For the past five weeks, Joshua McGuire has been in a whitewashed room in north London pretending to be a rhinoceros. The 37-year-old actor isn’t in a performance art piece or strange social experiment, but rather starring in director Omar Elerian’s new production of Eugene Ionèsco’s 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros; it is his first stage role in seven years. “It sounds mental but it’s the theatre of the absurd, so it’s meant to be baffling at points,” he says with a smile, back in human form in a white T-shirt and cap while on a break from rehearsals, where he is clearly enjoying taking on the story of a small French town whose inhabitants gradually turn into rhinos.
If you have watched a British comedy over the past decade, it’s likely you’ve seen McGuire in it. The endlessly energetic performer is usually found next to the leading man, sporting a frizz of curly hair and delivering anxious one-liners or slapstick pratfalls. He has featured in everything from Netflix series Lovesick to Richard Curtis’s About Time and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. On stage, meanwhile, he had his breakthrough in Laura Wade’s 2010 satire on the British upper classes, Posh, playing a member of a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club, and has since starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe in David Leveaux’s 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
“I was a class clown so it’s not surprising so many of my roles have been comedic,” he says, speaking in the quick nasal tone of his many characters. “But in recent years the work has been getting darker, which is welcome, since it’s nice to be morally dubious for once.” In 2022, McGuire starred as “clever asshole” Chris Clarke in the Downing Street thriller Anatomy of a Scandal, while in Rhinoceros he is tackling material that has been read as a critique of postwar fascism, challenging the audience and its central character Bérenger to question how much people will believe and go along with – even if it means succumbing to a crash of rhinos bolting across the stage.
“The play is about groupthink and the dangers behind the ideas we might buy into,” McGuire says. “You can read it as a comment on social media and how we can become indoctrinated to follow the crowd, even if we don’t initially agree with where we’re going. But ultimately it’s the cast in a white box with no props – the audience can fill it with whatever they’re seeing and that’s the most confronting thing of all.”
While his role as Jean in Rhinoceros sees him showing a darker side to his usual playfulness, it was McGuire’s top billing in 2022’s BBC series Cheaters that has done more than anything else to transform him from a sputtering sidekick into an unlikely leading man.
Starring alongside Susan Wokoma, Cheaters sees McGuire playing Josh, a downtrodden sound engineer whose adulterous one-night stand with Fola (Wokoma) while on holiday ends up following him home when he realises she has just moved in across the road.
“I was drawn to Cheaters because everyone in it has committed some sort of betrayal but they’re also empathetic and lovable,” he says. “I really liked how Josh isn’t macho or a gym guy but he’s still shown in moments of passion and is working his way through the difficulties of a long-term relationship.”
Created by Oliver Lyttelton, Cheaters features plenty of well-observed relational dynamics, as well as a lot of sex. In the 18 10-minute episodes of series one, characters masturbate, get naked, perform oral sex and experience several orgasms. “It was my first experience doing intimate scenes on screen and it was such a gift to be performing alongside Susie [Wokoma], not least because we were both at Rada together in the same year, so I’ve known her for ever,” he says. “We would be in bed almost totally naked, surrounded by 20 crew putting up lights, and we would just be chatting about which mutual friends we had seen recently.”
The show became a sleeper hit and a second series came out last year. With the increased popularity, though, it must have been a challenge to prepare his family for the show’s steamy content? “I had to tell my mum that there was nudity in episode one and that it arrives pretty fast,” McGuire laughs. “It’s like five minutes in and bam – there’s my full bum out! There was no easy way to tell her that but she’s seen it all and she’s proud of me.”
Growing up in Warwick as the youngest of three siblings, McGuire fell into acting seemingly by accident. “I didn’t have a particularly thespy family since my mum’s a paediatric nurse and my dad worked for IBM,” he says. “We were only a 10-minute drive from the RSC in Stratford-on-Avon though and my mum would always take me to see new productions – both the good ones and the not so good.”
In 2001, at 13, McGuire was cast as one of the young actors in Gregory Doran’s King John at the RSC and soon caught the bug for performance. “They would just get local boys from the nearby schools to fill in as the young parts for some of the RSC performances and I thought it would be a fun thing to do,” he says. “I was suddenly part of this mad world where people were getting paid to have fun every night and then going for drinks afterwards. I was enchanted and to this day whenever I smell incense it takes me right back to the Swan stage and the cardinal in the play swinging his censer across the boards.”
Getting into Rada at 19, McGuire joined a mightily talented cohort, including Wokoma, Daisy May Cooper, James Norton, Cynthia Erivo and Phoebe Fox. “It was a magic time because from 10am to 6pm each day you’d just be playing and discovering,” he says. “I would laugh at what my older brother might have thought if he could see me spending all day being water or jelly.”
In his final year, McGuire was cast with Norton to play members of the riot club in Wade’s Royal Court send-up of the Oxbridge Tory elite, Posh. “His talent was immediately evident,” Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp says of his performance in the ensemble. “He gleamed in an excellent cast and has since been a good picker of good plays – rumpled in James Graham’s Privacy (2014) and garrulous and bossy in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
While McGuire says his experience of Posh was overwhelmingly positive – “I thought all jobs would be as fun, as popular and as pertinent to the moment as that” – future stage roles were less straightforward. “I had the opening line of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and one night I began it by skipping the first two pages of the script entirely,” he laughs, head in his hands. “It’s like suddenly thinking about walking and you trip up. Thankfully, I don’t think anyone noticed because Dan [Radcliffe] is so famous that for the first five minutes of that show at least, no one was looking at me.”
Does he wish his career had taken off to similar heights, rather than largely being known for supporting roles? “God no. I have mates who have lost all anonymity and it’s really tough, especially if you have kids,” he says. “I have a two-year-old son now and I love being able to go to work but then also come home, put him to bed and leave it all at the door.”
In 2022, McGuire married actor Amy Morgan and the pair share parental responsibilities in their London home alongside their work. “We’re living the dream because we’ve been able to work and have our boy and not really sacrifice any roles,” he says. “It does take a village and we’re very lucky to have so many friends and grannies around for babysitting!”
At least McGuire’s current rehearsal schedule means he can be home for bedtime and once the play’s run begins he can spend the day with his son instead. “As a dad, this show takes on another resonance, thinking about how social media groupthink might affect his life in the future,” he says. “But he can’t even read yet so there’s no use worrying too much – I’m more desperate instead to be in one of those Julia Donaldson Christmas adaptations, which he might just about understand!” Until then, it’s a welcome return for McGuire to the London stage, bringing his comedic excitement and recently showcased vulnerability to both rhinoceros and human beings.
Rhinoceros runs at the Almeida, London N1 from Tuesday 25 March to 26 April
