Jefferson Mays

I was offered jobs impersonating everyone from Cher to Madonna.

Some actors start with the right shoes. I start with the right hats.

I should be one of those actors who has a list. A lot of people do - 'I wanna do this and this and this' - but I don't. I enjoy being surprised - indeed, often ambushed - by a role.

There was a lot of playing by myself, wearing last year's Halloween costume and wandering around the yard talking to myself - which may account for my fondness for doing different voices.

I love hats. I've always loved hats.

I try to inhabit each of the characters as fully as I can, however short-lived they are. But most of my show happens offstage.

The beauty of performance for me is finding details with which to betray character.

My mother was a children's librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children's literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

It's such a rare and rewarding thing to be in control of space and time for two hours a night, to go through a journey and take the audience along. There's nothing quite like it.