Max Harwood: "I like to play a gay role, but I want queer actors to be able to play any character"

A pandemic is not short for anyone, but the wait in which Max Harwood has spent the last year or so of his life is noteworthy: this acting student had achieved, without the help of agents, representatives or anyone, only with a video and a series of auditions, not only his first job, but the leading role in a reasonably-priced film; And not just any leading role, but Jamie New, the transformer who gives name to

, the most acclaimed and beloved English musical of recent decades.

Filming a long-awaited movie had given him the most famous debut in recent memory and, for a while, the actor thought, what things, that 2020 - the original date of the premiere - would be a great year.

"Since then, everything has been an exercise in patience," he laments, and from the Zoom angle you can see how he buries his head a little between his shoulders when remembering it.

“More than anything it's the anticipation, I suppose, of knowing that this is all on the way.

But just having the opportunity was already a privilege and well, we already have a date and they will see us in more than 200 countries ”.

On September 17, five days after Harwood's 24th birthday,

will premiere on Amazon Prime Video.

The wait is about to come to an end.

The story of a

will also end

impossible: if it is already rare to star in a movie without any experience, doing it without help is directly a lottery. "It was an open casting," he explains. “I was in acting second, at the Urdang Academy in London, where you are not supposed to play roles while studying. They prefer to keep you until you are ready to hit the streets. But hey, I sent a video, which I liked, and then they called me for another seven meetings. They nagged me: it was the first time he did it to me. I had a good time because I took all the pressure off from the beginning. "It is impossible for me to achieve it, it is too much my dream to star in a musical film." I only realized that it was all for real when I was offered the role. 'Come on, they want to work with me. I guess they really liked methey weren't being nice ”.

Max Harwood wears Louis Vuitton. Charlie Gray

Harwood takes on one of the most appreciative roles in recent musical theater: a kid from the outskirts of Sheffield, an industrial town in South Yorkshire, who decides he's going to the prom in

.

While learning about this culture, and the meaning of LGTBI visibility, he deals with the usual obstacles of these plots - a father who does not understand him at first, the class bullies - and close friends with a veteran of the matter, the employee of a Thrift store with a legendary past like the drag Loco Chanelle.

In the film, the latter is played by Oscar nominee Richard E. Grant (

). “My first day of filming was with him, an actor of legend. And I must say that it broke my ideas very quickly about what people with that degree of prestige are like: they are the most humble person in the world, exactly what I want to be in 20 or 30 years, ”recalls Harwood. In general, hearing him talk about the shoot is like asking a child about Willy Wonka's factory: “The crew was very kind to me. Especially the cameras, who always explained to me the size of the shot, where I was inside the axis, where I had to look ... It was a 12-week film master's degree ”.

Countless LGBTI kids have been screened at Jamie since the original work's premiere in 2011, something that Harwood is not particularly concerned about ("every movie is bigger than a single person," he claims). He doesn't practice any

, beyond watching

religiously, but he gets to the character in another way. Professionally, he is a lover of musical theater ("I grew up putting

(1968) and

(1981)

VHS

on my room TV"). Biographically, he also had to put up with bullies at school, although they asked him for forgiveness when he came out of the closet at 18 years old. "I like to play a

role

and I want to do it more. And I also want roles that are not only defined by their sexuality, and that

actors

can play any character, "he announces.

He's the first creative in his family ("which is great because I don't have to compare myself to anyone"), but he's more than fulfilling every child actor's dream. “Well, I'll tell you about my dream ... Let's see, this sounds like a false and made-up story but I swear, I swear, I swear it's true: at 16 I worked in a movie theater, I had to do things like serve popcorn, sweep the screen, breaking the spectators' entrances ... And I watched the movies. I remember seeing Jennifer Lawrence in

. And I remember thinking, 'Wouldn't it be a cool, improbable dream to be literally Jennifer Lawrence?' I think that was a small start. He made me study acting at the university, for theater. Cinema was not sure. Well...".

You can follow ICON on