Virginia Gay: ‘Shakespeare’s most overrated play? Hamlet. Too long’

By Dee Jefferson • June 7, 2026 • Culture

The actor and director on Disney villains, the sexy power of the melt emoji, and shattering a glass globe over the audience during Calamity Jane

You’re directing Yve Blake’s new play Mackenzie, a Shakespeare reboot in which Lady Macbeth is a nightmare stage mum. Who’s your favourite fictional villain? Ursula! From The Little Mermaid. Disney does villains really well: they’re fabulous and funny; all of them are queer coded, which is both fun and problematic. But Ursula is fabulous. She’s a strong female role model: she’s a business woman, she’s taking people’s voices, and it’s a clear contract that she makes with Ariel; and she’s living by herself, under the sea, so she’s the master of her own time and beholden to nobody. What’s the most overrated Shakespeare play? Hamlet. It’s too long. And I think there’s something about the world we live in now which makes me go: “I don’t really want to hear about your sad boy thoughts.” It’s also because I studied it, which means that I’ve wrung every scrap of meaning out of it, so I want to give it a break. It’s become a marker of when you’ve reached a certain stage of a certain kind of career in acting, and I just wonder whether there’s something more interesting to mark that stage now? What book, film, album or play do you always return to, and why? The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I learned an enormous amount about acting, about storytelling and about fabulousness from that movie. I discovered it when I was very young – some would say too young. We had it on VHS and my parents knew that if they put it in and pressed play, that’s where I would be for the next two hours, and they wouldn’t have to worry about me. It’s camp, it’s fabulous, it’s got these epic stakes, it’s very funny, it’s surprisingly moving – it’s my favourite flavour. And with Mackenzie, I wanted to create a Rocky Horror Show for bookish tweens and their favourite English teacher. What is the best lesson you’ve learned from someone you’ve worked with? What I learned from Patty and Harry [Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer] on the set of Colin from Accounts, is that if you’re the person setting the tone of the workspace, you can make that tone very joyful and playful, and everybody can bring their own unique comic voice. And your job as the person at the top of the hierarchy is to tune those comic voices into a bandwidth where they all exist together. There’s a cliche that making comedy is not very fun, and you do have to get very technical, actually – weirdly. You can leave lots of space for glorious flights of fantastical invention, but you have to support that with an enormous amount of craft and an enormous amount of specificity and precision, so that everybody knows what they’re looking at and when. But what I learned from Patty and Harry was that you can get that kind of specificity, and nobody has to feel corrected or excluded. And it means that everybody can bring their best, and that means the show is the best. What’s the best advice you ever got? It’s that phrase “Be yourself, everyone else is taken” [often attributed to Oscar Wilde]. When you go to drama school – and it might have changed since I went – you get taught to soften your edges and make yourself more adaptable, and actually, especially for film and television, the very you-ness of you is actually what makes you employable. This is true when you make your own work, too. And I think that saying is about honouring and refining and really backing the weird me-ness of me, which is queer and silly and irreverent and hopeful against all odds. And also the masc-ness of me: I used to think I had to femme up all the time, and actually, the masc-ness of me is what makes me valuable. What dessert are you? I’m a creme brulee – 10,000%. Very creamy, indulgent, a little bit textural, it’s got that hard layer of toffee on the top. There’s something about it that requires a bit of extra work, but once you’re in, it’s spectacular. With something like the panna cotta, there’s no mystery – it’s all one texture, it’s all one flavour. But the creme brulee, she’s got layers. She just wants to be cracked. What’s the most chaotic thing that has happened to you on set or stage? I was performing Calamity Jane, and at the beginning of the show, when Calam arrives, she throws lollies into the audience. They were hard lollies, and we had a lot of low bunting over the audience, and I threw the lollies up and they hit a glass globe in the bunting, and it shattered into 1,000 fine pieces over the audience. Primarily over this wonderful human being who simply put her hand over her glass as it was happening. I said, “Can I get you another drink?” And she went, “Nah, I’m fine”, and just took a sip. What is your most-used emoji? I really like the melt, because it can be very sexy, like, “Oh my god, I’m melting just thinking about you.” But it also can be, “Help me, Jesus Christ, I’m sliding off this plate.” I really like emojis that have two uses. And for me, it’s sexy first – it’s the ultimate response to an image that gets sent, or if like somebody sends you a cute little thing and you’re like, “I’m melting thinking about you.” What is the most embarrassing thing you’ve done in the name of your art? When I was a student I’d take any job that I could get, including walk-through immersive character work at fancy fundraising balls. You’d be wandering around, sort of in character but sort of not, and thinking, “OK, well, I suppose if I stay here for another hour and a half, I might have enough money to pay my rent”; doing those math equations in your head the entire time, not thinking about whether you were Anna Karenina or whatever you were meant to be. Like, I suppose if I don’t eat out at all next week, maybe I could leave now, just walk out in this full fur coat and fur hat – into the night and under a train, traditionally, in Anna’s case. What habit are you trying to break? Social media. I am absolutely addicted. Actually, what has been very useful in breaking the addiction has been making Mackenzie, because I’m so flooded with dopamine from being in that rehearsal room, and the discussions are so complicated and interesting and full that I don’t search for the surface dopamine that I used to get from Instagram. But if I don’t actively parent myself when I’m not doing a job like this, hours and hours of a day can easily go. Virginia Gay is directing Mackenzie, which runs from 6 June to 18 July at the Neilson Nutshell and from 29 July to 5 August at Arts Centre Melbourne

Source: The Guardian