The Joy of Rex: Rami Malek and Indira Varma’s Oedipus Has All the Allure of a Must-See

“You know people talk about ‘chemistry’? I think it’s bollocks,” says Indira Varma. Next to her, Rami Malek nods in agreement. “I’m the same way,” he drawls, his voice all American base, thick with vocal fry. “People say, ‘We have to have a chemistry read.’ And I’ll say, ‘Listen,’”—here the actor leans in intently, as is his habit—“‘I’ll make chemistry with anyone.’ It doesn’t require you to decipher that, that’s for us to figure out.”

The pair lock eyes. They may well be right. There does seem to be something instinctive between these two relative strangers sitting in a photo studio on a dank, autumn afternoon deep in west London. Earlier, in front of the photographer’s lens, I watched as the two slipped into their respective characters with ease. The roles in question? That of Oedipus and Jocasta, doomed protagonists of Oedipus Rex, Sophocles’s ancient tragedy, which will open as simply Oedipus at The Old Vic next month in a new production codirected by the theater’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus, and choreographer Hofesh Shechter, adapted by award-winning playwright Ella Hickson.

The on-set energy is crackling away as the actors sit down for their interview in the studio’s brightly lit café. Varma, an Olivier-award-winning powerhouse, originally from Somerset, is synonymous with gold-standard theater. She has done it all: Shakespeare to Shaw; Pinter to Coward. With the straight-backed poise of a dancer, the 51-year-old is wearing a loose blue knit sweater dropping off a shoulder to reveal a strap of white tank, untamed curls continually swept over her head with her hand. Malek—a best-actor Oscar winner, for Bohemian Rhapsody, and presiding Bond villain—is Hollywood incarnate in a close-fitting white T-shirt and black jeans, recumbent in his chair (later, he catches himself quoting Marlon Brando—“Forgive me,” the 43-year-old says, “I’m not that guy”). Both nurse green teas in takeaway cups.

With rehearsals yet to begin, the two have largely been getting to know one another over the phone. “We established a camaraderie almost immediately,” says Malek, as their conversation ricochets from the play to where they studied: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for her; for him the University of Evansville, Indiana. Indira, best known on screen for playing Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones, is warm and at ease; Rami is serious, thoughtful, with a spikiness softened by a face (large pleading eyes, impossibly smooth complexion) that seems to have childlike innocence perpetually etched upon it. In Warchus’s mind, Oedipus sits somewhere between “a rock star and a lost boy.” In Malek, he points out, you get both.

His intensity can be pretty thrilling. “I’m not a math person,” says Malek at one point, “but I say, if you ask 80% of the world what Oedipus is about, I don’t think they would know the exact details.” And so, despite Western society’s foundational tale of fate, religion, and humanity being around 2,500 years old, he asks if we can keep our discussion of its plot “off the record.”

“I don’t want people to go home and do their homework,” the star insists of his London theater debut. Fingers crossed he’ll live with the following summation: Oedipus, the hero who solved the riddle of the Sphinx to win the hand of widowed queen Jocasta to become the king of Thebes, believes he has managed to evade a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. And yet the late king’s murderer remains at large and vengeance on all Thebans looms unless the killer is brought to justice.

Oedipus resolves to do just that, to find the truth no matter the cost. The original story, says Hickson (whose last play was the well-received binaural thriller Anna at the National Theatre in 2019), wrestled with “the unavoidability of fate” mingled with “the horror and comfort” that our destinies are planned and immovable. Her telling will be “more contemporary British drama” than “screaming at the sky,” she tells me, though she is determined to pose the question: “‘Do you believe in the gods? And does it matter if you believe in them, if they’re going to smite you anyway?’”

