Before we announce the winners of our 2024 Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series.

 

The final performer in our series this year is Artist of the Year nominee Qasim Khan. In 2024, Qasim starred in three very different, very challenging, and highly lauded productions including Coal Mine’s Hedda Gabler and the leading roles in both Canadian Stage’s massive production of The Inheritance and their outdoor Hamlet in High Park. We caught up with him as prepares for the upcoming Shaw Festival season to look back at his incredibly productive 2024.

 

You’ve been super busy since you last did this series (for 2016’s All’s Well That Ends Well). Quick highlight reel?

I think 90 lifetimes and a global health crisis have passed since then, but here’s a recap: in 2017 I joined the company at the Stratford Festival and spent about five seasons there doing things like Paradise Lost, The Neverending Story, The Comedy of Errors, The Miser, Richard III, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, and many others. In 2023 I joined the company at the Shaw Festival, doing The Playboy of the Western World. In 2024 I found myself back in Toronto with The Inheritance, Hedda Gabler, Hamlet, and a few TV projects.

 

Your 2024 was particularly jam-packed. What’s going through your mind when a season like that starts to come together?

The first thing going through my head is “what have I done?” and the second thing is “I can’t wait.” I’m not great at “down time” to begin with, so the schedule took care of that. And I made sure I saw friends and family before everything started because I knew I was about to vanish for a while.

 

Let’s start with The Inheritance. How did you approach tackling such a large project in both a technical and an emotional sense?

The technical aspect of doing two shows at the same time is something I’m used to, because I’ve mainly worked in repertory theatres where we are rehearsing two or three productions at the same time; the gift here was that it was one character, and Eric Glass’s journey grew over two plays. It was daunting, but also I knew we were in very reliable and supportive hands with Brendan [Healy] at the helm.

I knew that the play demanded the whole ensemble to dig in emotionally, and that’s the fun part for me. The emotional journey of the play is so well constructed by Matthew Lopez, and I found that what I needed was to show up open and available, and I couldn’t help but be taken on the ride.

 

That show had a large all-star cast. Tell us about working with your co-stars.

Truly one of my favourite groups of people across the board – cast, creative team, crew alike. The ensemble was a mix of people from different circles of my life: some folks from my time at Soulpepper, some from my time at Stratford, and others who I was connecting with for the first time. There was a lot of comfort and trust and communication between myself, Antoine Yared, and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff because we all knew each other from before. We are all three so different, but there was a kind of spirit that we all shared that I think helped the work. And a total gift to work with greats like Louise Pitre, Jim Mezon, and Daniel MacIvor. MacIvor and I hit it off so well that we’re trying to make some stuff together now.

 

Our ensemble had several generations of queer artists in the mix, and that’s kind of what the piece is about – what’s shared between different generations of gay men (or, queer folk), and what an amazing thing it was to experience everyone’s queerness in anecdotes, conversations on breaks, and as we got to know one another. The Inheritance will go down as one of the most special projects I’ve ever been part of.

 

Then you did Hedda Gabler with Coal Mine. How did the modern approach alter or illuminate Tesman as we traditionally know him?

When Moya [O’Connell, director] and I spoke originally about Tesman, my mission was to find a way to make him less of a goof than he’s generally portrayed as. As we worked, I thought I could lace in an element that Tesman, like Hedda, is also completely unhappy in his marriage – he, however, is trying to make things work. The disparaging things Hedda says to him take a toll, and I tried to find ways to let that show. I think that type of realistic relationship dynamic speaks more to a modern audience than the typical nerdy-guy-who-dotes-on-his-wife thing.

 

Your director Moya O’Connell was herself a terrific Hedda back in the day. What were some of the key insights she brought to the text during rehearsals?

Moya for sure brought her past knowledge of the play into the space, but we were working on a brand new adaption by Liisa Repo-Martell, so the play was inevitably different than the one Moya was part of in the past. I think there were lots of insights shared between Moya and Diana [Bentley, who played Hedda]- and there was an edge to our show because of the edge that Moya has herself as an artist.

 

So then there’s Hamlet. With such a busy winter season and Hedda not closing until June, you must not have had a ton of lead time for such a massive role. How did you work preparations in between everything else you were doing?

Definitely no lead time for anything. I started rehearsals for Hedda during the run of The Inheritance, and then had a two-week break (from rehearsals, but I was doing some writing and auditioning) between Hedda and Hamlet. We luckily had done a couple of script workshops for Hamlet over the course of the year, so I had a very clear sense of Jessica Carmichael’s angle for the production. And because I had virtually no time to prepare before, I hadn’t made decisions of my own outside of rehearsal, so I was coming to Hamlet very open and totally ready to play and discover our version of the play.

 

The text for your High Park production was not just edited down for time (including the elimination of some of the play’s most famous lines) but also bulked up with text from other sources. How did these changes affect how you saw the role?

