Andrew Knott on Bringing Beatle John Lennon to Life in London's Backbeat

Andrew Knott was scarcely into his teens when the actor, 32 next month, appeared as Dickon in the 1993 screen retelling of The Secret Garden, starring Maggie Smith. Nearly two decades later, the amiable actor has had two daughters, gone to Broadway with Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, and is now playing John Lennon under David Leveaux’s direction in Backbeat, the West End stage adaptation of the 1994 Iain Softley film, at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Broadway.com caught up with Knott to find out what it’s like playing Lennon.

How long have you been with this project?
I’m the only one who’s been with it from the very first reading, well before we did it in Glasgow [early last year, in a separate staging directed by Softley]. I was asked to do a rehearsed reading based on the film in front of a bunch of money and industry people to try and generate some interest. I knew it had gone well, but I don’t think they knew what they were going to do with it. It was five months later that they got in touch and said they’d love to offer me the job of John Lennon and that we were going to go to Glasgow with a view toward it transferring into town— which over a year on, it now has.

Did you think you’re a natural fit for playing Lennon?
It excited me more than it daunted me. Lennon is somebody I do feel I have had a big attachment to: the Beatles were big in our house, growing up in Manchester, and I had his posters on my walls. But it’s brilliant what you can now do as an actor! Whereas before I would have had to take 40 buses to read a passage in a book in the library, you can now sit and do massive amounts of research on YouTube—though what you then hope to do is leave all the research behind and start to play the truth of the script.

What’s the challenge for you in trying to tell this story as well as perform from The Beatles catalogue?
What’s interesting for us with this is that you have to be part actor and part musician, so you divide yourself between telling this strong story [of the Beatles’ early days in Liverpool, Hamburg, and London between 1960-63] and then being a musician in a band playing 15 songs or more. The great thing in London is that we have David Leveaux, who has directed incredibly huge successful musicals and incredibly huge successful plays, and those are the two worlds you need to marry in order to make this work.

Yes, especially since Backbeat isn’t a jukebox musical as we have come to understand them.
And it’s not a tribute show: it’s not an evening where you’re going to come along and sit back in your seat and expect just to hear Beatles songs one after the other without any care or attention paid to the story. At its core, this is a hard-hitting and moving factual drama about five boys who left Liverpool and went to Hamburg and became the biggest rock 'n' roll band in the world. Nobody knows how that brilliance came about and what they had to go through to get there; that’s the story we’re telling you.

Your History Boys co-star Dominic Cooper was in the audience on opening night.
We all got on very well and we get on well now. [Tony nominee] Sam [Barnett] is coming next week with Nick [Hytner, Tony-winning director] and Frankie de la Tour [Tony-winning actress] and James [Corden] has said he’s going to come. But what’s lovely is that we all had at the ages of 25 or 26 something that may never happen to any of us again, in terms of a play that we took around the world and literally everywhere we played, it was a success. The loveliest keepsake was getting to do the movie, as well. That was Nick and Alan [Bennett]’s loyalty to everyone involved.

But you found your own degree of fame at an even younger age, with a prominent role in a major Hollywood film.
I know, but when you’re 12, you certainly don’t know what any of that is, and I couldn’t have been less affected coming from a family where nobody was or is in the entertainment industry. People couldn’t give a shit about who I had spent the day on set with. It was, like, “Yeah, excellent, now go tidy you’re room!” [Laughs.] My father was a lorry [truck] driver who worked his way up and we were a regular working-class family, which is a great foundation to have and to come from. It kept me completely level-headed.

What about your own daughters: are they entertainment industry-bound?
They’re only three and one, so not at the moment! Of course, I’d love for them to lead a life that is creative, which, if you can manage to get paid for it, is a beautiful existence. But the first thing I can do for my girls is give them a normal upbringing: I owe them that. Not everybody gets that but everyone deserves it.