Warchus has set the production in an unspecified time in an apocalyptic future. Stifle those yawns, though, people—naturally the visionary director won’t leave it at that. Drawing inspiration from great American noir stories—think Raymond Chandler and Chinatown—he’s intent on “light allusion” to his view that Oedipus is “the original detective story.” He calls to tell me, “The central character stands up at the beginning and says, ‘I will solve this crime.’” En route to rehearsals for his interim production, The Old Vic’s returning A Christmas Carol, and known for his blockbuster musicals—Matilda the Musical, Groundhog Day—it’s a pivot that the charming, effervescent Warchus is mining the origins of Western tragedy. Yet he encouraged Hickson to watch future-set dystopian films “that have the detritus and debris of the past in among them”—Brazil, say, or Mad Max—so that “it’s possible to have a futuristic setting in which Oedipus’s crown is a trilby hat from the ’40s.”

In truth, Warchus had more than 30 years to consider his approach. Ideas for his own retelling came after assisting Adrian Noble on the Oedipus trilogy at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991. The unlikely “seed” goes back even further, he says, to Dennis Potter’s seminal The Singing Detective, the 1986 television masterpiece starring a hospital-bound Michael Gambon as a crime writer caught in the altered reality of a debilitating disease. “I was interested in how you could have such a serious story interpolated with singing and dancing,” says Warchus. “And I thought, Well, that is the structure of a Greek play. The choruses originally were sung and danced. It’s a bit like prototype musical theater.”

Enter Tony-nominated choreographer Hofesh Shechter, who will be responsible for electrifying the movement on stage. Renowned for his visceral ultra-contemporary dance that tackles serious subject matter—take his recent From England with Love, a show that delved into the hellish depths of this fractured country—projects like Oedipus, says the Israeli-born, London-living creative, “kick him out of his comfort zone.”

“When you have subjects like death and love,” he continues, “we can learn so much from observing the way bodies move.” For both Varma and Malek, the prospect of working with him was a huge pull. “Before we started this photo shoot, I did say, ‘God, we should have asked Hofesh to come and do some choreography,’” says Varma. “But we both instinctively went down that route ourselves.” She notes how Malek—who has long “adored” Schecter’s work—is so “precise in [his] physicality” and able to “tell stories through [his] body.” “Not everyone does that,” she tells him, admiringly.

Indeed, physical theater was Varma’s introduction to the world she now inhabits. She grew up in Bath (she now lives in London with her actor husband, Colin Tierney, and their teenage daughter), to an Indian father and Swiss mother, both one-time freelance artists, for whom English was not their first language. As such, “Going to watch performances was very much a part of my upbringing,” she says, “but it wasn’t going to see a play. It was mime, or dance, or music.” An only child, she describes herself as “a latchkey kid who spent afternoons at drama classes as a form of childcare. “I was always playing old men or a clown,” she recalls, laughing. “That’s what I was interested in.” As her interest grew and broadened, and a career as an actor looked increasingly possible, her father had a piece of advice: “Don’t do it.” “He had struggled so much as a freelance artist,” she explains. She gets it. “I think if you are not ready to kill yourself a bit, [to] push back again and again and again, then give up now.”

Malek knows something of this struggle. He might be best known on screen—Bohemian Rhapsody and No Time to Die aside, he first became a star for his Emmy award-winning role as a troubled genius computer hacker in 2015 series Mr. Robot—but theater is where he honed his skills. After graduating in 2003, he shared a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with three other aspiring actors, “all just trying to rely on the writers and directors that we knew or we had some association with,” he says.

“I grew up in a suburb of LA to immigrant parents who were, you know—I had to kind of go behind their back to do this,” he continues. It was his high school teacher, Judy Welden, who recognized his talent and encouraged him to pursue acting. “I knew there was something special with this human being and she guided me towards auditioning for these theater departments all over the country.” His Egyptian parents gave him just “one caveat”: “If you want to go into this, you have to get a proper education.” (Today, he can still remember the Scottish professor who taught him First World War poetry.)

