The play that changed my life: ‘It was scary at first but the inheritance made me discover myself’ | Young Vic

In 2018 I had recently lost my mother, so I was searching for connection with spirit. Inheritance allowed me to speak about matters of the heart.

It was a world premiere at the Young Vic in London, so we were creating something completely new, which is always exciting. They actually rehearsed for a week with another actor who dropped out of what became my role. I stayed up all night reading Matthew Lopez’s script before the audition. It was so gripping. I was nervous about Stephen Daldry coming into the audition, as he has a huge stature and is very advanced in the training room. I like to be in the background and find my way, so his working methods scared me a little. But I put all that aside in service of this story.

The play was in two parts, performed over two nights. I’ve been with these characters for a very long time and we’ve had a lot of time to build up the details. The story follows a group of young gay Americans in a writers’ room, some time after the height of the AIDS crisis. For inspiration, a writer calls on his hero, E.M. Forster, who appears and guides him through the process of telling his story. Howards End becomes the model for the entire play.

Forster, in the process of helping these young writers tell this story, gets a version of his life that he was unable to do in his time. I was playing two characters: the repressed and very closed-off Forster, and the fearless contemporary American who is dying of AIDS.

After “Young Vic” there was a big hiatus, then “West End” – and then we took it to Broadway the following year. So it stayed in my body for a long period of time, which is partly why it had such a profound effect on me.

I was 16 years old, moody and moody when the AIDS crisis hit. It was a terrifying time and the play allowed me to reveal aspects of myself that I hadn’t really addressed since my earlier years. Playing Forster was a huge responsibility and I owe it to his memory to be as authentic as possible. I was completely immersed in his world, read everything he wrote and carried that character for a long time. I felt ownership of that play in a way I never would have felt with Chekhov or Ibsen. I created that character.

It has changed structurally, quite radically. We would submit a piece of script, Stephen would comment on it, Matthew would go away, rewrite it, and we would work on it some more. This was how the three incarnations of the production worked. By the time we got to Broadway, Matthew was still shaping it.

At the end of the whole process, he tried to pare it back down to what it was in the rehearsal room at the Young Vic, after we’d gone the whole way from the Young Vic to the Barrymore Theatre, which seats over 1,000 people. This broke my heart. But he has an amazing talent, which is Forster’s reinterpretation for 21st-century gay youth

I have always had the belief that theater can change people’s lives by touching individual hearts and minds. Being at the center of this piece was like conducting a communion, the closest thing to a church I have ever felt in a theater. You will hear the sighs of people in the audience. It was deep.

Paul Hilton will perform in A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic, London, until 10 January