The founder of Hackney’s Playhouse East talks to Cosmo Adair
James Alexandrou never wanted to be famous; he just wanted to be an actor. Thrust into the limelight at the age of 11 as the troubled rogue Martin Fowler in EastEnders, he was too young to have contemplated fame, let alone its repercussions. But by the time he quit the soap in 2007 – after featuring in 707 episodes by the age of 21 – he says that he was “very, very famous” and that he only “wanted to not be famous.”
He’s not famous-famous, eighteen years on, but the now 39-year-old is still bruised by the experience. When I meet him at the Playhouse East – the theatre he founded with his wife, the German actress Avital Lvova – he says that tabloids have often “acted incredibly unprofessionally” towards him and he is unwilling to speak about certain things on tape. He declines to answer when I ask him about his early fame because of a recent poor experience on the mental health podcast Secure the Insecure.
He takes me into the theatre, set up for crime drama Down the Road. We sit in a prison cell under a dangling electric light; I hit my head on it. Jokingly, the buzz-cutted Alexandrou asks me not to destroy the set.
When he left EastEnders – despite being “ostensibly quite successful” – he says he felt he was “lacking a lot of acting nous, even though looking back I was undervaluing myself at the time.” So he did lots of theatre and radio, “a great chance to not be on the telly, to keep my head down, and work with actors who were very accomplished”.
His first role after leaving “Enders” was a BBC Radio 3 adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. He starred alongside Michael Gambon and Pinter himself. Alexandrou was “so green that [he] didn’t quite get the gravitas of what and who he was” – but Pinter had “this incredible brain” and was constantly having “a good old laugh”. Alexandrou’s most prized possession is a copy of the script signed by the pair.
He tells me all actors “have to wrestle a lot” to get where they want. Following EastEnders and a flurry of West End shows (Othello and All Quiet on the Western Front, among others), he returned to acting school and, later, did a Masters in directing fiction. I had assumed his acting career post-EastEnders (TV to West End to Fringe) had been intentionally plotted. “God bless you,” he replied. “No [it wasn’t]. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Any actor, every actor, does whatever pays.”
He founded Actors East in 2018 – an acting studio that teaches the Meisner Technique, a form of improvisation – followed by Playhouse East, a theatre-cum-bar and creative space. For their first play, Casserole, Alexandrou was nominated for a “Best Performance” “Offie” (OffWestEnd awards).
Looking around this theatre he’s created, he says: “Small spaces like this are the closest thing to acting on camera. You can’t hide, you can’t get away with anything … In here, you know, it’s like a close-up.”
Cosmo Adair is a postgraduate journalism student at City, University of London. He writes about Haggerston and very little else.