A solid raft of off-Broadway credits in the 2000s led to steady film and television work for Malek, before stardom bit. But it’s been 18 years since he was last on stage. The idea of doing a play again had been in the back of his mind for a long time, not least because as a Londoner now—he lives in the capital with his partner, the actor Emma Corrin—“There’s something about being able to go to the Tate or the RA or Barbican, and The National and the BFI, that reminds you of what got you here in the first place. I’ve been working in this country for quite some time and I’ve just quite literally fallen in love with it,” he says. “I feel so at home here, oddly.”

What stopped his stage return until now? “A little bit of fear,” he admits. Plus, he knows how particular he can be. “I can get quite hands-on with the work in all iterations of the production. I’ll be with my partner and they’re like, ‘Leave it. Just take a beat. You don’t have to produce and try to direct everything on your own. Allow things to evolve.’ I mean,” he pauses, smiling, “I consider myself an intuitive person. I collaborate. There’s no greater feeling than a collective feeling of success, or if it’s shit that we feel it together and laugh about it. But if there’s an opportunity to lift something, I leave no stone unturned. And I think sometimes that could be a detriment.”

When it comes to theater, control isn’t always possible. “Ultimately we’ll put it on and there will be people who go, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen,’” says Varma, “and there will be people who say, ‘What a load of rubbish.’ It’s out of our hands. That’s what is so exciting about making and telling stories: the audience members have to bring so much of themselves to fill in those gaps.”

“And Rotten Tomatoes does not do theater,” says Malek, smiling. “Right?”

Oedipus is doubtless a bold, deliciously tempting, high-stakes choice for a West End debut. Aficionados will know it was last performed at The Old Vic in 1968, in a production directed by Peter Brook, adapted by Ted Hughes, and starring John Gielgud. The cast were chained to pillars in the auditorium. In 2008, Ralph Fiennes had a stab at the National. But perhaps most famous of all was Laurence Olivier’s near-mythic turn, performed in repertory as part of The Old Vic company in 1946 (The Old Vic had yet to be rebuilt after it was bombed in the war). It is said those who were present could recall the off-stage screams decades later.

The Vic’s newest lead is far from keen to take a look at the theater’s history books. It turns out Olivier’s is very much a name I should not have brought up. Instantly the intense, thoughtful, kind American is consumed with visible angst. “So the question is, how do I compare myself to Laurence Olivier?” Malek replies, prickling, no hint of a smile. “The answer is: I don’t.”

The mood turns a little, further unhelped when we get talking about the other current production of Oedipus, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, which, by peculiar West End whimsy, has been playing to good reviews at Wyndham’s Theatre since October. The two coming in such quick succession has been the talk of theaterland, though Malek is unaware of the other or perhaps (not unreasonably) has chosen to push it from his mind.

“There’s another production? In London?” he balks. “You know this, Rami,” Varma says, comfortingly. He seems rattled, though. “Well, have you ever had an Oedipus where the choreographer-slash-director has also done the score for the project? That immediately sets [ours] apart. The fact that Matthew is humble enough to share directing credit, then Ella writing it and a woman named Indira Varma and a man named Rami Malek playing Jocasta and Oedipus says it all.” Suddenly he’s on his feet, arm outstretched to shake my hand. “Hopefully someone will look to this and say, ‘How do we make it different to that?’ Good luck.” And he heads out the door.

What keeps millions of us, millennia after millennia, coming back to Sophocles’s story, says Warchus, is that it might be the best, most intricately plotted play ever written. It has “the same unstoppable energy as a great farce, [that] hurtles along at an unbearable kind of rate of awfulness”, he says. “Like a lot of tragedies, it’s a kind of a warning about many things: hubris, narcissism, but also fear,” he continues. “And how knowledge isn’t always a good thing.”

Indeed. Their production has all the allure of a must-see.

Oedipus will be at The Old Vic in London from January 21 to March 29, 2025.

In this story: hair, Chi Wong; makeup, Crystabel Riley. Malek’s grooming: Fay De Bremaeker. Nails: Simone Cummings. Set design: Miguel Bento. Production: Phoebe Asker.