Unlike other actors’ children, Sam Hazeldine took up acting late in life. He talks to Steve Pratt about his new role.

SAM Hazeldine seems to have done his best to avoid becoming an actor. Despite a mother who was an actress before having him and a father, James Hazeldine, known for TV series London Burning, he resisted the notion of following in their footsteps.

“That put me off to be honest,” he says of having an actor for a father.

“When I was nine or ten my dad was at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and I used to have to hang around rehearsal rooms and it was the most boring thing you can possibly imagine. It’s funny that because now theatre rehearsals are not nearly as boring.”

So he rejected acting until, when he was 18, his English teacher made him audition for the centenary Shakespeare play at the school. The play was Othello. “I auditioned for it and was awful. And there was one other boy who was even worse than I was. He was breathtakingly bad, so I got the part.

“When we came to do it I just absolutely loved it and applied to drama school, much to my parents’ chagrin.

Then they came to see me in Othello and I had their backing.”

But in his third year at Rada (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), he left to be in the band he’d been in at school.

“So I went off and I did that for ten years. I didn’t finish the training,” he says.

The band, Mover, was big in Japan.

“We were pretty successful really,” he says modestly. After a decade their record company closed down and the people who “inherited” them weren’t that interested in Mover.

“We released another album but realised because we were inherited we weren’t really their baby and maybe neglected, so we thought, ‘we’ve had a great time and recorded loads of music for our grandkids, if we have any’. So we amicably split up and are still great friends.”

His first professional theatre job post-Mover was playing Horatio in a tour of Hamlet that came to York Theatre Royal, where he now finds himself in a “musical” role in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As Duke Orsino, he gets to say the famous If Music Be The Food Of Love speech. That’s not without its problems.

“It’s a funny one because it’s so famous, that speech. It just has to be a new thought when you start otherwise you’re just doing a Shakespeare speech, which is awful,” he explains.

Orsino is the chap who takes a fancy to Viola who’s disguised as a boy while she/he’s supposed to be wooing him on behalf of the Duke.

He hasn’t appeared in Twelfth Night before, although he studied it for A-levels.

Hamlet and Othello are his other Shakespeare shows.

The York production, from director Juliet Forster, has a dreamlike quality, partly because the timespan within the play doesn’t make any sense.

Several people talk of different amounts of time between the shipwreck that opens the play to the end.

“And so the whole thing could potentially be a dream,” he says.

He’s enthusiastic about director Forster because “she allows you to be creative – she doesn’t impose her own ideas and is very intuitive and brings in what we think and feel about it which is a lovely way to work”.

Hazeldine is staying on in York to play Lennie in a revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, which follows Twelfth Night in the main house. He and two other members of the Shakespeare cast are doing both productions.

This will be the first Pinter play in which he’s appeared. He hasn’t read much of the playwright’s work either.

“On one hand, I guess that’s good in that I don’t bring any preconceptions.

If I miss the point entirely then you’ll know why,” he says.

AFTER Mover, he’s “absolutely loving acting” partly because he doesn’t have to take full responsibility for every single detail like he did with the band. “It’s nice to be part of the whole rather than covering it all,” he says.

“You write the first album at your leisure and present it to the record company, they sign you and release it, but then they want you to write another one. You have people breathing down your neck to churn out stuff. If you’re not very prolific in terms of just writing as I tended to be, it was a constant battle and constant pressure.”

He has a drawer ful of unfinished songs that without record company pressure may go unfinished for the rest of his life.

Perhaps, I suggest, the band will go on a reunion tour like Take That. “I prefer to think U2,” he says.

Meanwhile, he has Orsino’s musical tastes to consider. “We talked about him not having really listened to music in the same way before. Now he’s been told music is the food of love, he’s experiencing music in a completely different, and fresh way, as if he’s never heard it before.

“His confusion I identify with obviously.

Yeah, lots. Very much so, unfortunately.

There’s something very male, very human in terms of his approach to life. He’s so distraught by things not being simple.

“He goes from absolutely distraught and heartbroken to being completely fulfilled and happy in about a minute.

But I do relate to that, if you’ve ever been in love you do feel like you’re walking on air one minute and then you’re in the gutter the next.”

■ Twelfth Night is at York Theatre Royal until May 16 and The Homecoming from May 30 to June 20.

Tickets 01904-623568 or online yorktheatreroyal.co.uk