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“If Christopher Marlowe were alive today, he would’ve painted the town red. What a bad bitch!” howls Ncuti Gatwa.
He’s speaking via phone from London, describing the Elizabethan playwright and scoundrel, known as much for plays like Doctor Faustus as for his libertine exploits. (He is believed to have been stabbed to death in a bar fight at just 29 years old while facing charges of “heresy.”)
Gatwa, the 32-year-old Rwandan-Scottish actor of Sex Education and Dr. Who fame, is currently donning Marlowe’s rakish leather doublet and cunning grin in the fiery West End two-hander Born With Teeth, opposite Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare, Marlowe’s imagined rival, collaborator, and—in the very hypothetical world of the play—lusty sparring partner.
“The rivalry they feel towards one another and the admiration they feel and how that affects their artistry—it was a juicy subject matter to get into,” Gatwa says.
The play, written by Liz Duffy Adams and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, centers on a snappy series of (fictitious) meetings between Marlowe and Shakespeare as they collaborate on the latter’s Henry VI history plays from 1591 to 1593. Though there is no historical proof that they wrote together—or even that they were acquaintances—both were working at the same time in the treacherous political cauldron of Elizabethan London.
“England had gone from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant rule, and during Catholic rule, Protestants are hunted; during Protestant rule, Catholics. Everyone is just terrified of each other, terrified to reveal themselves,” says Gatwa of the historical context of the piece. In the story, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, a known spy for the Protestant deputies of Queen Elizabeth I, is paired up with Shakespeare, who is suspected of having papist leanings.
Add to that a bubbling layer of sexual tension between the two men, one that feels, to Gatwa, in keeping with the queerness alive in Marlowe’s texts.
“Me and Ed, we were very keen to just make it as hot as possible,” he says. Studying the work of Elizabethan historian Will Tosh in preparation, Gatwa “discovered how unapologetically queer Kit Marlowe was and indeed Shakespeare. I found out that the pair of them would write into their work same-sex pronouns. They wouldn’t hide their queerness.” He likens their tête-à-tête to that between a leopard (Marlowe) and a house cat (Shakespeare), and over the show’s brisk, 90-minute runtime, their taut repartee rarely slacks—a credit to director Daniel Evans.
Going into the production, Gatwa had a passing knowledge of Marlowe from his drama training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a staging of Shakespeare in Love—which features Marlowe as a character—that he appeared in early in his career. (After arriving in Scotland with his family from Rwanda at two years old, he caught the acting bug while at school in Fife, and has never looked back.) On the heels of his departure from his history-making turn as the first Black actor to play Dr. Who last spring, he was immediately drawn to the idea of Adams’s conception of Kit. “I thought, I have to play this role. I was taken by this notion there was an iconic queer artist of the Elizabethan era whose work and legacy have been hidden a bit, and it’d be cool to engage with that. Not resurrect it, but give it a new life.”
Beyond the West End, Gatwa has a raft of projects coming down the pike. The Roses, a romantic comedy starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, opened last week, in which Gatwa plays Colman’s “slutty head gay waiter called Jeffrey.” He also just wrapped filming The Queen of Fashion, about the iconoclastic fashion editor Isabella Blow, in Wales; Gatwa plays Blow’s mentor and Tatler boss, Michael Roberts.
Variously a critic, photographer, fashion editor, and illustrator during his peripatetic career, Roberts died in 2023. “What an incredible man he was, and how brilliant for a man of color to be working in high fashion at the time,” Gatwa remarks. He closely studied a video on Vogue’s website to absorb Roberts’s mannerisms for the film: “He had that unemotional but incredibly witty British thing that was so fun to try and capture.”
Gatwa’s own relationship to fashion has deepened as his star has risen. Working with the stylist Felicity Kay, whom he met during his time on Sex Education, he describes his approach to dressing as “classic with a kink.” For last May’s Met Gala, he went with a patterned purple suit by Ozwald Boateng and had a “kinky Elizabethan” look planned for the Teeth opening.
“I’m quite an emotional person, and so I will message Felicity just how I’m feeling that day and she’ll work around that—say, ‘I want to feel like Beyoncé’s alien superstar-meets-Tom of Finland. Can you make me look like that?’ And she somehow will.”
To decompress between shows, the actor finds solace in an unlikely place: birdsong. (Well, that and his go-to smoothie of spinach, green powder, marine collagen, chia seeds, banana, blueberries, peanut butter, protein powder, oats, and oat milk: “I started pimping my protein shakes and actually I’ve noticed the gains, and I’m not mad at it!”)
“I have a lot of anxiety and ADHD, so I needed something to drown that out. I discovered that birdsong, scientifically, will calm down your nervous system. Humans know that wherever there are birds, there are no predators. So in an evolutionary sense, we know that we’re safe,” he says with a self-aware chuckle. “So I listen to birdsong and FKA Twigs’s Eusexua, on repeat of course!”