'The most punk rock thing we can do is be unapologetically ourselves'

Yahoo

21-03-2025

Mason Alexander Park speaks to Yahoo UK for Queer Voices about their play Much Ado About Nothing, The Sandman season 2, and the impact of trans and non-binary people on the arts.
They are an actor of the stage and screen, known for playing Desire in The Sandman, Ian Wright in Quantum Leap and many more.
Park made their West End debut with The Jamie Lloyd Company in The Tempest with Sigourney Weaver, they now star with Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in Much Ado About Nothing.
Much Ado About Nothing is being performed at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane until 5 April.
I think the best advice I could give anyone, but especially to my fellow transgender and non-binary siblings, is just to endure.
Attempt to be as unapologetically yourself as you possibly can because your humanity, your experience as a human being, adds up to the beautiful fabric of what makes the experience of being on Earth at the same time as all of these diverse, amazing individuals so exciting and so important.
You're a part of this larger community that would not look nearly as colourful if you in any way try to dim who you actually are. Some of the most punk rock things that we can do as individuals is be unapologetically ourselves.
Theatre has always pushed boundaries when it comes to queerness and the representation of queerness on stage. Maybe that's because theatre just attracts a lot of queer people in general and gives them an opportunity to write, and to direct, and to produce so we can present our own stories more frequently than you might in other factions of the entertainment industry, like film or television.
I think theatre has this amazingly rich history of playing with gender going all the way back to Shakespeare's time, that still rings true today.
I'm currently starring in The Jamie Lloyd Company's play Much Ado About Nothing as Margaret, it's my second time working with the troupe as I made my West End debut in The Tempest as Ariel.
I find the experience of working on both of these shows to be so exhilarating, I never imagined myself getting to do Shakespeare quite at this level, especially not for the first time, and especially not with this insane company. And it's just been a dream, I mean, it's rare that you get to make a Shakespeare debut opposite Sigourney Weaver. It's really a once in a lifetime experience.
It's really amazing that with so many roles throughout my career, I've been able to play with gender as I've grown as I've sort of been able to express myself in different ways, and so these two shows have been really, really fun because Shakespeare always toys with gender anyway.
There's so much mistaken identity in so many of his plays that literally revolve around the concept of gender, and they're incredibly queer pieces of of theatre.
Neither of that really exists in either of these pieces so it's quite fun to be a trans individual in a play where I can just be playing a character and there isn't a discussion around gender or that there really isn't anything plot wise that revolves around any of those things. I just get to be like any other actor in the piece and just play a role in a great piece of theatre.
It's quite fun to get to play all these different roles that have been imagined by so many different people, people of various gender expressions and identities. I've had roles like Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Itch and Frank-n-Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, characters who through a modern lens we can kind of see as gender non-conforming characters, or as trans characters, or however you might want to prescribe an identity to them.
But at the time, obviously, they were incredibly transgressive in a different way so it's just fun that the reinvention continues to happen and people can revisit old things and update them a little bit.
The Sandman, in which I play non-binary character Desire, is such a special series. That character was always explicitly non-binary in the comics and so to be able to bring that to life in the television adaptation and get to play someone that's a part of a story that is large and so fantastical was just one of the greatest gifts ever.
Those characters are beautifully complicated and remarkably complex, and so much fun to play. And this upcoming season, this final season of the show, really dives into the family dynamics way more so than Season 1.
It was so much fun to film and I'm just really excited for people to to get to more of that character.
I would say some of the major cultural touchstones for me growing up would be Will and Grace, I very vividly remember watching Will and Grace with my mum and the shared familial like comfort of interacting with queer storytelling really made me feel safe in who I was and made me interested in exploring who I was as an individual.
The fact that was on network television, that was it was just happening in my house, and me and my mum would stop everything to watch it was such a testament to the power that a show like that can have. It was a big inspiration for why I ended up doing Quantum Leap on NBC many decades later because of the effect that network television had on me as a kid.
In terms of like movies and theatre, you know, I fell in love with performers like John Cameron Mitchell and Alan Cumming, who were known for playing these almost genderless, boundless characters playing Hedwig and playing the Emcee in Cabaret.
Those roles really inspired me to seek a further career in theatre, which I don't think I would have done had I not experienced their artistry as performers and not been able to imagine some kind of future for myself because of it.
Alan Cumming is definitely up there as one of my LGBTQ+ role models, he saw The Tempest which was a really wonderful. It was nice to get to spend an evening with him and sort of talk to him about life and about our work. But yeah, Alan and John, when I was a kid were truly queer icons and they were people that closely resembled an aspect of myself that I wanted to understand better.
But there's so many remarkable people in queer history too that goes all the way back to like Edward 'Ned' Kynaston, who was a Shakespearean boy player who was incredibly well known for playing female roles on stage.
Ray Bourbon and Jim Bailey who were of different time periods —one living and becoming famous in the 20s and one later in the 60s— who were these transgressive female impersonators that really were at the height of their fame in the time periods where people don't necessarily remember, or think, that was something that was going on.
Christine Jorgensen, too, the list really is kind of endless. There are so many remarkable trans individuals and a non-binary individuals that have contributed to art and to society for hundreds, thousands of years. But those are just a few that come to mind when I think of people that inspire me.
I am in a lot of films and TV shows I wish I had as a kid, shows like The Sandman or National Anthem, a film that I did recently that meant a lot to me. As someone who was born in the South, in America, I really had never seen queerness represented in places outside of major metropolitan cities.
It's so easy to set a show in New York or Los Angeles and have your queer characters flourish in that regard, but often you don't really see queer people thriving in the American Southwest and so that was a big reason why I took that job on National Anthem.
In terms of the future, I hope to see more and more trans and non-binary creators being given the opportunity to write and produce their own stories. So much of the queer media that I fell in love with, and have consumed, most of it was created by and written by straight, cis people.
It still lead to some really remarkable touchstone moments and got us to where we are today but I think the next step to really begin diversifying the kinds of stories that get told is to give power to the people that need it most. I think we have to be empowered and supported in the same way.
There are A-listers that have production companies and have these massive teams of people that help develop really amazing star vehicles for themselves or their friends, and there are very few queer A-listers, unless they're gay men, beautiful, white gay men.
It's really rare to find the Hunter Schafer's of the world, the Laverne Cox's of the world. So much so that you can probably count them on one or two hands.
I think that as soon as more people trust us as storytellers and provide us with the platform to create our own work, the more stories there'll be. We're not going to see a whole lot of forward movement because it really does require us behind the camera, and it requires us at the table making the decisions in order for it to get to the next level.
It's not enough to just be cast in the thing, if you're lucky to be cast in a thing. That's certainly not how Tom Cruise became Tom Cruise, you know what I mean? We'll never have the trans equivalent of Tom Cruise unless someone is willing to build that person's career to a point where they are actually making the decisions themselves, and creating the work for other people.
So that's something that I hope happens within the next decade, which I really do think that it will. I think it's incredibly possible, 20 years ago I would have never have imagined Hunter Schafer existing in quite the way that she is.
It's amazing to watch someone like that thrive and imagine that maybe one day she'll have a production company of her own and want to make a film or a series that centres on voices of people that are similar to her experience.
Much Ado About Nothing is being performed at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane until Saturday, 5 April.