Kyle Soller: I was an over-achieving asshole. I was 'that dude'

It’s 8am, a normally unheard-of hour for a stage actor, but Kyle Soller, recently named Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, is reciting the entire Robin Williams Good Morning, Vietnam monologue verbatim in a Kensington café. Elastic expressions are pinging about his chiselled face, his mop of curls bouncing uncontrollably. ‘I watched Robin Williams from way too early on, which is probably why I was diagnosed with ADD,’ he chirps in his east coast American accent.

Soller, 29, who was brought up in Alexandria, Virginia, is about to open in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Apollo, alongside David Suchet and Roseanne actress Laurie Metcalf.

‘It’s a part that I was very proud to get,’ says Soller. ‘O’Neill’s work is in the consciousness of nearly every American actor. It’s the closest thing we have to Shakespeare.’ He continues the analogy, likening his character Edmund Tyrone to Hamlet. ‘I may sound like a dick, but Edmund is depressive and he’s got super-complex relationships with his parents. He pretty much thinks the world is a useless, empty place and chooses inaction over action,’ he explains. The play, set around a dysfunctional family wrecked by addiction and recrimination, has given Soller his most harrowing part to date. ‘The subject matter is so heavy. I think everybody sees their own family in the Tyrones.’

Soller’s own life sounds distinctly less dysfunctional. His parents, a pharmacology lecturer at the University of California and a former concert pianist, made sure he did everything at high school. ‘I was an over-achieving asshole. I was that dude,’ he jokes. He went on to study history of art at William and Mary College in Williamsburg but abandoned the course to migrate to the UK and audition for RADA and LAMDA, both of which offered him a place. ‘They probably wanted my money,’ he quips.

He is on a roll after impressing critics with an eclectic trinity of roles over the past 18 months: Jim O’Connor in Polly Teale’s Shared Experience Glass Menagerie, followed at the Young Vic by the lead in Richard Jones’s stylised version of Gogol’s The Government Inspector; and then starring opposite Hayley Atwell in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Faith Machine at the Royal Court. ‘I was blown away, exhausted, excited, hungry and full by the end of it,’ he says.

In his third year at RADA Soller met a first- year actress, Phoebe Fox, and they married in 2010. The couple now live in Crouch End with their cat, Bob Hoskins. Fox, who had parts in The Acid Test at the Royal Court and the National’s There Is A War, was also shortlisted for last year’s Evening Standard Outstanding Newcomer Award. Did that cause marital tension? ‘Hell yeah! At first I was like, “I want you to win it,” and she was the same. But a week later my actor’s ego came raging in and I was thinking, “Jesus Christ, I really want that award!”.’

He found out he had been longlisted while working on his first film, Joe Wright’s upcoming rework of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law. The Atonement director had seen Soller in The Government Inspector and was so impressed by his electric performance that he offered him the part of Korsunsky, the master of ceremonies, which involves only five lines but plenty of dancing. ‘I had to learn two routines in two and a half days, choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui [a Sadler’s Wells fixture]. We filmed in corsets for nine hours every day for a week, it was wild.’

The experience has left him hungry for more, possibly in Hollywood. ‘I’d consider working in the US but I’m living here for the time being. I have a responsibility to the cat: she has abandonment issues,’ he says, poker-faced. Whether it’s stateside or in the UK, it will take a lot to appease his insatiable appetite. As Soller puts it, ‘I’m always looking for American-sized portions.’ ES

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is at The Apollo Theatre until 18 August (0844 412 4658; longdaysjourney.co.uk)