Shakespeare’s Boy Player Alexander Cooke

In Shakespeare’s time, the actresses were boys—and for the most celebrated of them, fame came early but could end abruptly with a voice change. In this episode, author Nicole Galland joins us to talk about the world of boy players, young apprentices who performed women’s roles onstage in England before 1660.

Galland’s novel, Boy, follows one of these real-life members of Shakespeare’s company, Alexander “Sander Cooke,” and his fictional best friend, Joan, a fiercely curious young woman who disguises herself as a boy to pursue knowledge. Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines, Galland explores the freedoms and risks of reinventing gender roles in Elizabethan England.

Figures like Francis Bacon appear in the novel as part of the broader web of power and political intrigue that shapes Joan and Sander’s world. Through these connections, Galland brings Shakespeare’s theatrical world to life and the people navigating its stage.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

Nicole Galland is the author of the historical novels I, Iago; Godiva; Crossed; Revenge of the Rose; and The Fool’s Tale; as well as the contemporary romantic comedies On the Same Page and Stepdog, and the New York Times bestselling near-future thriller The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Neal Stephenson).

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 3, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: The life of an actor has always been full of uncertainties—will I remember my lines tonight? Will the play keep running? Will I ever land another part?

Those uncertainties must have been intense for actors in Shakespeare’s England, where professional theater was only just getting off the ground.

Now consider a teenage apprentice playing the roles of female characters on the early modern stage. The only certainty in his life was that he’d probably age out of a job in a few years.

Nicole Galland’s novel Boy imagines the life of one of these young actors. It’s based on a real-life apprentice in Shakespeare’s company, Alexander “Sander” Cooke. But Galland invents a second act for Sander’s life. And a companion, Joan Buckler, who is every bit Sander’s match.

Galland is the author of many novels, including I, Iago, based on Othello, and two books co-written with science fiction writer Neal Stephenson.

Here’s Barbara Bogaev in conversation with Nicole Galland.

——————-

BARBARA BOGAEV: I thought maybe we could start with a reading, if that’s okay with you? And that would be…

NICOLE GALLAND: I love reading.

BOGAEV: Oh, great, great.

GALLAND: So here we go.

[Nicole Galland reads a section from her novel, Boy (2025)]

The Globe Playhouse managers had laid down wide planks leading to the gates, that audiences might enter without wrecking their shoes and galoshes. Even so, playgoing was a sodden affair under the clearing skies. Those with the means to pay for a seat would be well enough off, but the thousand-odd groundlings in canvas and lockram who could afford only a penny-ticket would be standing soggy and unsheltered in the big round yard for the whole two hours.

Around the back of the Globe, where the players themselves entered, was an expanse of paving stones canted to drain well. Here Sander Cooke sat perched on a stool. The other players were crammed into the backstage tiring-house, where it was humid and odorous; Sander always took the hit of being called soft for wanting to escape outside. The flowing green satin skirts of his queenly gown were gathered and piled onto his lap as he frowned at his lips in the little scratched glass. His face, plucked to keep wispy hairs at bay for this last precious season of his apprenticeship, was in shadow. He kept his back to the hazy sun so the white ceruse blanching his face wouldn’t melt. Although small for the role, he was playing Titania, queen of the Fairies, not a mortal but a fantastical creature. Marjorie, the dresser, would be out soon to paint heathen decorations across his marvelous bone structure.

He knew he had marvelous bone structure. He had been told this so many times, the angles of his cheek and brow and chin had been so often commented upon, sketched, and serenaded, that his awareness of them was no more prideful than awareness that he had black hair or ice-blue eyes.

BOGAEV: Oh, thank you so much for that, Nicole. That really situates us right there in Shakespeare’s Globe, and also gives us such a great introduction to Sander Cooke, the boy-star of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who was a real person.

GALLAND: Yes, he was.

BOGAEV: So perhaps we could start with that, tell us about the real Sander Cooke.

