Luke Newton on the “Joy and Despair” of Embodying Lee Alexander McQueen Off-Broadway

At face value, playing Lee McQueen is straightforward enough: baggy jeans, a buzzcut, and a T-shirt get you most of the way there. But to embody Alexander McQueen, the iconoclastic designer known for his inspired fashion shows and unbridled creative output, is a more daunting proposition.

House of McQueen, a new play chronicling McQueen’s short life, opens off-Broadway on September 9, and tasked with portraying the eponymous English designer is none other than Luke Newton, the English actor best known for his role as Colin in Bridgerton.

As Newton soon learned, there is a long runway between playing a fictitious, Regency-era ladies’ man and becoming one of the most recognizable designers in pop culture. Beyond the fact that McQueen was a very real and beloved person, whose life and death—he died by suicide in 2010—have been widely documented, there was the matter of the show’s highly discerning built-in audience. Fashion fans love a reference, they love a factoid, but they also love a fact-check. To put it plainly, the crowd for McQueen already knows too much.

“There are many, many people in the world that will know the same amount about Lee McQueen as I, or much more,” Newton says, calling in from the apartment he’s renting in New York. “I know that I can’t compete with that.” What he could do, and what he did, was research: He watched McQueen’s shows over and over—his favorite is Voss, from spring 2001, a true fan-favorite—and studied photos and interviews and videos.

House of McQueen is not associated with the label or its parent company, Kering. Its connection to the designer is instead familial: Gary James McQueen, Lee’s nephew, serves as the creative director of the production. (Darrah Cloud wrote the script and Sam Helfrich directs.) Ticket-holders will also be able to explore a tight but impactful exhibition of vintage McQueen fashion and ephemera adjacent to the theater, at the Mansion at Hudson Yards.

Here, Newton breaks down a role that he says will stay with him long after the play wraps.

Vogue: I’m curious, how did you come to take on this role?

Luke Newton: I was working on Season 4 of Bridgerton at the time, and I got an email or maybe even text message in my team’s group chat from my manager, saying, “I think we have an offer coming through to play Alexander McQueen off-Broadway, in a play about his life.” Usually in those situations, I never know how real an offer is, or if it’s something that’s going to be much later down the line and it won’t work out. But I was immediately just on it with my research. There were some other projects at the same time that I was meeting for and really considering committing to, but then as soon as that came in, it just drew me in. I think it was more what I didn’t know about McQueen that was drawing me in. I knew his name, I knew that he was an icon, I knew that people regarded him as a genius. As soon as I started doing more and more research, I was like, I think I have to do this. I’ve always wanted to work in theater in New York and have an opportunity to create something from the ground up, so I just jumped at the chance.