In 2018 I had recently lost my mother, so I was looking for connections with the spirit. The Inheritance allowed me to talk about matters of the heart.
It was the world premiere at the Young Vic in London, so we were making something brand new, which is always thrilling. They’d already done a week’s rehearsal with another actor who had pulled out of what became my role. I stayed up all night reading Matthew López’s script before my audition. It was so gripping. I was nervous of Stephen Daldry going into the audition, as he has an enormous status and he’s very front-footed in the rehearsal room. I like to be in the background and find my way, so his working methods frightened me a little bit. But I put all of that aside to serve this story.
The play was in two parts, played over two nights. So you’re with these characters for a long, long time and we had a lot of time to build the detail. The story follows a group of young gay Americans in a writers’ room, some way after the peak of the Aids crisis. For inspiration, one of the writers calls on his hero, EM Forster, who appears and guides him through the process of telling his story. Howards End becomes the template for the whole play.
Forster, in the process of helping these young writers tell this story, gets to play out a version of his life that he was never able to in his own time. I was playing two characters: the very repressed, closeted Forster and a fearless contemporary American character who is dying of Aids.
After the Young Vic there was a big pause, and then the West End – and then we took it to Broadway the following year. So it was in my body for a long period of time, which is partly why it had such a deep effect on me.
I was 16, bicurious and fluid as the Aids crisis hit. It was a terrifying time and the play allowed me to unearth aspects of myself that I hadn’t really addressed from my earlier years. To be playing Forster felt like a huge responsibility and I owed it to his memory to be as authentic as I could. I totally immersed myself 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 wouldn’t have with a Chekhov or Ibsen. I created that character.
It changed structurally, quite radically. We would present a piece of the script, Stephen would comment and Matthew would go away, rewrite, and we would work on it some more. This was how it worked for the three incarnations of the production. By the time we got to Broadway, Matthew was still shaping it.
At the end of the whole process, he tried to reduce it back to what it had been in the rehearsal room at the Young Vic, after we’d gone on a whole journey from the Young Vic to the Barrymore theatre, which seats more than 1,000 people. That broke my heart. But he has an amazing gift, to reinterpret Forster for young gay men in the 21st century
I always had a belief that theatre could transform people’s lives by affecting hearts and minds, individually. And to be at the centre of this piece felt almost like conducting communion, the closest to church I’ve ever felt in a theatre. You would hear the sobs of people in the audience. It was profound.
• Paul Hilton is in A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic, London, until 10 January
• As told to Lindesay Irvine
