Life with Oscar is an autobiographical tragi-comic odyssey through the dark side of Hollywood written by and starring actor and filmmaker Nick Cohen based on his time in LA
Tell us about the show
Life with Oscar is a crazy twisted rollercoaster ride through my mad hellish Hollywood years. It’s all true. Almost every single word of dialogue in the play is something that someone actually said in those words. I basically spent a long time living with a double Oscar winner – who we will not name for legal reasons(!) She or he promised me they could show me the backdoor, so that I could get my hands on an Oscar myself. But it didn’t quite work out like that! It’s a very funny and very energetic and super physical show with a lot of characters and madcap adventures which get darker and darker.
You play 31 different characters in the show, how did you decide which people you’ve met over the years to include as characters in the play?
I play a lot of different characters in the show a lot of Hollywood predators and psychopaths and just outright crazies. This is all pre #metoo Hollywood. So the behaviour is quite shocking and disgusting, and surprising, sometimes just plain mad.
What’s your favourite character to play?
I think one of my favourite characters that I play in the show is a producer, who’s a real trickster, and deeply untrustworthy, very charming, very smart, but also has a big dark secret, which I think will really surprise the audience when they find out about it.
The show debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, has it changed much since then?
The show’s been developed a lot since it first debuted at Edinburgh, in the Underbelly, it evolved throughout the run. We responded to audience feedback and kept working on it. And some of the darkest scenes come in now alongside some of the zaniest and funniest sequences. So the two things go together really, we’ve just pushed everything and gone to places that initially in rehearsals maybe were just too intimidating to explore. But once the audience in Edinburgh gave us the confidence that they understood, then it emboldened us and made us braver to just go deeper or more crazy.
Tell us about working with Cressida Brown who is the director of the Arcola run
Working with Cressida Brown, has been a real privilege. She’s a fierce and magical director! Rigorous, and painstaking. She works through the text forensically – questioning every word – then she works through the physicality with an equal precision and rigor. Cress’s brought a very political sensibility to the show, and how it deconstructs the American dream and how the American Dream is really the American nightmare. And that’s what we see unfold on stage. Cress is fearless and she really pushes you to places you wouldn’t go otherwise.
The perception of shows about Hollywood can be that it’ll be just funny stories about celebrity parties, but Life with Oscar is different isn’t it?
There is a sort of perception about shows about Hollywood that it’s all just funny anecdotes and celebrity parties. Real life hustling in Hollywood is very far from that. For most people. It’s desperate. It’s compulsive, it’s something which is very dark and very dangerous to mental health. And something which friends of mine have literally died in Hollywood trying to pursue their dream and I think if I hadn’t escaped, I’m not sure I would be here myself. I mean, I might be in an asylum somewhere. I might just be dead like some of my friends. It is a place that’s littered with forgotten casualties – there’s the famous ones like James Dean, River Phoenix and Heath Ledger but for every famous casualty there are also a thousand unknowns.
Life with Oscar is at the Arcola Theatre from 2nd – 20th April. For tickets and more info go to https://www.arcolatheatre.com/whats-on/life-with-oscar/
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