“Woah, that was impressive,” muttered the woman sat behind me in the West End’s Savoy Theatre, where the Mean Girls The Musical is currently playing. Tom Xander, playing Damian, had just finished opening the show with “A Cautionary Tale”, alongside Elena Skye playing his best friend Janis. “I really like the guy playing the gay guy.”
That’s Olivier-nominated guy playing the gay guy, to you and I. For his role as the too-gay-to-function high school student, Xander has been nominated in the Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical category at this Sunday’s prestigious Olivier Awards, competing against the likes of Layton Williams (Titanique), Raphael Papo (Fiddler on the Roof), and Andy Nyman (Hello, Dolly!).
After finding out he’d been nominated, you’d think Xander’s elation would’ve blown the Savoy’s roof off. Not quite. “I’ve never been so terrified in my entire life,” he deadpans. He was also “incredibly grateful, honoured, humbled” and all of those other marks of appreciation, but ahead of the first performance after he got the news, he became a conspiracist. “I just felt like everyone was going, ‘Right! Let’s see what this Olivier-nominated performance is about! It’s quite overwhelming [in terms] of anxiety.”
Make no mistake though, Xander is no harbinger of doom. The lady behind me was right: he’s electric on stage as hilarious outcast Damian, a clear scene-stealer with his impeccable delivery of the film-turned-musical’s most adored catty quips – “She doesn’t even go here!”, “You go, Glen Coco!” et cetera. Over Zoom, he’s easy company, charmingly self-effacing and a natural showman, though an already media-savvy one: he’s prone to caveating any negative thoughts with positives, and broaches answers with a chastised politician’s favourite – “Listen…”
Xander’s reaction to his Olivier nod seems particularly out of character given that he hardly seems afflicted with stage fright: He and Skye have the unenviable task of opening Mean Girls with energy dials turned up to 100, and he’s performed to over 300,000 people since last June. “Listen,” he begins. “When we opened I was a bag of nerves. I was petrified.” The nervousness “does still exist,” he insists, “it’s just now I know what I’m doing,” and everyone feels more comfortable.
Perhaps Xander knows what he’s doing because the role has been a dream, or rather a goal, for years. He watched Tina Fey’s 2004 teen comedy and “fell in love” with the character, “like I imagine everyone else did on the entire planet”. Damian, played then by Daniel Franzese, is the fiery, funny friend to outcast Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and newcomer Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). He’s shunned by the plastics, Regina George, Gretchen Wieners, and Karen Smith, but he’s the film’s heart: 20 years on, he remains an omnipresent source of meme material, and a trailblazer in LGBTQ+ cinema.
When the film was adapted for Broadway in 2018, led by pop icon Reneé Rapp with Grey Henson as Damian, Xander saw it four times. “There’s not many roles that I’ve seen in shows for someone of my build and my casting that I look at and go, ‘Oh I desperately want to do that.’” At the time, he was playing missionary Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon. “That was my dream role, and then I didn’t have another one. As soon as I saw [Damian] on Broadway, that was the moment I went, ‘Oh damn. Now this is what I want next.’”
During one point in our chat, Xander urges with a laugh: “If you’ve got dreams, you need to go and fight for them!” And fight he did. In 2020, after hearing a West End version was in the works, he “went crazy”, and posted on Instagram asking if any of his theatre-trained friends could teach him to tap dance (Damian tap danced during the song “Stop” in the Broadway version, but was removed for the West End).
“I definitely was quite ambitious with trying to make sure I was competent enough for when the time came to audition. Because I wasn’t going to let them not let me audition,” he says. He was “absolutely, categorically not” thankful for the pandemic, but recognises that if it weren’t for the show being subsequently delayed by three years, the role would never have been his: he was locked into his The Book of Mormon contract. Then casting opened back up in 2023, and he “unashamedly” begged to audition.
Xander has always put in the work. “I’ve always been a bit of a fighter. I’ve always gone after what I’ve wanted,” he says, cringing a little at the cliché. He studied at London’s Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, which boasts Drag Race’s Kitty Scott-Claus and Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland among its alumni. He arrived from a childhood in Wolverhampton, where he spent time testing the waters at amateur dramatic associations; he first performed on stage aged eight.
He was a “big fish in a very small pond” back then, but drama school was “when you go, ‘Oh, this is now the sea. This is an ocean.” In response, he went in on day one with “something to prove”. Again, he did just that: “I managed to, luckily, work my way towards being given more opportunities than other people might have been given.”
Now, the actor’s ambitions are ballooning. It’s understandable, considering he grew up seeing people from West Midlands city make it (Wolverhampton’s notable people list includes EastEnders’s Aaron Thiara, Three Girls star Antonio Aakeel, and the late Liam Payne). His uncle is an actor, whom he “idolised” after seeing him on stage in plays, and so despite troubles in the West End – its London centricity, the fact its increasingly brimming with Hollywood stars – Xander always saw a career in entertainment as a possibility.
There were small barriers – “Just being candid, being a plus-size actor… the people that I was looking up to weren’t of my build” – but he had hope. “It wasn’t something that I felt was completely unachievable or inaccessible. I think I saw it as something I had to work for.”
There’s that word again: work. Mean Girls The Musical is closing in the West End on 8 June, and it’s time to look ahead at the work to come. In 2021, he starred in his first film, action caper Jolt alongside Laverne Cox and Kate Beckinsale. “I really relished in doing that,” he smiles. He’d be up for taking a small break from theatre and his stream of comedic roles, in favour of more screen jobs, more versatility. “I definitely would love to branch out a bit more,” he continues. “I think I’m now one of these actors that would like to try and make the next projects different from the ones they’ve done before.”
It’s possible. Eddie Redmayne, Jonathan Bailey and Benedict Cumberbatch are among those to become major Hollywood heavyweights after their first Olivier nominations and there’s no reason why Xander, with all his unabashed determination and charisma, both on and off stage, couldn’t be next.
“We all have dreams; we all have goals,” he opines, and the Olivier Award nomination has “just put me in a place where I feel that my dreams are now able to be realised. I’m able to actually see a road towards that happening.” Oh my God, Tom Xander, we love your work – and it’s clear that he does too.
Mean Girls The Musical is playing at the West End’s Savoy Theatre until 8 June.
The Olivier Awards, hosted by Billy Porter and Beverley Knight, will take place on Sunday 6 April. A highlights show will air on ITV1 and ITVX at 10:15pm BST.
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