Dominic West is quick to admit that he struggled early on in his career, in movies like 28 Days and Mona Lisa Smile. Despite his high-wattage costars, Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts, West felt out of place.
“I was a disaster,” the British actor confessed in an interview with The Guardian. “I just didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t be the all-American guy, I just couldn’t stand it. I think it’s very hard to do those parts because you have to put so much of yourself into them.”
But his background as an Eton actor leads West to believe that he’s become somewhat limited in his career options, despite earning a Golden Globe nomination last year for his work in the BBC series, The Hour. “As an actor, you tend to be typecast, and you tend to probably want to do a greater variety of work than your typecasting might allow,” he noted. “So I’m not pleading I’m terribly disadvantaged and what a hard time I’ve had. But what I’ve always liked is to play lots of different parts that are very different to you, and so in that way you have to go beyond people’s expectations.”
It seem West is doing just that by appearing in the Sheffield Crucible theater’s production of My Fair Lady, where he’s taking on the challenge of playing Henry Higgins (singing and all!)