GALLAND: Well, actually very little is known about the boy players, about the apprentices there. Some of them, such as Sander and other ones like Bobby Gough and Nicholas Tooley, their names are recorded in history, but the roles that they played are not specified. Sometimes it’s possible to assess who may have played which roles, but we really know very little about most of them. But probably I have taken a little bit of a creative license. It is likely that Sander came along a couple of years later than I have actually placed him and that he was more likely to have played the dramatic roles that followed right after this. Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Cordelia were all probably written at about the same time, just like the comedic ones, Viola and Rosalind, were probably written at about the same time. So, I’ve taken a little liberty there in that I’ve made him a boy player of comedies rather than a boy player of tragedies because that fits the character that I’ve created for him.

BOGAEV: How so?

GALLAND: Well, he is light. He has a lightness to him and a playfulness. It was easier, it was more seamless to have him have a little bit of arch-flipness and sprinkled with an insouciance, if that’s both who he’s playing on stage and also somewhat who he is in real life.

BOGAEV: Oh, that makes sense. Just to dwell in history for a moment, how did the boy player apprenticeships work? How long did they serve and what did they do when the apprenticeship was over? Because that’s what Sanders’ main dilemma is.

GALLAND: That’s what Sander’s struggling with, exactly. So, the simple answer is that like most apprentices, they were apprenticed for seven years. So, what that means is that the apprentices were often playing these roles into their early twenties which stretches, not credulity, but definitely makes it clear that you could be on stage and not entirely boyish playing a girl or a woman.

But what’s interesting is the Chamberlain’s Men, there was no actors guild, there was no performer’s guild, and so all of the Chamberlain’s Men actually belonged to other guilds. John Heminge, who was the mentor to whom Sander Cooke was apprenticed, belonged to the Grocers’ Guild, which was a general catch-all term for almost what we would think of as merchants now. One of the things they did was they provided coal to the city of London, that sort of thing, and so, theoretically they were not only being trained as actors, but also in whatever the other thing was that the actor they were apprenticed to was supposedly engaged in doing. So, theoretically when they finished their apprenticeship, if they were not welcome to stay on with the company, they could get a job in that other thing which means Sander could be looking at becoming a businessman of sorts, which he definitely doesn’t have the aptitude for. Some of the apprentices went on to become company members. A very few became shareholders, which were the central group who made the most money and had the most job stability. Some others would be just hired per show, which is how most actors work nowadays. But there were approximately four apprentices at any given time, which means there was a constant graduation out of the apprenticeship at a rate that was higher than they would need to replace actors, and so, it was not a given, it was absolutely not a given, that you’d finish your apprenticeship and move on.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and I would imagine a lot of competition. Okay, so Sander fears he’s going to be replaced and he’s going to lose his job, his standing, everything, and he is not trained for anything else like perhaps some other apprenticeships.

GALLAND: Correct.

BOGAEV: So, he looks for a patron and this drives a big part of the plot of your book because he gets involved with the Earl of Essex, who is another historical figure who famously was Queen Elizabeth’s favorite but then fell out a favor and led a revolt against her. Just a practical question: Was it common for these boy actor apprentices to end up with a wealthy patron? And what was the relationship there? What would they do once they’re in a nobleman’s household? Besides the obvious, sorry.

GALLAND: Besides the obvious, yes. Favorite can mean many things. He, at one point, is—you know, this is a strange image that just jumped into my head, but I think it would, in an odd way, almost be the equivalent of a geisha in Japan. There is a sense of this being who isn’t quite owned, but definitely is absolutely dependent on a courtier, to be all that, so to speak, in their household.

There’s one scene where Sander, as he’s approaching a particular household, he’s thinking, “Well, I could be the sort of resident entertainer here” and then he finds out that another young man who he knew as a child has already taken that role—that he is the resident musician, but also because he can read and write, does other services around the house.

BOGAEV: Right, but like geishas, perhaps these boy actors or house entertainers could serve as spies.

GALLAND: That is definitely true and Sander even entertains that notion before realizing that maybe he’s not actually cut out for that. But yes, certainly there were—almost everyone seemed to have been a spy in that day, frankly. Everyone was so paranoid and keeping tabs on everyone else.

BOGAEV: Complicated times.

