The actors are accompanied onstage by a live band that includes Scottish singer Eddi Reader and legendary British pedal steel player B.J. “There is something classic about the dynamic, and the stakes.” “Of course it’s not ancient Greek theater, but there’s something deeply fundamental about it, about these two characters, about the way in which they need each other and can’t ultimately be together,” Hedges said. Hedges said the director had compared the show to the last production to run at Soho Place, Euripides’ Greek tragedy “Medea.” It covers two decades in 90 minutes, as the pair struggle to convert their passion into something sustainable and sustaining. So the duality exists within all of us and part of our job is to just find those parts and bring them to the surface and make them the most accessible as possible.”Īshley Robinson’s script aims to match the gut-wrenching economy of Proulx’s 35-page story. We’re all Ennises and we’re all Jacks, in our way. “I think all of us in general have both of them.

“It’s because he sees those qualities in us,” he said. But he said the actors trusted that director Jonathan Butterell had cast them for a reason.

“It’s constantly a process of feeling like I’ve discovered the character and then losing the character and then finding it again,” Hedges told the Associated Press. Still, Hedges admitted he was “pretty nervous” before opening night.

Hedges got an Oscar nomination for playing a bereaved teenager in 2016 drama “Manchester by the Sea,” and Faist is a Tony Award nominee for “Dear Evan Hansen” and made a splash as gang leader Riff in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” Proulx’s tale of homophobia on the range, first published in 1997, reached a huge global audience through Ang Lee’s Academy Award-winning 2005 film, which cemented the stardom of Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger.Ī new stage version at London’s Soho Place theater, stars Hedges as taciturn ranch hand Ennis Del Mar and Faist as livewire cowboy Jack Twist, who fall passionately in love during a 1960s summer on an isolated mountainside.īoth are already acclaimed young actors.

The stars we steal