Broadway Star Patrick Page Opens Up About the Emotional Toll of Playing the Villain (Exclusive)

Broadway veteran Patrick Page has an undeniable knack for playing the villain. His devious expressions and rich baritone voice have made him an ideal portrayer of characters like Hades, king of the underworld, in Hadestown; the titular role in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!; the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark; The Lion King's Scar; the vengeful Comte de Guiche in Cyrano de Bergerac; and Brutus in Julius Caesar. But the list goes on. 

Now, the Tony Award nominee is bringing some of William Shakespeare's most renowned villains to life in his one-man show All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain. Beginning Friday at the Daryl Roth Theatre, Page — who also created the show — depicts and explores the complexity of the many characters from the classic works historically categorized as evil.  

Page's latest production is a bit of a full-circle moment, as the actor cut his teeth on Shakespeare, following in the footsteps of his father, who worked as an actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

He consistently found himself drawn to Shakespearean work, so he auditioned for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1984, where he hit his "stride" and spent six summers, he tells The Messenger. This led him to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to regional theaters nationwide and, a decade later, to New York, where he's called home for the last 30 years. 

Musicals weren't part of Page's original plan. He intended to continue immersing himself in Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov until he stumbled upon a gig as a reader — someone who reads part of a script opposite an actor auditioning for a role — for the first national tour of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. To Page's surprise, he was encouraged by the casting team to audition for the role he had been reading for — not Gaston, or even the Beast — but French candelabra Lumiere. 

"I resisted and resisted. I didn't want to, but eventually, I had agreed to audition and jumped through a few hoops, and I was offered that role," Page explains. "So I was playing Lumiere on the first national tour of Beauty and the Beast, which is where I met my wife, [actress] Paige [Davis]. And then we stayed out there on that tour because we were having such a splendid time, for two-and-a-half years."

Page eventually played the part on Broadway, and from there, he moved to another Disney staple: The Lion King. Nearly ten years and a diverse mix of musicals, straight plays and original roles later, Page was sifting through trade magazines to find opportunities for students at his New York acting studio when one specific casting call jumped out at him. 

It was directed by Rachel Chavkin, whose work had stunned Page when he saw her critically acclaimed Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. 

"One of the things that I tried to do with my career is, rather than pointing myself toward bucket-list roles, which people always ask about, I found that it's more useful to point yourself toward bucket-list collaborators, people that you really want to work with," Page explains. "And I had sort of targeted Chavkin."

She was directing a project titled Hadestown, and production was searching to fill the role of Hades with a true bass voice — a role Page not only fits, but one that doesn't come around very often, he says. He listened to a concept album for the production and thought, as he puts it, "I must do this project."

Page was involved with the production from its beginning stages of workshops and experimental labs, when the show only consisted of a song collection based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades and Persephone. 

The production moved to the New York Theatre Workshop, where the team began trying to design a moving narrative around the song cycle, before experimenting in Canada and at London's Olivier Theatre. Eventually, a Broadway production arrived at the Walter Kerr Theatre starring Page in what marked his 15th Broadway show. 

He went on to play the antagonist in the Tony- and Grammy Award-winning musical for the next four years before making the emotional decision to move on from the show he had seen through nearly every stage. 

"I didn't, like Orpheus, look back and think, 'Perhaps otherwise,'" Page says of leaving the role. "I knew that I wanted to move on. I was moving forward toward a project that had a lot of meaning for me. I was playing King Lear in Washington."

He was also looking toward creating and starring in another career milestone with All the Devils Are Here. This was the right time to bring his passion project to fruition, Page says, because of the parallels in Shakespeare's work to the conflict around the world, which he finds could be remedied — or at least more deeply understood — if more people could genuinely and fully experience the work. 

"That's how I feel about this project in a sense, which is really looking at the darkness of human nature and Shakespeare's process over a period of two decades of really discovering the nature of human beings — why we do the things we do," Page says. "And there were two great avenues through which he explored that. One of them was his investigation of evil, which is what I explore in All the Devils Are Here. And the other one was his exploration of the nature of love."

So, how exactly does Page deliver the desired message through Shakespeare's canon in a 90-minute timespan? By both entertaining and communicating with the audience, he guides viewers through the repertoire chronologically. He breaks down, analyzes and makes discoveries not only about the (more than a dozen) characters he portrays, but about Shakespeare's own trajectory grappling with the human experience as he created them. 

"These characters, over the course of 21 years, become more and more human, and dimensional. So I think today we're in the moment where we are once again perilously looking at other people and reducing them to something less complex than they are," Page says. "And the word 'evil' is getting thrown around quite a lot. The word 'evil,' I think, is very frequently a way of not having to grapple with how dimensional someone is and how different they are."

Page, who has been outspoken over the years about his personal challenges surrounding mental health, admits that exploring the darkest parts of human nature in this way is quite strenuous — emotionally, mentally, physically. In this play, he addresses what he thinks was likely a very taxing practice for Shakespeare in bringing these beings to life. 

This is why Page has spent decades honing his ability to maintain his own wellbeing while also delving fully into complex characters — something he doesn't imagine he would be able to do as successfully years ago as he is doing today. In fact, Page reveals that he has had experiences with characters that have drained him to the point of having "a bit of a breakdown" in the past. 

Nothing is guaranteed, Page acknowledges, as this will be the first time he performs the show eight nights a week, but he adds that he feels equipped with the proper mental and communication skills to prevail. For example, he is taking multiple pilates classes each week specifically to release any tension, so he can begin and end every performance with a clean slate. 

"King Lear was a role that demanded that I do nothing else while I was playing it. The whole day had to be given over to Lear, and the day off had to be given over to recovering from Lear," Page recalls of his run with the Shakespeare Theatre Company. 

"And some shows are like that. Other shows you find you can go in, do the show at night, and take it off at the end of the night. Other characters are much more possessive than that, and they say, 'No, the only thing you can do right now is me.' And we'll find out. I think All the Devils Are Here is going to be pretty challenging. But I'm really looking forward to the challenge."