GALLAND: Very complicated.

BOGAEV: Well, we’ve been talking about Sander, but Joan is the other protagonist in your book. She’s a character that you made up and I understand at first you were thinking that you were going to write two separate books, one about each of these young people. So, tell us about Joan and how did they end up in one book?

GALLAND: Joan came to me in a very bizarre way, very indirectly during the Omicron surge of COVID. I had a random question in my head, which was, “Why didn’t the Greeks stop worshiping the Greek gods the first time someone went up to Mount Olympus and saw that there were actually no gods there?”

BOGAEV: Oh, wait a second. So, you’re stuck in your house, and you’re just thinking this randomly.

GALLAND: Just randomly.

BOGAEV: In the middle of the night going nuts the way we all were?

GALLAND: Yeah, exactly. That was one of the many ways in which my nuttiness manifested itself, a question like that, and so I went on to, you know, I did what we all do, I went onto the internet to start randomly looking, and I suddenly thought, “How would I do this if I didn’t have access to the internet?” And then, you know, you sort of like reverse engineer that question:“What would I do if I didn’t have access to a library? What would I do if I didn’t have access to anything? How would I go about trying to figure that out?” And because the Shakespearean era is sort of my default because I’m a Shakespeare geek, like many of us, I immediately began thinking, “What would a girl in Shakespeare’s era do if they had a question like that? If she had a question like that, where would she turn to? How would that happen?” I asked my friend Neal Stephenson, “Who were the great minds of the time?” and he said, “Really, Francis Bacon was sort of the only dude in town.” which, interestingly, as a side note—and we can get back to this—turns out not to have been true.

BOGAEV: Neal Stephenson can lead you wrong! [Laughter.]

GALLAND: One of the reasons he doesn’t realize this is because, in a sense, like, you know, the victor writes history and Francis Bacon was really good at making sure that he was the one who left his mark on history. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in London at the time.

But anyhow, then I began to think about how could Joan possibly get connected to Francis Bacon and that was one of the reasons that the two stories began to merge. Because Bacon is, first of all, known to have really been,  I don’t want to say infatuated, but he was a big fan of theater. He loved going to theater.

And also there is one of the various conspiracy theories about who wrote Shakespeare, the one that I think is the most farfetched is that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I don’t have words to express how certain I am that that is not the truth.

BOGAEV: Thank you for that. Okay, so I’m beginning to see how these three ended up in this book—and in your book, in the same room together.

GALLAND: Yes.

BOGAEV: Because, they do, and Sander leads Joan. Well, you tell us about Joan first because you really, I think, let your imagination run free in a wonderful way with this character, Joan, by the way.

GALLAND: Oh, thank you.

BOGAEV: She’s Sander’s childhood friend and eventually his great love. Tell us what kind of young woman she is—nd, I guess, the question really that I have is, did Shakespeare’s heroines inspire you from the beginning in creating this character?

GALLAND: You know, at the beginning I was just trying to imagine what her life would be like in London at that time and it was important to me that she, she’s smart, she’s stubborn, she’s very grounded, she’s, to the degree that she can be, she’s an autodidact. But her resources are very limited—and it was important to me that she not be the sort of character that one might be tempted to put into a story like this where she’s like an undiscovered genius. I did not want her to be a secret Einstein. I wanted her to just be an everywoman who happened to be smart and curious and driven, but without a way of getting to where she wanted to get to. She has extremely neglectful parents. They’re essentially uninterested in her existence except to the degree that that she’s useful to them, almost like a servant.

BOGAEV: Right, and certainly not interested in her intelligence or her curiosity.

GALLAND: Not even aware of it, really, like, absolutely indifferent. There’s a scene when she dresses up as a boy for the first time and she walks through the shop in the house, right past her father dressed as a boy, and he doesn’t even notice. She felt safe doing it because she knew he wouldn’t even notice. So, there is in that setup, a sort of a benign neglect ,that allows her to get away with doing things that probably an ordinary young woman in that time would’ve had a harder time doing.

