Operation Mincemeat's Jak Malone: How a Fan Artist Wound up at Sardi's Sipping Martinis with Patti LuPone

Age: 31

Hometown: The Wirral in Merseyside, England

Current Role: Jak Malone plays a variety of characters in Operation Mincemeat, most notably Hester Leggett, a fastidious MI5 staff member and the unsung hero of the title World War II deception operation.

Credits: Malone studied acting at the Liverpool Institute For Performing Arts, graduating in 2018. He's been with Operation Mincemeat, an original musical from the comedy troupe SpitLip, since its world premiere in 2019. In 2024, he won the Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical.

*Photos shot at Haswell Green's

The Play’s the Thing
Jak Malone—donning an intergalactic knit set, suns and moons with flirty red lips and mascaraed lashes—describes a classic working-class English upbringing. He’s the second-born of seven children that span several marriages and wide age gaps. His mother was a nurse while his father worked at a Unilever soap factory. “We didn’t have a lot growing up, but my mum was very creative,” he says. “Everything was a game. Everything was a reason to make up a funny voice or play together.” But, he says, “I was quite naughty.” His sober tone implies more than a contritely reformed Dennis the Menace. He reiterates, “I was so terrible as a small child.” Like a herald of the imminent Supernanny empire, a child psychologist moved in to observe Malone’s behavior and advise his desperate mother. But it was ultimately his paternal grandmother who cracked the case. She told his mother, “I think he is very creative and very frustrated and you should find a drama group for him to go to.” As Malone remembers, “They enrolled me in a drama group called Starlight Youth Theatre, and it was a one-eighty. I was the nicest kid in the world.”

Play Days
While a young Malone was enjoying star turns in youth productions of The Buddy Holly Story and learning the Wicked cast album by heart (“Everyone was just obsessed, painting themselves green"), he had the advantage of a grandmother (the one that diagnosed his incurable imagination) who worked as a dresser at a nearby theater. The first show he saw there was Playdays Live, a stage version of a popular BBC children's program. (“It finished and my nan came to the seat to collect me and I asked her if she could rewind it for me.”) His reign of terror at home, meanwhile, dissolved into a heap of dressing gowns and eccentric hats: “Dressing up was a huge thing for me. If I saw a film I liked, I'd go around the house and I'd cobble together something that, by the end, probably wouldn't resemble it at all, but at least I had the feeling of that character." He adds, “A scarf can be a cape when you're small.” Prescriptive creativity at school, however, was less appealing. “I remember when I did art, they put a shoe on the table and said, ‘We want you to paint this shoe.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to paint that shoe.'” He would have preferred a monster or gothic horror tableau. “But all in all, I had a lot of allowances made for me,” he says. “The head of the drama department and the head of the PE department were married, so that meant every time we had PE, I got to go and sit in the drama department and read plays. I still got my grade in PE despite having never done it.”

On the Fringe
Acting, says Malone, “was the only thing that when I did it, I would stand out.” Drama school, then, became “the only decision.” He ended up at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, 20 minutes away from his hometown so he could be close to his young sisters. (“I have the same guilt about the babies now,” he says of his latest pair of young sisters, a seven- and five-year-old who are obsessed with his character Hester's big song “Dear Bill” and once sang it for passing travelers at an airport in Dubai.) It was nearing the end of the school year when a teacher told the cohort how to spend their summer vacations: “Try and find something to point at and say, ‘That is what I want to do.’” Malone found it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: “The guys from SpitLip, who were working under another company called Kill the Beast, were doing these horror-comedy plays that spoke to me on a cellular level,” he remembers. “I was able to point at it and say, ‘That is exactly it. They’ve nailed it.’” He left determined: “I want in.”

Starships Were Meant to Fly
Kill the Beast’s five members were university chums Ollie Jones, Clem Garritty, David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts (the latter three, with Felix Hagan, would splinter off into SpitLip in 2017). Malone got to work on infiltrating the tight-knit group. “I made myself known on social media,” he says. Then he started making fan art—posters inspired by the ‘70s and ‘80s horror films their work drew from. (“They have since told me that they were very annoyed because all of the posters I made were much better than the ones they'd ever used.”) When the newly formed SpitLip announced they were making a musical, Malone insisted on being in it. “I promise you,” he told them, “if you let me be in it, it'll be great.” They acquiesced: “They were worried that I would be weird,” Malone says, now very familiar with their side of the story. “But they were like, ‘Let's let him audition. It'll be nice for him.’” He came in and sang “Born to Lead” from Operation Mincemeat and rapped a verse of Nicki Minaj’s “Starships” in a variety of characters (angry Scottish sailor, sexy female lounge singer, etc.) “I left the room and Tash said, ‘He's clearly better than any of us, so we better let him be in the show.’”

Mincefluencers
Malone joined the world premiere of Operation Mincemeat in summer 2019 at the New Diorama Theatre, and moved to London that winter for its second run at Southwark Playhouse. “We were seeing people were so excited—people were coming back. And then from there, it snowballed.” Bringing friends to the show became part of the event. And not just one friend. Ten friends. “They realized that by bringing people they were influencing—and then by influencing, they were mincefluencing. By the time we got to the West End, there was already a Discord server where they all live and communicate.” The Mincefluencers make their own merch, which Malone loves: “I can often be found wearing a t-shirt with my own face on it." He ran a fan art competition for them called Hester’s Drawing Club (he recused himself as judge because choosing was too painful). Twenty of them even flew to New York just for the show’s first Broadway preview, the ones already living here offering up couches and spare rooms. “They just spread the word—either in a really positive way or a really relentless way where people are like ‘Fine, I'll see it! Please stop!’ It was just resoundingly, Get that show to Broadway and get the original cast in it.” After the transfer was announced, the company was flown to New York for four days at the end of October 2024. Within those four days, Malone was having martinis with Patti LuPone at Sardi’s—her treat. The Broadway dream had already come true. “And I hadn't even started the job.”

Jasmine and Dracula and Nanny Joan
If you watch the video of Jak Malone winning the 2024 Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical, you’ll see his mouth wrap around a profanity as he crawls over castmates and loved ones. Everyone else in his category was seated with easy access to an aisle while he was buried several rows back and five seats deep. It was surely the seat of a loser. “I was miserable for the whole ceremony,” he says. “When I did win, the shock was so real.” He thanked Jasmine—his partner of nearly eight years who he first wooed working front of house at the same theater that mesmerized him with Playdays Live (Jasmine was alone working the bar on an overwhelming day and Malone swooped in on his day off to help her work the till: “She said it's the sexiest thing anyone's ever done.”) He also thanked his “really handsome dog Dracula” (he’s shocked the conversation hasn't yet veered to the Italian Greyhound, but to learn more about Dracula, follow him on Instagram). The biggest thank you, however, went to Nanny Joan—his late maternal grandmother who he calls “the president of my fan club” and who lives in Hester's officious but soft-hearted DNA. “Even when I had those troubled years as a little kid, I think she was the person who had the most patience and understanding. Without her steadfast support and her pride, I don't know whether I would've been so eager to stick it out.” You could say…she was the original Mincefluencer.