Callum Scott Howells on Cabaret, It’s A Sin and The Beautiful Game

“They have porn star martinis on draught in there!” declares a wide-eyed Callum Scott Howells of legendary drag bar The Glory, the riotous drag hotspot in east London’s Haggerston. (Or Faggerston, as per the high concentration of gays who live there).

Unsurprisingly, there’s no such fabulousness juice on tap (“I’ll bring it back”) in his hometown of Treorchy in Wales (population 7,681), the actor tells Attitude over smoothies in a plush south London members’ bar. (“What’s acai?!” he asks aloud, with pure puppy energy, and a thick Welsh accent we hope he never loses).

The actor is recounting his introduction to London nightlife via his friendship with his co-stars in last year’s rabble-rousing TV hit, It’s a Sin, recently named the second-best Channel 4 TV show ever after Big Brother by the Guardian. “All the guys lived here, and I didn’t; I’d come up randomly from Wales for nights out for the weekend, or even just the night, and crash with them.” 

The Pink Palace WhatsApp chat — Omari Douglas, Lydia West, Years and Years’ star Olly Alexander et al — is still popping. 

“Big time,” replies Callum when Attitude asks if he considers the group his queer family. “We really love each other in real life. Omari and Lydia are like my brother and sister, I speak to them all the time. Olly’s so busy, [which means] I don’t see him as much as I’d like. But I speak to him when I can. We know we’ll all see each other again eventually.”

He’s also in touch with the series’ guest star Neil Patrick Harris (“I saw him when he was in Cardiff filming Doctor Who”) and creator Russell T Davies.

“I adore him. He’s the busiest man, with every show coming out ever, and still he finds time to reply to my random messages! He said after the show: ‘You’re part of the family now.’” He’s something of a father figure to TV talent, I suggest, like Elton John is to musicians. 

Speaking of which, Callum’s joined an esteemed lineage of stars to receive an out-of-the-blue phone call from the Rocket Man himself. (Want our number, Elts?) “We went round his for dinner last December,” Callum recalls. The cast previously reunited for an Elton John AIDS Foundation video calling for government action to end new cases of HIV and Aids in the UK by 2030. “We had cottage pie,” he reminisces. “The best fucking cottage pie I’ve ever had. There was art everywhere, including Picasso sketches. Real ones.”

From A-list encounters to sugary cocktails; from nights out at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the location of his Attitude cover shoot (“It was so fun!”) to take-out pizza three nights in a row the week before (“I felt really guilty about it…”), Callum is living his best 23-year-old London life. It’s cheering to hear about, if weirdly sobering. One can’t help but think of Colin, the fresh-off-the-boat Welshie he played in It’s a Sin, and whose wondrous, pure energy he seemingly imbued with his own, and of all the young men for whom the party was tragically cut short by HIV and Aids. 

“After this hour, I probably won’t speak for the rest of the day,” Callum decrees — he’s a chatterbox, unlike the taciturn Colin — because he’s on voice rest to protect his pipes for his latest role as Master of Ceremonies, or Emcee, in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club at London’s Playhouse Theatre. “I make exceptions; speak a bit on Sundays. My flatmate, bless him, is constantly having to put up with me not speaking. Which is probably also a blessing!”

“I was literally petrified. You go, ‘What’s the blueprint here? Where do I start? Where do I end? What the fuck goes in the middle?!'”

Callum on playing the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret

For what it’s worth, Callum’s take on the Emcee — a slippery figure who presides over the pleasure-seeking, queertastic revelries at the Kit Kat Club in 30s Berlin, a bubble of debauchery waiting to be burst by Nazi Germany — is poles apart from what he’s given us before. He’s escaped a curse that’s afflicted many actors — even Liza Minnelli, who won an Oscar as Cabaret’s lovable sex worker Sally Bowles in the 1972 film — of playing oneself forever, of one-dimensionality. (To be fair, we weren’t mad when Liza did just that in Sex and the City 2, almost-but-not-quite rescuing it from the pop-culture trash heap.)

Callum’s Emcee, meanwhile, is full of dimensions — and contradictions. Funny. Clever. Arch. Eccentric. Strange. Foreboding. Alluring. Sexual. Threatening. Extreme. He’s the epitome of a bad influence. Somewhere between the sociopathic sexiness of Queer As Folk’s Stuart and the magnetic malignancy of Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise in the It movies. It’s one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen on stage. 

“I was literally petrified,” says Callum, a Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama graduate, of crafting the character. “You go, ‘What’s the blueprint here? Where do I start? Where do I end? What the fuck goes in the middle?!'”

If Colin and the Emcee sound like night and day — indeed, the latter would eat the former for breakfast — Callum has even more poles-apart roles coming up. First is a turn as a footballer in the Bill Nighy-starring Netflix movie The Beautiful Game, expected in early 2023. “He’s a reformed heroin addict, on methadone,” says Callum. “He’s playing for England in the Homeless World Cup. But he’s Welsh. That’s a story in itself, as you’ll see in the film.”

To read the full feature, order or download issue 350 of Attitude, out now.

Callum plays the Emcee in the musical Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club until 28 January 2023, for tickets visit kitkat.club, and The Beautiful Game will air on Netflix next year

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