BOGAEV: Well, she’s so interesting. She’s a student of botany and healing, and then she’s a student of natural  philosophy, as we’ve said with Francis Bacon who gets over her being a girl because he needs someone smart but with an untrained mind to help test his theories about the workings of inductive reasoning. First, is this based in fact? Did Bacon actually employ others to help him test his theories?

GALLAND: So, here’s where we get into the interesting role of Bacon and the fact that Bacon wasn’t the only great mind in town at the time. Bacon is considered to be the creator or the articulator, perhaps is a better word, of inductive reasoning. That’s why he’s known as the father of the scientific method and this is partly why the Royal Society, a generation or two later, considered him essentially their patron saint when Isaac Newton and his ilk came along.

But in the actual moment, there was at least one other person in London who was doing essentially what Bacon was doing but was doing it among the masses. He wasn’t a courtier. He was the son of a merchant. His father had left him money. His name was Hugh Plat and he was interested in the same questions and the same discoveries that Bacon was, but he was doing it in a more applied science sort of way. So he was coming up with things, and throughout the book, Bacon belittles him and makes fun of him.

BOGAEV: Oh yeah, you have a lot of fun with that.

GALLAND: Yes, yes—

BOGAEV: —Bacon just can’t stand Plat.

GALLAND: Yes, he can’t stand the fact—in reality, probably, it’s that he couldn’t stand the fact that Plat did not need to make a name for himself or make sure that he had a source of income because he essentially was a trust fund baby. But he was a trust fund baby as a commoner which was an unusual situation for someone to find themselves in, so, there was a definitely a jealousy thing going on. What is interesting to me is that Bacon was definitely a snob, he was an elitist, and yet, this thing that he keeps saying in the book, where he wants to bring his genius and his insight to the masses, that is true. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t take on an apprentice the way that he took on Joan but I think that if an opportunity had arisen that fit that model, he probably would’ve considered it, at least, because he really did feel like he had something to teach and he wanted the masses to learn it. He was completely ignoring the fact when he said that Hugh Plat was already doing it among the masses. But it wasn’t just Hugh Plat. There was, at that time—the reason that Joan is able to be a botanist and go to the College of Barber Surgeons and study midwifery and everything else is because there was so much going on in London at that time. We think of it as being the height of political intrigue and the height of culture and theater. It was also a time where there was incredible developments and energy around the natural sciences, in particular. So, that allows Joan—who is fearless and curious and doesn’t see any reason not to ask a lot of questions—to find these mentors all over the city—that is definitely realistic and the male mentors that she finds are real people. I had to invent the female ones because of course we have far less information about women in that era.

BOGAEV: Well, while we’re talking about research, there’s a wonderful scene in which Sander explains just how disgusting early modern makeup was. Sander explains, you know, what he has to plaster onto his face to get into character, including pigeon—

GALLAND: —Pigeon stool.

BOGAEV: —Stool, yeah.

GALLAND: Pigeon poop. Well, he actually doesn’t have to. The point that he’s making is that if—

BOGAEV: Oh, that’s true. He has theatrical makeup.

GALLAND: He has theatrical makeup that’s come from abroad. So, the argument—which of course Brexit was very much on my mind at the time, and now there are other reasons to be acutely aware of this mindset—some of the characters at the table that he’s speaking with are very, what we would now say, nationalists and believe that England is superior to all other places and that there is really no reason to have international trade because England has the best of everything obviously.

BOGAEV: The best pigeon stool.

GALLAND: Pigeon stool, yes. So, Sander makes the point that his makeup—which clearly they like because they think he’s extremely beautiful when he is wearing it—his makeup comes from abroad. The ingredients from it come from Venice or from Trinidad or China even, and that before the age of exploration and international trade began, women in England were stuck with what was available at home and that was the pigeon poop. Pigeon poop and the ground—or the ashes of—a ground-up pig’s jaw. It’s so specific. It is so extraordinarily specific.

BOGAEV: Oh right, you must have been jumping out of your chair.

GALLAND: Yeah, it’s really—it’s so fun.

