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“This isn’t what I usually do,” says Denise Gough, gesturing toward a heaving rack of lace-up corsets and prairie skirts.
We’re backstage at the Harold Pinter Theatre on the edge of London’s West End, just a few hours before Gough’s matinee performance of High Noon. The celebrated, two-time Olivier Award-winning Irish actor is known for exercising a raw emotional power in her roles. For a few months back on the London stage, however, she’s embracing something softer.
Based on the 1952 western starring Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper, High Noon’s debut musical stage adaptation follows the same storyline: Sheriff Will Kane (Billy Crudup) is marrying Quaker Amy Fowler (Gough) with a plan to subsequently retire from his duties. Then, news comes that the murderous outlaw Frank Miller, whom Kane helped to put away, is out of prison. The action unfurls in tense, real time as Miller hurtles toward town on the high noon train. The clock hanging over the stage ticks, love is tested, and duty and desire lock horns amidst a smattering of line-dancing sequences and Bruce Springsteen songs.
As the reflective, pacifist Amy, torn between her abhorrence for the violence of men and her love for Kane, Gough brings a rougher-edged, more tenacious spirit to the part than Kelly once did. Still, it felt like a departure for her. “When I first read the script, I was like, no way. She’s a wife! I’m not doing that!” recalls Gough, her Irish accent rollicking through her vowels. But then she did the workshops for High Noon, and she met Crudup (a fellow “theater animal”), “and everything was very heavy in the world.” Getting into the rehearsal room, she began to think: “Here was something nice and gentle. Here’s something that I’m loved in. I sing. It was the right thing for me.” (The day we speak, Gough’s parents are due in to see the show. “They’re just happy they’re going to see me married in a big dress. It won’t happen otherwise!” she laughs.)
Working with director Thea Sharrock, Gough developed the character beyond the era-restricted teenager Kelly played onscreen. “I thought about Amy as at the forefront of feminism—yes, it’s white feminism, but I see her as a nonviolent peace activist quite ahead of her time, questioning the idea that women always have to stand by their men,” Gough says. “The original character wasn’t written to give me a lot as an actor, so I had the opportunity to build her out. Billy very much supported me in that, too.” There was a contemporary relevance to the character and play that resonated with Gough, too: “I think she represents what people have to do all over the world for people that they love.”
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With High Noon, Gough, who sang soprano from the age of eight through drama school, takes on her first major singing role. “I sang at my ex-boyfriend’s father’s funeral at 22, and I didn’t hit the note because I was really emotional,” she recalls. “I just stopped.” Over a month of workshops, however, she found her voice again—one line at a time, her back to the cast. “Doing this play gave me that gift back,” she says.
This theater turn follows Gough’s 2024 reprisal of her volcanic, Olivier Award-winning part as Emma, an actress and struggling addict in Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things, which debuted in 2015 and shot Gough—who herself had been fighting addiction, working as a waitress and close to giving up on acting altogether—to fame. To witness Gough onstage in this portrayal of addiction at its most unnerving, absurd, slippery, and toxic is mesmerizing. It was era-defining the first time and just as sensational (but not sensationalist) the next. She went on to do Angels in America (and nabbed her second Olivier) in the West End and on Broadway, TV work including Disney’s Andor, and movies like Colette. But theater, she says, is her home.
“I’m used to leading,” says Gough, pulling herself cross-legged on her chair. “Having done People, Places & Things, I need a specific kind of character to fill up all the space that it made in my body. But with how the world is hurting, I also wanted some time to come into a beautiful, soft space every day.”
When marches for Palestine began in central London while she was in the theater, Gough’s friends would send photos of her face on the show’s billboard, surrounded by Palestinian and Irish flags. “If I was playing something heavier and still trying to be active in this community, I think my nervous system would be shot,” says Gough. (Even a cursory look at her Instagram makes clear just how vocal she’s been about the war in Gaza.) “It’s important to look after yourself while the world burns.”
“As an artist, I think of Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and people who reflected back to society what was happening. That’s the role of an artist,” she goes on. “Speaking out, I don’t want to lose what I’ve earned, but equally I don’t know how I would sleep at night if I didn’t say anything. How do you not say anything? But loads of people don’t say anything.” During her run, she’s also been doing voice-over work for a documentary about medical workers in Gaza.
All the while, her reverence for the theater has been stronger than ever. If People, Places & Things affirmed anything for Gough, it’s that “theater has the power to change people. I see it every day.”
“People will roll their eyes at that,” she continues, “but I know it because I was on that stage every night. I met the people afterwards, I got letters, I felt it in the room. For me, it is a shamanic experience.” Watching fellow Irish actor Jessie Buckley take what she sees as theater-style craft and skill to the screen with Hamnet has been moving: “I see film and TV work as quite a technical and intellectual experience—that’s worthy, and just as valuable—but Jessie is so possessed by the emotions, and when that meets her craft, it is special.”
The previous evening, Gough had the Irish actors Dearbhla Molloy and Genevieve O'Reilly (Gough’s costar on Andor) in her dressing room. “There is something with Irish women,” Gough reflects, warmly. “We’ve had to deal with so much, and that means we are so hard on ourselves. Try to give an Irish woman a compliment! We’re still working out a lot of shame. We can’t sit in our power yet. I remember someone asking, when I won the Olivier, ‘How does it feel? Does it feel really surreal?’ And what came out of my mouth? ‘No. This is all my work and it’s been a really fucking long time.’”
When Gough first came to England at age 16, she put on an English accent. “My generation are the generation of ‘sorries,’ of not allowing each other to shine, or even working in Ireland,” she says. “I don’t really work in Ireland in the theater. For a long time it felt like you weren’t allowed to be great. There’s a new generation showing that all up.” The Ireland she wants to connect with today is pre-Catholic Church, pro-witches. (Gough says she is a direct descendant of the 16th-century Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley.)
And while the world’s heaviness is front of mind, hope and inspiration spring eternal too. Gough is among the star-studded cast for Greta Gerwig’s “rock and roll” reimagining of the childhood classic Narnia, which will be released in November. “Greta really understands actors,” Gough says. “It’s a rare thing to spend time with women your own age in this industry, and it’s a gift, as you age, to keep having new experiences with people who inspire you.” The kids in Narnia came to the show and presented a roll of toilet paper with her face on it as a gift. “When I work with kids, I want them to stay kids, so we don’t talk about work. We play pranks,” she says.
What will Gough do when she closes High Noon and we await her next high-fantasy turn? “Well, I’d want to keep doing plays, but I also have to pay off my house,” she laughs. But first: “After this, I might go to Peru and do some things you won’t be able to print.”
