Colum Findlay

Colum Findlay plays a non-binary character in this year's panto at Eden Court

Transcript

00:00I play Poison Ivy. Poison is the villain, technically, but also the giant's henchman.

00:07They are a non-binary character. I think they were originally written as a woman, actually.

00:14When I did my audition, I was the only non-AFAB person in the room.

00:17AFAB meaning assigned female at birth. And then in the first draft after I was cast,

00:21all the pronouns were changed to they. They used they then pronouns.

00:24I got my first draft of the script and clocked all the pronouns have changed.

00:30And honestly, at first, I was a little disappointed because I was kind of

00:32looking forward to playing a girl. And I was like, oh, that's that's cool that I

00:38that they think that they trust me to hold that and that I could play a woman,

00:41especially in a panto where panto already meddles with gender so much.

00:45We already have a dame. We already have a man playing a woman.

00:50It's nice, the notion that you have this dame character that is very clearly supposed to be

00:54a man playing a woman for comic effect, but then to also potentially have someone else

00:58who's visibly not a woman or cisgendered woman playing a girl.

01:02I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then so when I first got the script,

01:04I was like, oh, that's a shame. And then the more I sat with it,

01:09the more I was like, well, actually, no, it's better this way.

01:12I think it does more this way. And it lets, especially because panto

01:18is a family thing. It's for kids. It's for everyone.

01:21But it's for kids primarily. And to let them see a non-binary

01:25character, especially a non-binary character that's not good, I think is healthy.

01:32A non-binary character that doesn't fit with this narrative,

01:35that there's some kind of weird queer Illuminati forcing a version of like,

01:41ah, the gays are good, you know, the notion of like, no, no, no,

01:43I can be non-binary and the villain and still give these kids,

01:49for some of them, the first time that they'll see someone like me on stage.