, and introduced drama in a big way, especially in creating opportunities for people who wanted to get involved. I have a lot to thank her for as she was a big part of showing me that drama school was a real possibility and I remember her coaching me through my first audition at RADA.

It was a relatively gradual thing. I remember Matthew Eberhardt (OG 2006) directed a combined cast of RGS and GHS in ‘Les Misérables’. I had one line as a foreman “on your way” but I had an absolute ball and fell in love with acting doing that, so it was a very formative experience.

But it was getting onto the Foundation course at RADA that developed the ambitions I had at school. I had always intended to go and study something more academic and traditional as something to fall back on (Jack studied Theology and Religion at Oriel College, Oxford, for a brief time) but going to RADA and realising I could perform at a higher level and not be out of my depth… that’s when I knew.

To be honest I didn’t have any expectations at all because I didn’t have the first idea what it was going to be like. You do regularly see various mythologised characters from theatre and film and tv, walking through the corridors, but it’s very hard work, very long hours. The years are very small – just 28 people a year – and it’s very much a full-time job. They are big on punctuality and you clock in first thing every morning Monday to Saturday.

The campus is basically two buildings of big studio rooms and you attend 90-minute classes on acting, voice, movement. It’s a very unique style of learning. There’s a lot of exercises that sound relatively absurd. A lot of humming. You treat your voice like an athlete would treat their body so you build up the various articulator muscles, making sure your diction is the best it can be, so your voice projects to fill big auditoriums. Even though the graduates that leave RADA go on to do primarily film and TV it is a theatre vocation training. It’s designed to train actors to perform in theatre.

I would say theatre. When theatre is at its best there is nothing that comes close to it and there’s nothing that comes close to participating in it. But having said that I don’t think it matters what medium you’re performing in, it’s dependent on the creatives you are working with to make it an enriching experience.

There is no one way to make a performance truthful. The mantra we had at RADA was “to play the truth of the imagined circumstance” and you achieve this through years of practice and various techniques.

There is a difference outside of the core element of theatre compared to TV and film. Theatre is about projecting a performance outward and finding a way to enlarge yourself to tell a story to an auditorium full of people. Whereas film and TV is inviting the audience in. You have teams of people working on cameras, sound and lighting to get every nuance of your performance.

That’s something you need to get used to because I came out of RADA and went straight onto ‘Belgravia’ (ITV 2020). It was a scene with Dame Harriet Walter and I naturally walked onto set… and projected ... really very loudly. “… LADY BROCKENHURST… ” The next thing I hear is “CUT” and the director told me to take it right down. I remember thinking that Harriet sounded so quiet and everything seemed so small and so detailed but when I saw it on a screen it magnified everything in much more detail.

For me, performance is about telling a story. You have a simple job as an actor – which is to the best of your ability communicate and tell the story of that role. And that comes down to remarkably simple things; it’s clarity; it’s listening; it’s being in communion with the actors you are performing with. Most research as an actor comes down to the script. Everything you need is there – that is the whole story.

As best you can in the rehearsal process you soak yourself in the world of your character. With theatre it plays a bigger role because you have a huge rehearsal process where you have the luxury of having a director to guide you. But with TV and film you are not given that luxury. You show up on set the day your scene is being shot and you have one rehearsal before the cameras roll. Historical experts are instructing on the smaller details as you go along: i.e. how you drink tea in the 19th century or how you greet someone. It’s a lot more functional because of time-constraints when studios are spending vast amounts of money. I think people would be surprised by how little rehearsal there is in TV and film… it’s a lot more on the fly.

I exorcised my stage fright relatively early. I was probably more terrified when I was thirteen on stage at the Yvonne Arnold than at any time during my 3rd-year shows at the Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre. [The Vanbrugh is the pinnacle of the RADA journey.]

And this type of fear is like anything … the more you put yourself in fearful situations the more you get used to them and the more you can control your gut reactions because they are not alien any more. They used to tell us at RADA that fear and excitement have the exact same symptoms. It’s the same feeling. If you are feeling fearful just convince yourself you are excited… and this actually works. So, fear, to me, is a positive feeling. It’s like “let’s go and entertain people.”

In training I wasn’t aware of the value of the techniques I was learning but when you start out there is no one to help you … it’s up to you to bring this character, bring something to rehearsal. Something I now find useful is character lists. We had to handwrite from the script; everything your character says about themselves; everything your character says about another character; everything other characters say about your character; and every fact about your character. In essence you are reading the script afresh each time. But I just wanted to act. When I got my first theatre casting [Lt. Yolland in ‘Translations’ by Brian Friel at The National 2019] I didn’t have a great grip on the character during my first reading and it wasn’t going so well. Ian Rickson (Director) came over and said, “you’ve done lists before… why don’t you go back to your lists?” Revisiting my training really helped me find and immerse myself in the role of Yolland.

There’s just too many. I have always been a huge fan of Ralph Fiennes. He’s been a huge inspiration to me, Olivia Coleman is amazing, I think Jessie Buckley who is quite new and was only at RADA a few years before me is spellbinding. There’s just too many.

I hate not to answer the question, but really, it is the creative team you are working with not the part you play.

Follow your passion. It is a cliché but it is so true. Find something that you’re really interested in and pursue it bravely. And forgive yourself for mistakes, allow yourself to make mistakes and don’t be hard on yourself when you do. Don’t be afraid of the cracks because that’s how the light gets in.

‘The Canterville Ghost’ on Channel 5 with Anthony Head.