Last month, Disney fans criticised plans for a new series, Holes, a gender-swapped remake of the original film set in a boys’ juvenile detention camp and starring Shia LaBeouf. “Holes has to be about a group of young boys,” one said. Another complained: “Let’s be honest, no one wants a gender swapped reboot.”
After Bridgerton’s latest season finale rendered Francesca’s love interest a Michaela, instead of a Michael as per the books, viewers created a petition to restore the original character to the next season.
You wouldn’t think it controversial for traditionally male characters to be turned female, given it’s everywhere at the moment. In the current reimagining of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company on Broadway, relationship-phobic Bobby is now Bobbie – a flirty, flighty woman. And in an adaptation of The Tempest, currently running in the West End, the father figure Prospero has been transformed into a female sorceress, played by Sigourney Weaver of action-film fame.
There has always been something incredibly powerful about women taking on traditionally male roles in culture.
For me, it harks back to how I was received when I was pregnant while filming Doctor Who back in 2005. At the big BBC Christmas party that year I wandered around with a glass of water, happily showing my baby bump, and a well-meaning male producer told me I was really “brave” in my choice – as my career was now effectively over.
So imagine my surprise when, in 2016, John le Carré’s The Night Manager was adapted for television and instead of Leonard Burr – an intelligence operative intent on bringing down a master criminal – a heavily-pregnant Olivia Colman was cast as Angela Burr.
Colman won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy. Seeing something so subversive as a pregnant woman cast in the role of what was originally a male character made me feel that women really could have it all.
It eventually inspired me to take up my current role, as Shylock in a version of Shakespeare’s problem comedy The Merchant of Venice. I’m one of the first British women to play the role – Shylock is traditionally a Jewish man in the Venetian Jewish ghetto of 1550s, who lent money at interest in the face of persecution.
No actress (and I’m reclaiming that word courtesy of Dorothy Parker who famously said “scratch an actor and you get an actress”) wakes up and thinks I have a longing to play Shylock. It’s not a sexy role.
When I originally announced that I wanted to play Shylock, it was met with scepticism: “How’s that going to work?”. The first time I went on stage I took a deep breath. It might challenge people, but you never quite know how these things will be received. I felt excitement at the thought the audience might love it, but some fear at the prospect they just wouldn’t connect with it.
I was wrong! We’ve enjoyed two sold out West End runs and we are currently on our third tour of the UK.
The one thing I didn’t feel, oddly, was uncertainty over playing Shylock as a woman. I usually am prone to doubt my own choices, but having a female Shylock being spat at and kicked in the streets brings in a powerful intersectionality of misogyny and racism. Men who hate women dislike nothing more than a foreign woman who has the ability to stand up for herself.
What helped me most, though, was leaning into the memory of who I was brought up by – tough immigrant women who escaped the pogroms of Belarus to eke out a living in the slums of the East End of London. My great-grandmother Annie, my grandma and great aunts were on the front line in the resistance, and came face-to-face with Oswald Mosley and his private militia, the British Union of Fascists, at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. I wondered what would happen if Shylock became a single widowed woman with one daughter living, just as my great-grandma did.
Historically, many societies refused to let women perform on stage so boys and men took on female roles in Shakespeare. But even in 2025, women can feel nervousness around portraying male characters. Perhaps it’s because we second-guess ourselves.
That’s not to say women should always take on male roles, mind. Ocean’s 8, the all-female spin-off of the heist movie, felt a bit of a stunt. Despite the fact Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway had wonderful chemistry, it felt like they were crowbarred into a very male world. I agree with Rachel Weisz and Rosamund Pike who argue that James Bond shouldn’t be recast as a woman. You need the logic of concept, the character, setting and play itself to dovetail seamlessly together – and it doesn’t in this case.
But mostly, I don’t believe in male and female roles. We are complex creatures, men and women. What I do believe in, though, is characters, in the human condition and eternal truths. Unless gender is crucial to the role, why shouldn’t any part that’s written well, with recognisable traits, be played by a woman?
Listening… to Real Dictators on BBC Sounds. I love BBC Sounds, and I recently discovered this award-winning podcast, which explores in depth and with huge detail the lives, psychology and impact of some of the most infamous dictators of all time. I’ve been immersing myself on the long train journeys to the next touring venue to episodes on Herod, Attila, Oliver, Cromwell, Stalin – all fascinating stuff which enters my ear courtesy of Paul McGann’s mellifluous tones and a plethora of historians. It’s funny hearing this as the train steams past the Georgian houses of Bath Spa and the scenery of the Wirral peninsula.
Anticipating… walking through my front door after two weeks on tour in Liverpool and Bath. I’m imagining kissing the dog, hugging my daughter, cuddling my husband… in that order. And all of us sitting in the kitchen while I make a roast dinner and catching up on everything that’s happened and laughing (we laugh a lot). Spending time with my family is the greatest gift in my life. Going away is always difficult. My daughter is going to university in September so I’m trying to soak up as much family time as possible this year.
Reading… Julia by Sandra Newman. Actually, I am re-reading this novel as I’m trying to understand its genius. I have read 1984 – George Orwell’s 1948 dystopian analysis of a world ruled by the all-seeing eye of The Party and the its ruler, Big Brother. Newman has done the seemingly impossible and taken Orwell’s world of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, inflated it, and described it through the female lens of Orwell’s protagonist Winston’s forbidden love interest, Julia. Barely fleshed out in Orwell’s original, here she is as our narrator. It’s a breathtaking piece of work. I am completely in awe of it.
The Merchant of Venice 1936 tours the UK until 12 April. For more information, visit: themerchantofvenice1936.co.uk
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