I get really excited by artists wanting to carve out their own version of these ancient plays. In the case of Hamlet, Jessica noted that Shakespeare invites collaboration right in the text: While talking about the Murder of Gonzago (the play within the play), Hamlet asks the Players if they could “…study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I (Hamlet) would set down and insert in’t could you not?” And so she rolled with that.

 

The additions about grief that were added in to the script allowed audiences that were unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s text a connection to the overriding theme of loss, and then also re-illuminated parts of the emotional story for those that have encountered the play before.

 

I think if, as a culture, we are dead-set on continuing to do Shakespeare’s plays, and other very old pieces of text, it’s our responsibility to have a point of view on them, and find ways for them to resonate with new audiences.

 

Not to ask the standard Hamlet question but- considering the role’s inescapable legacy, how did you approach making it your own?

My access point in to Hamlet was something I have in common with the guy. My father died when I was very young, and the family situation around his death was complicated – to keep it short. In the play, Hamlet’s father has died, and the family situation around his father’s death is complicated, to say the least. So my goal was to tell that story – how does grief and loss affect a person, the world around them, and the people that they trust? When you look around and cannot trust those that are closest to you, how do you cope?

 

I tried to look at the Hamlet tropes – melancholic, seemingly unhinged, violent – and discover what was fuelling those traits and playing that, versus relying on those traits to dictate the storytelling. I spent time asking myself “what is Hamlet in response to?” – what is prompting “to be or not to be” and “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I?”, what prompts the violent scene with his mother?

 

Hamlet is a character who is stuck inside of a very destabilizing situation and he’s finding the will and desire to understand, to fight against, to cope with, and ultimately to accept the terrible fate he has been presented. This is totally human to me, and more interesting than “how is Qasim Khan going to deliver these famous monologues?”

 

And, as you say, there is no reinventing the wheel with a character that’s as well known as Hamlet – so for my own sake and sanity, I steered clear of watching other versions, or spending too much time measuring against the thousands of Hamlets that have come before. That would be a recipe for driving myself crazy!

 

The production had some of the most intense and fast-paced fights we’ve ever seen. Tell us about the process of developing those and executing them on the outdoor stage.

Well, we had an incredible fight director in Anita Nittoly, who is someone I’ve worked with a ton over the years, and I think the best fight director in the business. Anita has a way of making everyone feel incredibly powerful, capable, and is totally collaborative. We knew there would be a fencing match at the end, and so we started building that in the first week of rehearsal. That gave us so much time to repeat, learn, and fill the technical choreography.

 

When we moved out of the rehearsal hall to the stage at High Park, we were reminded that we are indeed outside, and the wind will blow leaves, and dirt on to the deck, and so both Dan Mousseau (Laertes) and I would clock if something on deck would make us slip or not, and find subtle ways to sweep away debris before the fight.

 

There was a day that I was CONVINCED there was a snake on stage right before the fight; under the dark sky and shadowy stage lights, it looked like this thing was a couple of feet long. I can’t deal with a mouse let alone a snake, but I remember thinking “okay Qasim, you have to deal with the snake, and you have to do it gracefully, confidently, and then we have to fight – there are 1,000 people watching you – don’t mess this up.” So I marched up to the thing I thought was a snake and tried to slide it away with my foot – it wouldn’t move. I ended up sliding it on to my shoe and then as I tried to shake it off, it flung into the grass right in front of the audience. It wasn’t moving because it was a small slug that had suctioned itself to the stage – no snake. But the slug survived, so did we, and I felt like a hero.

 

What are some of your favourite memories from your theatre work in 2024?
The impact that The Inheritance made on audiences blew my mind – a full year later, I still have people stopping me on the street to talk about it, and that’s something I’ve never experienced before.

 
The list of artists I got to work with last year is wild to me: I look at the circle of people around me and it’s a dream come true.

 

And truly, getting to work at home in the city was my favourite. I’ve spent so much time away from Toronto, and 2024 was a gift because I got to do three powerful pieces and sleep in my own bed!

 

What are you working on now/next? Anything to plug?
Right now I’m in rehearsals for Gnit (Will Eno’s adaptation of Peer Gynt) and Tons of Money at the Shaw Festival, and both shows will run this summer (check out shawfest.com for tickets and info), and later this spring, a couple of TV projects I shot in the fall will be released: Underbelly on Crave, and a web series called Dying Seconds. Daniel MacIvor and I will start work on a piece we are writing and you may hear more about that soon. In June I’ll make an appearance at Luminato, and I’ll be able to share more about that soon!

 

Is there anything you’d like to add?
Thank you for this incredible nomination! I feel lucky to have a job, let alone be recognized with something like Artist of the Year. I really appreciate it.