‘I loved Will & Grace, but I was looking for a way out’

Sean Hayes has traded sitcom for a Tony-winning turn in ‘Good Night, Oscar’. He tells Annabel Nugent about playing a troubled pianist and the pitfalls of being in a hit TV show

- Annabel Nugent

Within seconds of meeting Sean Hayes, I realise I’ve fallen prey to a classic trap. The actor is known for playing Jack, the gloriously camp gay best friend in the hit sitcom Will & Grace: a spritely Peter Pan figure so melodramatic that he gets into a Cher-off with the real Cher and wins. One of the most memorable comic creations of the Noughties, Jack is hard to shake. And so, when Hayes walks - not struts, not skips, not somersaults - into the dimly lit bar of the Barbican, it takes a minute for me to recalibrate my expectations.

I’m not the only one. Audiences are having to rethink their perception of the actor, now 55, in light of his Tony-winning turn on Broadway as the troubled pianist-raconteur Oscar Levant, who died in 1972. Three years after its American debut, Good Night, Oscar is transferring to London with Hayes stepping back behind the keys and into Levant’s shiny black wingtips. That one-year break was necessary: “They had asked me about transferring towards the end of the New York run,” he recalls, reclining in his chair. “They said, ‘Do you want to go to London?’” He raises his eyebrows past his thick black frames. “And I said, ‘No, I want to go to bed.”

Playing Levant is demanding. The pianist was as famous for films like An American in Paris as he was for his volatile TV appearances that showed off his wicked wit and far-ranging intellect. His struggles with mental health and addiction to prescription drugs were not obstacles to his charm but fodder for it. On air in front of millions, Levant would crack wise about his fragile mental state. Asked what he did for exercise, he responded: “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”