Shardlake star Arthur Hughes on proving his teachers wrong
With acting being a profession in which most members are unemployed most of the time, all drama graduates worry about their job prospects. But as Arthur Hughes prepared to leave the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2013, he had special reason to be concerned. “I remember becoming very disheartened towards the end that I was never going to work,” he says. “People kept telling me how hard it was going to be. I never saw anyone on stage or TV who looked anything like me.”
He is referring to radial dysplasia, a congenital condition resulting in a shortened forearm and deviated wrist. Hughes’s pessimism about the reaction of casting directors to his “disability ” (his chosen word; others in the community prefer “difference”) is disproved by his being, just over a decade later, aged 32, the star of the new Disney+ series Shardlake, adapted from author CJ Sansom’s historical mysteries about 16th-century lawyer-turned-detective Matthew Shardlake. Hughes, who was born in Aylesbury, came to the attention of the US entertainment giant in 2022 when he was cast as the f irst disabled actor to play Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company, winning a Critics’ Circle prize for best Shakespearean performance.
The Shakespeare and Sansom characters share the spinal condition scoliosis, leading both to sufer the insult “crookback”. For such roles, actors have traditionally worn a prosthetic hump and lurched unevenly across the stage, but Hughes was keen to avoid this. “With my Richard, I didn’t want him to have a limp. I didn’t want him to have a hump.
I wanted him just to be me – with my disability. I was rehearsing Richard III when Shardlake came up and I was wary because I thought, ‘Am I forever doomed to play limping hunchbacked men who hate themselves?’
“But I had good chats with the creative team and then saw the two roles as diferent ways of exploring the weight of being disabled within a society. Shardlake hates himself, but he also has acceptance and mental resilience, and I wanted him to be a bit more proud – unlike Richard, who falls into a huge pit of self-loathing that he then inflicts on others. The least interesting thing about Shardlake is his disability. It’s a very everyday thing that he comes to live with, as has been my experience.”
Lived knowledge is the most common argument for “authentic” casting, but Hughes says it also alters the dynamic of a show. “It changes things for the actors and the audience. Seeing a disabled person insulted on stage or screen is diferent from it happening to someone who’s dressed up with prosthetics. It’s received diferently in the rehearsal room and in performance.”
