On an easy day each summer, André Sills performs in one show at the Stratford Festival. On a hard one, however, the job is a different beast altogether: On two-show days, Sills appears in two completely distinct productions, flung between plays, genres and atmospheres with barely a few hours to catch his breath.
So goes the festival’s repertory system. It’s one of the hardest ways to work as a performer, but also one of the most rewarding.
But no matter the show, Sills is one of a kind in Canadian theatre. His diction – the mouth feel of each consonant, each thought – is intentional and precise. Directors appreciate that he’s easy to work with; audiences love him because he telegraphs an understanding of Shakespeare’s text that compensates for the 400-odd years between the plays and their audiences. He finds laughs – real, belly-clutching guffaws – in plays that aren’t dependably funny.
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Markham, Ont.-born Sills is one of a kind in Canadian theatre.
This year, his 12th at Stratford, he’ll play the title role in Othello and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both shows will run at the festival’s 600-seat Tom Patterson Theatre. The building is a fortress, its intimate thrust stage a crown jewel in the festival’s portfolio of theatres.
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“There’s a confrontation we get to have with the audience there,” says the Markham, Ont.-born Sills. “There’s something special about that space.”
Sills now lives year-round in Stratford, the 33,000-person town about two hours west of Toronto, but he first landed there via the festival’s Birmingham Conservatory in 2005. He’d auditioned for the training program right out of college – George Brown Theatre School in Toronto – but hadn’t gotten in.
But after a year of working, learning and improving his craft, he finally got his chance while working on – what else? – one of Shakespeare’s plays: Much Ado About Nothing, to be precise, as part of Dream in High Park in Toronto. (Sophia Walker, a close friend, was one of his castmates.)
“I got the call and was extremely excited, but I knew Sophia had auditioned and hadn’t heard anything yet,” he says. “A day or two later, she came to me jumping up and down: ‘We’re going to Stratford!’ So we kicked off our Stratford journeys together, and 20 years later, we’re both still doing things, and making it happen in this business.”
That’s an understatement. Walker is one of the most consistently employed actors in Toronto, and while Sills has taken a few summers off from Stratford – mostly for contracts at the Shaw Festival – he’s become one of the company’s regulars, a workhorse capable of finding depth in the comedies and laughs in the tragedies. Though he’s perhaps best known for his portrayal of the title role in Robert Lepage’s landmark Coriolanus in 2018, he’s also had memorable turns in plays such as The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth and The Tempest; he additionally directed Get That Hope, Andrea Scott’s loose adaptation of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in 2024.
It’s a career most theatre-obsessed youths could only dream of. But Sills, a rugby enthusiast who grew up performing at Agincourt Pentecostal Church in Scarborough, always knew he wanted to change people’s lives through acting. And he wasn’t scared of Stratford’s imposing theatres: The megachurch, his childhood self’s stage of choice for Christmas pageants and plays, held 2,200 people.
“Those experiences reinforced for me that theatre can inform people, it can change minds, if we really buy into it,” he says. His family was supportive of his aspirations, he adds, but drilled into him that if he was going to pursue show business, he was going to do it right: “They encouraged me to really build my foundation, and get the right training, and not just go be an extra in some movie,” he says. “They were very serious about me getting trained, and I’m grateful to them for encouraging that.”
The Birmingham Conservatory left Sills with exercises he still uses today, including one called “imaging,” in which an actor visualizes every phrase, every simile, in a passage of dialogue. “You’re taking a chunk of text and painting a picture in your mind,” says Sills. “If I’m working through a very thick bit of text, it helps to think of the pictures.”
That’s one of the thousands of tools in his tool box as he embarks on his “Double-O” season – Othello and Oberon. Exercises like imaging help keep roles separate, he says, a crucial skill for actors working in repertory, or playing multiple parts at once.
“It’s cool to have an opportunity like this one, where the two characters speak to each other,” he muses. “But the work is making sure that each character is true to himself, and not trying to meld that together.”
As Sills tells it, a colleague once suggested he think of All’s Well That Ends Well’s Lavatch as a precursor to King Lear’s fool. The advice was well-intentioned but useless, recalls Sills, whose knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays verges on encyclopedic: “It’s a different play, a different set of circumstances,” he says, enunciating each word as if performing a soliloquy. “I don’t mind noticing similarities between roles – they happen, they speak to each other, that’s fine – but it’s also my job to see how they function in service of their own show.”
Another weapon in the actor’s arsenal: a trip this past winter to Italy, Cyprus and Morocco to better understand the psychology of Othello, who over the course of the play descends into madness against a backdrop of war. Sills played the star-crossed lead for the first time at Hart House Theatre in 2004, and again with St. Louis Black Repertory Company in 2008. He understudied Philip Akin in Stratford’s 2007 production.
Sills chats with Jessica B. Hill before rehearsals of Othello. Sills stars as the title character in the upcoming production, which opens June 19 at the Stratford Festival.
But playing the title role – not his understudy – at North America’s largest repertory theatre company needed research beyond this country’s borders.
The trip was formative and informative in equal measures, he explains: “There was something special about being able to touch these lands, touch these cultures, in a way that really informs the play. In the play, Othello talks about being this one Black man in the world of whiteness, but in reality, we were always there.”
Feeling everything – the military history of Venice, the political tumult of Cyprus and its ghost towns – was “grounding” for Sills as he stepped into the rehearsal hall, he says. “These different countries have so much history – it was mind-opening to see them in person.”
According to directors Graham Abbey (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Haysam Kadri (Othello), Sills applies the same thoughtfulness to rehearsals that he does to his travel plans. “He leads by example,” says Kadri. “He takes care of other actors like I’ve never seen before: He’s mindful of who gets heard in the room. He’s someone young Black artists, and other artists of colour, can look to and see as a real sustained path forward as an artist.”
Abbey, another of the festival’s most recognizable actors, concurs: “He comes to work with every ounce of his energy,” he says. “He’s exceptional: He comes to the room prepped and ready to work on that play that day. These two plays are so different, and sometimes, sure, he’ll notice when he adds a little bit of Othello to Oberon. But he was also one of the first people to call me in the off-season to chat about Oberon’s journey, which for any other actor would be a discussion on the first day of rehearsal.” While Oberon is not a small part, he explains, Othello is the far bigger lift between the two.
“He phoned me two months in advance, asking to chat about this guy,” continues Abbey. “And I was like, ‘Isn’t there another guy you should be thinking about?’ I so appreciate that rigour.” He adds that, at 6 foot 2, Sills towers over castmates, a trait he uses to his advantage when performing swordfights and duels: Behind the scenes, he’s a gentle giant, says Abbey. But in the spotlight, he’s formidable, with a voice that oscillates between a menacing growl and a full-chested roar.
For Sills, the work is worth it, even – especially – when it’s hard. “Sometimes, I finish the day and still have all this energy that I don’t know what to do with,” he says of working through difficult scenes – the quintessentially Shakespearean vignettes of sexual violence, suicide and anguish that have punctuated his career. “This year, I’m being patient with myself.” And while Sills doesn’t shy away from the occasional unscripted joke – in the rehearsal hall, around town and even, sometimes, on stage – there’s a time and a place for it. “If someone tried to prank me in Othello, I think I would lose my mind,” he says, laughing.
“This is the season I’ve been waiting for for a long time,” he continues. “This is the right time for me to come to Othello. I’m jumping in head first and hoping everybody else follows. I believe in the story. It’s a love story. And I want to show the tragedy of it.”
Sills says he has been anticipating this, his 12th Stratford season, for a long time.