Harry Potter's Alfred Enoch is about to take on Theatreland in Red

When he isn’t busy rehearsing for his latest play, or shooting his next TV show, Alfred Enoch likes to let his hair down.

So he and his friends get together at one another’s houses — and perform Shakespeare readings. ‘We read Troilus and Cressida the other day,’ enthuses the 29-year-old. ‘We send an email round saying, “These are the ones that we still haven’t read.”’

So passionate is Enoch about these readings that when he moved to Los Angeles to shoot the blockbuster ABC drama How to Get Away with Murder, in which he starred as legal student Wes Gibbins opposite the Oscar-winner Viola Davis as the formidable professor Annalise Keating, he did them there, too. ‘I do like weird things,’ he grins.

We’re sipping mint tea in a corner of Clerkenwell’s Quality Chop House. Outside, it’s unseasonably dreary, one of those days when the city appears in permanent twilight. But Enoch, wearing a blue Adidas jacket, blue trousers and trainers, is irrepressible, speaking a mile a minute, singing the praises of everything from working with Davis (‘a privilege’) to his latest play, Red, which opens at Wyndham’s Theatre next week: ‘It’s one of those productions you hear about, that you’re aware of.’

Directed by Michael Grandage, the two-hander revolves around what happens when Mark Rothko is commissioned to create a set of murals for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant (it doesn’t go well). Alfred Molina plays Rothko and Enoch his fictional assistant, Ken. It’s the first British revival since Grandage directed the play’s debut at the Donmar in 2009. Back then, Ken was played by Eddie Redmayne. A Broadway transfer followed, along with six Tony Awards.

It also marks Enoch’s arrival as a serious player in West End theatre. Until now he has been best known for his screen work; before HTGAWM, he played Hogwarts pupil Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter films. But he has been steadily racking up smaller stage roles: Edgar in King Lear at the Royal Exchange; Titus Lartius in Josie Rourke’s Coriolanus at the Donmar and Philotus in Nicholas Hytner’s Timon of Athens. Right from the first audition Grandage, says Enoch, ‘was lovely. We worked, do you know what I mean? I felt like I’d got something out of it, aside from the part as it turned out.’

Enoch has been obsessed with acting for as long as he can remember. His Brazilian-born mother, Etheline, was a doctor while his father is the actor William Russell Enoch, aka Doctor Who’s original assistant, Ian Chesterton. ‘I used to watch war movies that my dad had done in the Fifties and Sixties and I was like, “This just seems like fun.”’ But it was his dad’s work for Shakespeare’s Globe that really captured his imagination: ‘The combination of theatre and Elizabethan England was a really fascinating thing.’ When Russell played King Charles VI of France opposite Mark Rylance as Henry V, Enoch painted his room at home in Gospel Oak royal blue in the play’s honour. Aged 10 he landed a speaking role in a National Youth Music Theatre production of The Ballad of Salomon Pavey.

Yet his dream of becoming a professional actor almost didn’t happen. When he was 11 a team of casting directors visited his school, Westminster, to hold auditions for the first Harry Potter film. ‘They cast the net wide. Pretty much everyone auditioned.’ Everyone except him: ‘I thought, “This is unrealistic, it’s not going to happen,” and probably beneath that was some kind of fear that already I knew it was what I wanted to do. So I didn’t want to be told I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t good enough.’ There was another factor, too: ‘I remember thinking, “Are there any black characters in Harry Potter apart from Lee Jordan?”’ In the first film, Jordan is in his third year at Hogwarts — considerably older than Enoch.

Fate intervened. One of the casting directors caught Enoch’s turn in The Ballad of Salomon Pavey. They invited him to audition — and the rest is history. Enoch went on to appear as Dean Thomas in all eight films over the course of 10 years, juggling filming with schoolwork (and, later, a degree in Spanish and Portuguese at Oxford).

How to Get Away with Murder followed in 2014; he won the part after auditioning on Skype. Despite misgivings over whether his skin colour would preclude him from Harry Potter, it was his time filming in the States that really made him reflect on diversity in the industry. Last year he penned a moving article for a national newspaper in the form of a letter to his younger self. ‘It is precisely your identity as an outsider — as a foreigner and a person of colour — that will give you a new perspective on your ethnicity,’ he wrote. ‘You will begin to ask, for the first time, what it is to be black in a predominantly white society.’

What does he make of criticisms that black British actors, among them Daniel Kaluuya and David Oyelowo, appear to need to go to the US to achieve fame? It turns out he has given this a lot of thought. ‘I think there are a couple of things here. Firstly the industry is bigger… there’s a hell of a lot of work out there.’ That aside, he argues that the US’s problematic racial history has created an ‘engagement that impels people to work against it’. Finally: ‘There’s a more evident black history in America… it’s harder to make a film about 19th-century America and not have a single black person.’

The flip side is that there are those in the US — notably Samuel L Jackson — who have criticised black British actors for taking work from Americans. ‘I mean, there are lots of modulations of that question, do you know what I mean?’ says Enoch, thoughtfully. ‘There are lots of ways you could ask that, not just “can a black English actor play a black American?” It gets to a point where actors don’t get to do any acting… Alfred Molina can’t play Rothko. He’s not a Latvian émigré to America. Where do you draw the line?’

Either way, he would like to see more colour-blind casting of classics and period dramas: ‘It’s a responsibility that I think, yes, exists. I think it’s beneficial… There’s the way we appropriate different cultures in a way we’re comfortable with. I don’t know — was there a big outcry about Brad Pitt playing Achilles [in the film Troy]? Don’t think so.’ In contrast, he points to the recent BBC/Netflix miniseries Troy: Fall of a City in which he played the Trojan hero Aeneas: ‘David Gyasi plays Achilles and it’s a certain indication of how far it has to come that there were people on the internet and out in the world that were saying, “A black Achilles?” But no one goes, “A blonde, long-haired Achilles?” It’s extraordinary.’

A former public schoolboy, he is sympathetic to claims that acting has become too posh. ‘I’m immensely grateful that I had all those opportunities. But that’s obviously problematic in a society where some people get easier access to things like that than others. To me that’s self-evidently not right.’ If things are to change, London’s theatre scene needs to be proactive in broadening the economic background of both its actors and audiences: ‘It has to be for everyone. It can’t just be for people like me, who went to Westminster… That’s self-defeating.’ For Red, more than 40,000 tickets will be available for £10 — some 25 per cent. ‘It’s vital. Otherwise people are like, “I’m going to go to the theatre and pay £80?”’

Having moved back from LA after the end of his time on How to Get Away with Murder (his character died in series three), he is single and lives in north-west London. When he’s not doing Shakespeare readings he plays football with friends — or goes to the theatre. ‘It’s a bit of a busman’s holiday, but it’s genuinely something that I just really love,’ he says, almost apologetically. What would be his ideal part, on stage or screen? He looks panicked. Doctor Who, I suggest, thinking of his dad. He considers. ‘I don’t know. I was going to say Henry V.’ Why am I not surprised?

Alfred Enoch appears in ‘Red’ at Wyndham’s Theatre from 4 May to 28 July (delfontmackintosh.co.uk)

Photographs by Dean Chalkley. Styled by Eniola Dare

Sittings Editor Marian Paterson

Shot at L-13 light industrial workshop, Clerkenwell London​