MATTHEW BEARD

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Late last month, the young English actor Matthew Beard planned to celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday in a way perfectly fitting for a newcomer to New York—atop the Empire State Building. He never quite made it, but spent the day instead engaged in an equally iconic—if somewhat more rarefied—Big Apple tradition, performing in his Broadway début, in his case opposite Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy. “I was all depressed about it being my birthday and being twenty-six, and then someone was like, ‘Yeah, you’re on Broadway, it must be the worst birthday ever,’” he laughs. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, what the hell am I talking about?’ I have to remind myself every now and then.”

If the success of his celebrated appearance in Skylight, the new David Hare revival which transferred from London recently to mass acclaim, is an accomplishment still difficult for Beard to come to grips with, it’s also only the latest in a long line of achievements that have all left the soft-spoken performer equally stunned. “A Broadway opening is something I never thought I’d get to do,” he explains. “This is my first-ever play, my first-ever West End production, and then my first-ever Broadway play all at the same time, so I’m just trying to stay calm and not let my heart explode.”

In Skylight, directed by Stephen Daldry, Beard plays Edward, the eighteen-year-old son of Nighy’s Tom, who had a years-long affair with Mulligan’s Kyra several years before the evening on which the play opens. Edward frames the story, as it were, appearing only at the beginning and end, between which Tom and Kyra spend the night debating, bickering, and reconnecting. Beard explains that working with a team knowledgeable about both stage and screen helped immeasurably as he made his first foray into theater. “What’s great is they’re all experienced in theater, but they’re also all experienced in film and television, so they knew where my mind was going to be and what my concerns were going to be and the traps I might fall into,” he says. “All the things you learn on a film set aren’t really helpful anymore at all, so I had to unlearn that and relearn some other things.”

Skylight also happens to mark Beard’s third time working with Mulligan, having appeared alongside her in both his breakout film, When Did You Last See Your Father? from 2007, and her breakout film, 2009’s An Education. “In all these projects I’ve done with her, I’m always the guy who’s completely infatuated or madly in love with her and can’t have her,” he laughs. “She just rejects me all the time. I’m just waiting for the job where Carey Mulligan is obsessed with me, and I have to be like, ‘Carey, please, just understand that someone like you could never be with someone like me,’ but somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen. Oh well.”

Beard’s onscreen and onstage devotion to Mulligan would seem to have carried across somewhat into real life as well, given his backstage pastimes between his two scenes in Skylight. In London, he spent the hundred or so minutes between his appearances each night crafting an origami menagerie for Mulligan. In New York, he’s so far connected a thousand dots to draw the Statue of Liberty and completed a kaleidoscopic watercolor-by-numbers for her. “I had to do something that would occupy my mind but wouldn’t excite me, so I got obsessed with origami because you’re just following very simple steps but it has an end result,” he explains. “I made the mistake very early on of making something during the show and then presenting it to Carey at the end, and then she started getting used to it and it became like a demand, so at the end of a show she’d run up to my dressing room and be like, ‘So, what’ve I got today?’ Basically my job is to keep Carey happy every day.”

Beard’s eagerness to entertain and please appears to have been ingrained in him from a young age, ever since his parents signed him up for a local drama club in Yorkshire, England, at the age of four in an attempt to quell his hyperactive nature. Small appearances in several commercials and British television shows followed until, at the age of seventeen, he was ready to retire from the acting life. “I was with a kid’s agency and I was seventeen so I was like, ‘Probably going to be the end of this,’” he recalls. “I was ready to go to university and get a real job, and I stopped auditioning and I stopped acting, and then my agent called and said a London casting director had come up and was looking for someone to play young Colin Firth in a movie. Opportunities like that don’t come around here very much, so I thought, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ I went and, many recalls later, I got it.”

On the basis of that film, When Did You Last See Your Father?, a tearjerker that also starred Firth and Jim Broadbent as the former’s overbearing father, Beard began to garner attention from the film industry in London, enough to reconsider his life plans. “I couldn’t decide whether to go to university anyway, and I decided I did want to, which wasn’t a popular decision work-wise. When you have some momentum, when you have a film and some ‘hype,’ you’re supposed to cash in on that, but instead I just ran away for three years to go and read books,” he explains. “I had a gap year, and I shot An Education and a few other things, but I just wasn’t ready. I was scared of moving to London, scared of being an adult, scared of calling myself an actor. I was scared of everything. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted or anything. I think I would’ve crumbled under that kind of pressure on myself, so I thought that uni would give me space to try loads of different things, fail lots, and then work out what I like and who I am a bit.”

Beard ended up at York University studying English and French literature, subjects he chose because he knew the least about them. “At school, I mainly did science and maths, and I think [the admissions board] liked the gall of someone who’s just decided that he can go and do a degree in essentially his worst subject,” he laughs. “If I’m ever asked, ‘Should I go to drama school?’ my personal advice would always be to go and study something else completely different from acting—art, English literature, finance, biology—whatever the hell you want to study, but just go and use another bit of your brain before you decide to use one bit of your brain for the rest of your life.”

Beard picked up acting again after graduating because, he says, besides missing the collaborative process of filming, “basically nothing else turned up.” After a few years in various film and television projects, he appeared in two of the most-discussed films to come out in England recently, as a member of the debauched and decadent eponymous private club in the Max Irons-led Riot Club (from An Education director Lone Scherfig) and as the youngest member of Alan Turing’s cryptanalysis team in The Imitation Game. “I was really lucky because I did two films that year, both of which, when I read the scripts, they made me really angry, and I liked that,” Beard says. “I quite like leaving a cinema feeling angry—not because something’s terrible, but because it makes me want to go home and look stuff up and tell people about it and say, ‘Did you know about this?’”

Beard joined the awards circuit supporting The Imitation Game after Skylight’s London run last year, an experience that proved both enlightening and enervating. “I had no idea how many award shows there are,” he laughs. “Being a part of the Imitation Game press train was wonderful because I got to see and do things that I’d never be able to do off my own initiative, but it was strange, because it’s not at all like anything that you think of as being an actor. It’s not part of the job in any way, so it was bizarre to occupy myself with that, and it meant that when I came back to do Skylight here, I was really ready to start working again.”

Now in America, where he recently signed with a Hollywood agency, Beard seems just about ready to come to terms with himself as an “actor.” “Another reason I think I ended up going to university was because it didn’t seem right to just start acting professionally as if that were a thing you could do. I still don’t really feel comfortable with that, to be honest.” he explains. “I still lie all the time if you ask me what I do. I say all sorts of different things, but I never say actor. I’ve not come to terms with being brave enough to say that that’s what I do.”

And in the short term, there’s always another birthday to plan for, and perhaps finally a trip up the Empire State Building. ”Obviously it’s ridiculous, but according to Buzzfeed or whatever, twenty-seven is the best year,” he laughs. “So I still have that to look forward to.”

Skylight runs through June 14 at the Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, New York.