BOGAEV: A pig’s jaw. Who thought of that? I mean, I imagine, you know, people are pretty clear by now in the conversation that both Joan and Sander are in drag for a good part of your book.

GALLAND: Yes, yes.

BOGAEV: And both of them, particularly Sander because he’s the performer, think a lot about the tension between their appearance and their inner selves, and Joan, of course, as well as a woman, a theme right out of Shakespeare. So, how much did you look back to Shakespeare in his gender flipping plays to write these characters?

GALLAND: Oh, I’m sure a lot, almost without thinking about it. A friend and I had for many years a small Shakespearean theater troupe, and so, I’ve worked my way through so much of the canon. I’ve directed a lot of things. I’ve dramaturg a number of them. I’ve acted in a few even. And so like all of that is second nature to me. I sort of live and breathe it. There is, as I said, there is one play in particular that gets a huge nod near the end of the book.

But the stakes are different in the cross-dressing for both Sander and Joan. Joan’s need to get away with her disguise reflects Shakespeare’s heroines far more than Sander. Sander’s got more of an existential thing going on. Joan actually has to pass as a male in real society in order to live the life that she wants to live, or do the things that she wants to do at least, which was true for Shakespeare’s ladies, many of them the pants roles. Whereas Sander is doing it as a livelihood and there’s a quality where everybody knows that that’s actually a boy and the tension between “That’s a boy that’s a female” is part of the fun for him and for everyone that is aware of him being dressed as a woman. So, there’s something a little more existential about his situation, which means that as he’s getting to the end of his apprenticeship, there’s an existential angst, whereas for Joan—and this is true for Joan’s character as well—it’s just a purely practical matter.

BOGAEV: Practical, but also the stakes are high because if she gets caught, she could go straight to jail or worse.

GALLAND: Yes, yes, for a number of the things that she’s doing, definitely. And for her, in a way, I think just as dangerous or damaging would be that she would be prevented from ever doing the things that she’s been doing, dressed as a boy, again, and then she would be like me, stuck in a house during omicron but without access to the internet.

BOGAEV: Go right back to your origins.

GALLAND: Yes.

BOGAEV: Well, Joan and Sander become lovers, as we’ve said, and I did enjoy how you dramatize just how hard it is to find privacy in the late 16th century for two young people. There are no cars to make out in.

GALLAND: Right, right, there’s no cars and no one has, like, private sleeping quarters really, certainly not people in either of their position. Joan sleeps in the same room as her parents and Sander sleeps at John Heminge, who has an enormous number of children and only a certain number of bedrooms. So, yes, at one point they contemplate Joan’s family’s chicken coop, which is immediately rejected, so, yes, they have to be tricky about that.

BOGAEV: They end up in a room in the theater.

GALLAND: They end up in the only backspace in the theater.

BOGAEV: Yes, and the whole company—these are childhood friends, Joan and Sander—and the whole company had been taking bets.

GALLAND: Right, on when this was going to happen, and Sander had absolutely no idea and is just mortified when he realizes it.

BOGAEV: I don’t know if Shakespeare was in on the betting, but he does show up kind of infrequently in your book and he hardly says anything in the book. I know so many of the guests on this podcast have told me that they dreaded putting words in Shakespeare’s mouth when they were writing their own novels or plays.

GALLAND: It’s tricky.

BOGAEV: It is tricky. I know you have no problem with that because Shakespeare’s a major character in your book, Master of the Revels.

GALLAND: Yes.

BOGAEV: So, had you gotten your fill of writing Shakespeare in that book and didn’t want to for this one?

GALLAND: You know, that’s something that I don’t think that I consciously thought about, but I was aware that, yeah, I suppose so, I suppose that’s actually a fair thing to say. I do think that his personality in the two books is fairly similar and I’ve always just intuitively and probably incorrectly had this sense of him as doing most of his expressiveness in his writing and so, he’s a quiet, calm person.

BOGAEV: That’s just how you imagine him?

