When it comes to squeaky-clean performers they don’t come more toothpaste advert pristine than Lee Mead. The man who made his name by winning the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on BBC One’s Any Dream Will Do positively bounces into the office of producer Bill Kenwright on a frosty morning, all unflashy chain-store checked shirt and sparkly smile. He removes his woolly hat and is off and rattling through our interview.
Mead left Joseph last January after more than 600 performances, so maybe it was understandable that he craved a gear shift. This week he opened in Windsor in Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, alongside Gary Wilmot and Kate O’Mara. It is his first proper play, apart from an early pre-fame outing as Laurence in Abigail’s Party. After such a long run he wanted to escape his comfort zone. “It is important to give yourself challenges,” he says. “It’s easy to coast and not push yourself.”
Wilde’s blackly comic melodrama tells the tale of Lord Arthur, who visits a clairvoyant before his wedding and is told he is destined to commit a murder. To avoid the possibility that he might kill his fianc?e Sybil he decides to pre-emptively do in a distant relative instead. Bombs and poison are involved and things are never taken too seriously.
For the 28-year-old Mead the run dovetails neatly with his plans. The national tourlasts until April and in May his wife, the actor and TV presenter Denise Van Outen, is due to give birth to their first child. If he is excited about changing artistic direction he is even more excited about changing nappies: “I wanted to have a family for a long time. I was just waiting to find the right person. I’m going to be very hands on.”
His relationship with Van Outen, whom he married in the Seychelles last April, fascinated the press. When he won the role of Joseph in June 2007 Van Outen fluttered: “The next time he lands a role as a leading man, can he put me forward to be the leading lady?” Add to that the seven-year gap and the fact that Mead is so different to her ex, the Jamiroquai singer Jay Kay, and you can see why they are a tabloid target.
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Being a celebrity couple, however, is something he shies away from talking about. “When we first got together the opportunity was there to do shoots, deals and sponsorship together, but Denise has her own career and I have mine. We are both in the public eye but that’s it, really. We decided to keep our personal life personal or it’s not our own.” Both have been voted Rear Of The Year — lasting marriages have been built on less.
Despite both coming from Essex — he’s from Southend, she’s from Basildon, 20 minutes away in a fast Ford Escort — they have a house in Kent and a Hampstead flat. “When we go home we don’t talk about the business, it’s about being husband and wife. If the two start to mix it’s not healthy.” He does say, however, that contrary to tabloid rumours, Van Outen does not do the housework wearing his Technicolor dreamcoat. He also reveals that he lent his loincloth to his successor in Joseph, Gareth Gates.
Mead is taking his acting ambitions seriously. After leaving Joseph he relocated to Manhattan to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. “I’d released my second album and thought about touring, but I had a bee in my bonnet about acting so I went for three months, working on scripts, camera, proper Method stuff.”
He has always put hard work before hedonism. When he was growing up, the son of a postman and a cleaner, he wanted to study drama but could not afford to go to Rada. Instead he went to the Whitehall Performing Arts College and while his mates headed off to the pub he would hop on the train to have extra singing and stage coaching in London. “I always spent any extra money I had on classes.”
He was always heading down a musical theatre path, though the early days were a struggle. He can laugh now — and he does frequently when the subject comes up — at his early jobs. “Singing in the saloon bar on the Portsmouth to Bilbao ferry was rough, and I don’t just mean crossing the Bay of Biscay.” Passengers who had partaken of too much duty free would chuck cigarettes and shout at him. His next job, at the Bridlington Spa Theatre, was more Phoenix Nights than Vegas. One evening a dog in the stalls barked constantly while Mead tried to deliver his version of Barcelona.
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But gradually his commitment paid off. He landed small parts in Joseph and Miss Saigon and by the time he auditioned for Any Dream he was in Phantom of the Opera. Nearly three years on, the reality TV show stays with him: “It’s strange looking back. It was a phenomenally intense experience, a complete whirlwind of emotion. While I was in it it felt like I was singing for my life. It was very tense, just three days a week to learn a song to sing in front of ten million people. I never expected to make the final, let alone win.”
One thing that constantly comes across in talking to Mead is his professionalism, which borders on the obsessive. He has seen too many stars phoning in their performances. “It’s our job to go out and give a great show,” he says. “People are seeing you for the first time and they’ve been looking forward to it for months. The least you can do is give 100 per cent for an hour and a half.”
If the straight acting does not pan out, he is in the cosy position of knowing that he can always return to musical theatre. His real challenge might be avoiding the temptation. At one point last year he was going to play the Gregory Peck role in a musical version of Roman Holiday, but pulled out. There is, however, one story that would coax him back. He has high hopes for a long-mooted production based on Marc Bolan’s life entitled Twentieth Century Boy. “I’ve seen some scripts and it’s great. I really hope it can happen. It’s a great life story.”
Ambition, reality TV, celebrity wife — Mead is an icon of our times. If they ever make a musical out of his life story it could be called 21st Century Boy.
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is at the Theatre Royal, Windsor (01753 853888; www.theatreroyalwindsor.co.uk), until tomorrow, then touring