Kieran McGinn on the struggles of West End actors

In dressing room 37 of London’s Shaftesbury Theatre sits a handsome young man in front of a light bulb-framed mirror, legs elegantly crossed, neatly lining up his make-up brushes in size order. Kieran McGinn is an understudy in the hit West End musical Motown. “It’s a terrifyingly white industry, to the point where we celebrate every day we come in,” he says.

Although he’s played Genie in Aladdin and Curtis in Save the last dance, the Londoner’s Caribbean-Irish complexion often means he misses out on roles, “because I’m not clearly white or clearly black,” he says. For most of the cast, this is the first time they haven’t been up for a role based on the colour of their skin. “In auditions, I would usually be lined up with all white guys or black guys and I’d never get the role,” he explains. Which is why he also paints, edits and writes. “You’ll find that if you speak to any actor, they do a multitude of things. Talent is sort of an assumption. Luck, coincidence and knowing the right people is usually how you get the job.”

Kieran, who studied Musical Theatre at Guilford School of Acting, does eight shows a week with one day off. If he’s tired he just has to get on with it. “If you don’t do it, someone else will,” he says. Musical acting is a mentally and physically draining job, and there are lots of things that the theatre goer doesn’t see, such as constant injuries. But it’s all about pretending, he says. “You don’t go to Disney Land to see the guy behind Mickey Mouse sweating and eating on his lunch break. You want to see the illusion.”

It seems as if Kieran is in disguise in his time off, too. He always wears a hat and sunglasses. “Ever since I was a kid and I got my first pair of sunglasses, my mother would have to come into my bed at night and take them off,” he laughs. “I try to take them off on the tube, I wouldn’t want a girl to think, ‘God, is he staring at my boobs?’”

He’s equally concerned about the fact that the most powerful figures in theatre are mostly white men. He can’t understand why Elle Woods, the protagonist of ‘Legally Blonde’ who gets into Harvard University to study law, isn’t ever played by a black woman. “They’ll cast a brunette and give her a blonde wig. So why can’t they cast a black girl and give her a blonde wig?”

We talk about Harvey Weinstein and sexual harassment in theatre. “Yes, it does happen. Here you are constantly seeing naked bodies because you always get changed next to someone. It’s very hard to know where the line is,” he says. Perhaps he’s suggesting that if everyone is so close, when someone takes advantage, it’s hard to notice. “Possibly. I know that there are problems that women have to go through in this industry that I can’t even fathom,” he says. And on that note, he gets up, puts his sunglasses on and leaves for his physiotherapy session.