GALLAND: That’s just how I imagine him. And I don’t think that I thought that up. I think that came to me. This is going off topic ever so slightly, but when I, many years ago—like my gosh, almost 30 years ago—I dreamt a perfect screenplay, a perfect movie—like it had a beginning, a middle, and an end—and Shakespeare was a character in it. So, I immediately wrote it down and then several years later, Shakespeare in Love came out and it was 80% the same story.

BOGAEV: You can sue. [Laughter.]

GALLAND: I can’t. I actually—

BOGAEV: —they stole your dream.

GALLAND: They stole my dream, I think they stole my dream, but I wasn’t showing my dream to anyone until that script already existed and was moving around Hollywood! But in the dream, he was the Shakespeare that you see in Boy. So, that’s just always been how I’ve seen him because that’s how he came to me in a dream.

BOGAEV: Oh, I love that. Well, a bigger question: how do you think about historical authenticity in your fiction? And you’ve given us a little bit of an idea in some of your answers about the poetic license that you did take, but do you have rules about how much license you feel you can or want to get away with?

GALLAND: Sometimes I adhere to these more strictly than others: so, one way to go about it is, I don’t mind putting things in that didn’t happen as long as I don’t put in anything that couldn’t have happened—or if the story is begging me to put in something that is deeply implausible, then there needs to be justification for it.

Another thing that I’d say about that is a wonderful thing that a friend of mine said to me when I was writing my very first novel and I was anxious about how much historicity do I have to put in, how careful do I have to be? She said, “I don’t need to know what is in the next room. I just need to know that the writer knows what’s in the next room.”

BOGAEV: Oh, I like that.

GALLAND: Yeah, that has been a guideline for me, that, as long as what is happening in the moment feels rich and fully realized and not a violation of history, then it’s okay to take a little more leeway with the stuff on the edges.

BOGAEV: So, can you give us an example of either a book or a movie or a play or something that you’ve seen where you felt, like, “Wait a second, that went too far.” Or, “I wouldn’t do that.”

GALLAND: I could wax rhapsodic about how annoying I found the movie Anonymous. That’s the movie that proposes that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare. The creative license that was taken in that absolutely undermines its own argument. So, for instance, right before the Earl of Essex’s insurrection, he paid the Chamberlain’s Men to restage Richard II, which tells a certain kind of story about the abuse of royal power. We know that that definitely happened.

BOGAEV: And it figures in your book, in fact.

GALLAND: And it figures in my book. In Anonymous—which was apparently created to try to make an argument, like an actual nonfiction argument, for it being the Earl of Oxford who wrote them—in order for the Earl of Oxford argument to hold water, they make it that it’s Richard III instead of Richard II that is done the day before the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, which just is simply incorrect and totally would be sending a completely different message. So, that sort of thing is annoying to me when something is not only wrong, but when it feels like something was deliberately wrong in order to tell a story, especially if I think the story is nonsense. That kind of thing gets under my skin. When I saw that movie, I had to call up another Shakespeare nerd friend so that we could bitch about it for quite a while.

BOGAEV: I love it. Well, I can’t let you go without asking you about your book that was specifically inspired by Shakespeare, called I, Iago. It fills in Iago’s backstory, or rather, what we don’t see in Othello. What inspired you to take on Shakespeare’s famous villain?

GALLAND: Yes. So, the little Shakespeare troupe that I mentioned earlier that my friend Chelsea and I started, the way that we would do the plays is we would reduce them to about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then they would be performed with a day or two of rehearsal, and then done, script in hand.

This wonderful Irish actor that we knew, we wanted him to play Iago, so, we wrote to him and said, “Would you be willing to play Iago?” And he said, “Of course.” And then when he arrived, he came from out of town, when he arrived, he said to me, “I haven’t read the script, so can we just read through it?” And I said, “Well, actually, unlike most of our scripts, we really hardly changed this one at all. We didn’t add—there’s a narrator character who adds a lot of commentary—this is really just like a straight telling of the story.” And he said, “No, you don’t understand. I’ve never read Othello.” And I said, “Well, okay, first of all, how? And also, why did you say you’d love to play Iago if you’ve never read Othello?” And he said, “Well, I’m not an idiot. Everyone wants to play Iago, so there must be a reason.” So, I sort of fought down my panic and said, “Okay, let’s read through it together.” So we did and at the end of it, he said, “I don’t understand why Iago behaves that way.” He had come to it with this purity that most actors don’t come to it with and so we started to deconstruct what might, on a very practical level, have caused Iago to start the play—the play starts in the middle of a story, really.

