Fresh Face Alex Gaumond Goes Blonde in London's Newest Hit

Age: 31

Hometown: Montreal, Canada

Currently: Winning the heart of Sheridan Smith's buoyant Elle Woods, not to mention the audience, as Emmett, the Harvard graduate and smart yet sexy teaching assistant in Legally Blonde at the Savoy Theatre. The production opened on the West End in early January to arguably better reviews than it received on Broadway, where Gaumond never saw it. Indeed, the performer admits with endearing sheepishness, "I've never actually been to New York."

Size Matters: Why might Legally Blonde against expectation have become a critics' darling in London, where so many Broadway musicals can take a tumble? Gaumond credits leading lady, Smith: "It's absolutely a gift that I was given just to be on stage with her. She gives the same show every single night, full of energy." It helps, too, that the Savoy is smaller by several hundred seats than New York's Palace Theatre. That, says Gaumond, means that director Jerry Mitchell's production "reads really well out front: the theater is slightly more intimate, the people slightly closer. It's a smaller proscenium, too, so that lets people see the details, which is great for us. We can be subtle; we don't have to send [the material] out there."

So Much Better: Gaumond is well aware that this co-starring gig marks his biggest and best career move since graduating from the Guildford School of Acting in 2000. He toured as Rusty Charlie, and understudied Nathan Detroit, in the Michael Grandage staging of Guys and Dolls and spent seven months on the road doing seven shows a week as Galileo in We Will Rock You. Gaumond laughs, recalling the sobriety that went with so particularly raucous a gig: "The funny part was, in order to do this rock 'n' roll musical, I had to live like a monk. I would come home and steam every night and be mute every morning and had to really look after my body." On the West End, he had an "if-you-blinked-you-might-have-missed-it" part in the ill-fated Desperately Seeking Susan, playing the magician who saws co-star Kelly Price in half near the end. (Don't ask.)

Alex Gets An A: Gaumond says that he connects with the hard-working, serious-minded Emmett. "I was a bit of a straight A student, so certainly the whole working part of Emmett is quite close to me. In school, I was—well, not a nerd, but certainly a goody-goody. I worked hard and didn't do drugs as a teenager and I'm afraid I still don't." He laughs. "Boring as it may sound, I haven't changed much in that department. The drug of life: I live on that." Was law school ever an option? "No, I was doing business studies before I decided to change my path." His younger brother, incidentally, is an electrical engineer who lives back in Canada and has three children under five and a fourth on the way. Gaumond says he Skypes his family when he can, but don't look for him on Facebook. "I'm not a social network kind of guy."

Happy Now: Gaumond speaks of being "quite fortunate, because I'm Canadian, that I seem to fall into the castability of American roles [in London] and that whole niche market here"— despite the fact that his first language was French. And he finds a parallel to his own career in his current show. "I believe very much in the message of the show and that thing with Elle that because she is so physically stereotypically one way, they just assume she's a dumb blonde whereas in fact she isn't." As Gaumond sees it, "everybody has the right to succeed, to take the path that they want as long as they put in the hard work: I'm living proof of that. I've done my time in the ensemble and proven my worth that way as opposed to getting leads right out of drama school. There's quite a big parallel to the show, even though we're talking acting as opposed to law school."