The dashing British actor thinks pink in The Pride.
By Adam Feldman

(Time Out New York) For an actor frequently described as “dreamy,” Hugh Dancy seems surprisingly well-grounded. In the past few years, Dancy’s star has been rising both in his native England and in the U.S.—an ascent that has not been impeded by the sharpness of his cheekbones or the softness of his sea-gray eyes. But it is his sensitive turns in such plays as 2008’s Journey’s End and such films as 2009’s Adam and that have really sealed the deal. This month, Dancy—who married fellow actor Claire Danes in September—opens in the American premiere of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, directed by Joe Mantello for MCC Theater.

Did your agent raise any concerns about your taking three months off to do an Off Broadway play on gay themes?
If those thoughts ever arose, I’m grateful that they weren’t expressed to me. I was sent the play by MCC in June, and I thought it was one of the best new pieces of writing I’d read or seen onstage in a long time. January through March is a relatively short commitment. And theater is something I enjoy; it’s something you come away from a little richer, in every sense other than the literal.

Your father, Jonathan Dancy, is a well-known moral philosopher. Was there ever any pressure to go into the family business?
No, not at all. I don’t think—I’m trying to think of a polite way to put it—I don’t think he would have considered the effort worthwhile.

How do you think that growing up with a philosopher shaped you?
My dad encouraged us to ask questions of ourselves and our assumptions. One of the things I enjoy about theater is the experience you get in rehearsal: to sit with a play and beat it until the blood comes out of it, and figure out what the hell it’s about. You have to have that curiosity, and I guess in some ways that was instilled by my parents. Unfortunately, in film that’s not a given. You film everything out of order, and you haven’t often had a chance to bounce your ideas off other people. We’re none of us so good that in solitude we figure everything out.

The action of The Pride alternates between two time periods, right?
Yeah, it takes place in 1958 and 2008. There are three characters, Philip, Sylvia and Oliver—I play Philip—whom you see in ’58 and then you see again in ’08, played by the same actors. They’re different incarnations of the same people, with different dynamics between them, but in each era it’s a triangle of sorts.

So the ’08 Philip is openly gay, but the ’50s Philip is in the closet?
I don’t think of him as a closeted gay man. He thinks it’s a perversion, it’s criminal, it’s a sickness; he truly can’t conceive of the notion that it’s part of who he is. And being in denial is not the same as being in the closet. Truly, truly not. Somebody who has built up an incredibly complicated series of defenses around his whole psyche to prevent even himself from looking at it—that’s catnip for an actor.

The closet is being dismantled in a lot of places these days, but it is still in force for many actors.
It still seems to overwhelm people’s sense of the rest of your identity. If an actor is gay, then they are a “gay actor.” It’s not like being a blond actor or a very short actor—those things can be dealt with in people’s imaginations. And there is this strange cultural obsession, this eagerness to unmask people.

You have had to deal with a few such rumors yourself.
You could spend your whole life just trying to clear up other people’s perceptions of you, but it would be a great big waste of time. I just can’t bring myself to care very much. It’s a kind of self-preservation: You cannot hope to control what other people think or say about you.

Outing used to be largely about conservatives going after supposed subversives; now it’s often gay people calling out people who they feel are not being subversive enough.
Yes: that they’re hiding, that they’re sacrificing the greater good for the sake of their careers. It’s a subject that people are incredibly passionate about. But when I read this play, that’s not what grabbed me about it; it’s all there, but I didn’t think, Oh, fantastic. It’ll be so interesting to get into sexual politics. I just thought that this one man—and the construct and lies that he’s created for himself—would be very rewarding to examine. Maybe some people will feel we’re not making the right argument on behalf of gay rights or whatever. But I’d like to think we’ve all got beyond that.

The Pride is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.