BOGAEV: I picture you pulling an all-nighter with this actor.

GALLAND: We were up until very late, yes. Also, we later got married, although that didn’t stick.

BOGAEV: I know that, I have to admit, I know that. Did you fall in love that night talking about Iago?

GALLAND: No, no, we didn’t. We did not. There was nothing remotely romantic about it at the time. First of all, I had my director’s hat on and that is not a romantic head space for me to be in.

BOGAEV: Well, really, you were Francis Bacon and he was Joan. I mean, he’s your blank slate.

GALLAND: Oh, that’s wonderful. Yes, exactly, thank you for saying that. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s a very good point. So, then, you know, we did the play and he went away and I was stuck with all these questions that he had asked that we had only halfway answered, and then, I think my novelist brain knew that, which is why it wanted to dig deeper. But I would never have started to think about those things if he had not very innocently from a such a pure place, you know, zen mind, beginner’s mind, asked me those questions.

BOGAEV: What was it like writing in Iago’s voice, and is that something that you have to exorcise after you’re done?

GALLAND: Once I was in his head space, it was so easy to just stay there and to feel profoundly justified. This actually reminds me of something from when I was in high school. I was in a production of The Crucible, and I played Abigail Williams, who’s, you know, essentially the bad guy in the story. My director was taught method acting and got me into a head space where I was absolutely seeing the world of Salem in 1692 through the eyes of Abigail, and everything that Abigail wanted as an adolescent woman, girl, in that time made sense and I loved playing her. She was so empowering. I actually think that I, as a human, was a stronger, more independent thinker when we finished doing the play than I was when we began rehearsal. And then right after it closed, I was walking through the hall in the high school and one of the teachers came up to me and said, “Oh my God, I loved your Abigail. I hated her so much.” And I was shocked. I was so shocked.

BOGAEV: That’s like saying she hated you, at this point.

GALLAND: Right. So, then I had to like untangle myself from Abigail and look at what she actually did and thought, “Oh, Jesus, of course, right.”

So, I think I got into a similar headspace with Iago. But I really do feel like until he does things that are absolutely inappropriate—the first half of the play, what he’s doing is not, he’s not taking the high road, but no one’s taken the high road, really—he’s not behaving any more dishonorably than anybody else. It’s just that then he gets a little drunk on his own ability to get what he wants and that’s what takes him to a place that nobody benefits from.

BOGAEV: Power, power always corrupts.

GALLAND: Yeah, and his power is secret power, which is even more corrupting.

BOGAEV: I have to ask you, what are you writing now, if you can tell us?

GALLAND: The simple answer is that it’s not something that would be interesting to your readers to hear about. The state of the nation is so distressing to me, the state of the world, that I’m finding it very hard to focus on writing fiction when reality is so much more dramatic, and bizarre, and distracting than fiction. So, I am actually—temporarily, not forever, but for the moment until my brain can regroup—I am going to be working for my hometown newspaper, the Martha’s Vineyard Times, as a writer and an editor because I feel like this is a really good time to support and defend the free press and freedom of expression and making sure that the truth gets told. Journalism is a thing that just needs all of us so, that’s what I am about to be doing for at least the next several months and possibly longer. Then, eventually, I suspect that dealing with the truth will allow me to eventually feel the need to dive back into fiction. But at the moment, reality is so important. It is so important for us to stay with reality, that that’s what I am doing with my writing skills.

BOGAEV: Wow, kudos. Martha’s Vineyard Times is lucky.

GALLAND: Thank you.

BOGAEV: Thank you for this, too.

GALLAND: Thank you, this has been fun. Thank you.

——————-

KARIM-COOPER: That was Nicole Galland interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Boy is out now from William Morrow.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Mary McGrath in Boston and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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