Guest blog post for a female-founded talent agency
(Names changed to protect client anonymity)
Project summary
Okay, we can’t name names here, as we’re sworn to secrecy. (Seriously, we signed an NDA – no spilling the beans!) Suffice it to say, this female-founded talent agency is making waves in the entertainment industry. It represents some of the most amazing actors and creatives working in TV, film, and theatre today.
The agency has a fabulous all-women team of agents who work hard to support their clients. We particularly admire their advocacy for the Black, Asian, and minority ethnic clients on their books.
To write a slick and professional yet conversational guest blog post introducing two of the agency’s West End clients.
Our first port of call was to craft creative, thoughtful interview questions for the actors. Asking the right questions ensured the blog post touched on the projects they were starring in and their great relationships with the agency. We spent a while researching their acting profiles and identifying unique angles for questions to illuminate their onstage experiences.
The writing process for this client represented a novel approach for us. The agency’s founder loves content that places the interviewee’s voice front and centre. But she didn’t want a straightforward Q&A style piece.
So, we took the two interview transcripts and carefully wove them together. We linked answers with common threads to create a seamless flow between the actors’ stories. We selected the juiciest behind-the-scenes insights and personal anecdotes while showcasing the bloomin’ brilliance of the agency’s team.
An long-form interview / editorial hybrid that wouldn’t be out of place in an issue of Vanity Fair.
The agency’s founder was over the moon with the style of this piece (and she has exceptionally high standards!). The blog post allowed her to present her team in the best light and promote two of her agency’s clients. (We’ve since written many more of these guest blog posts for her.)
The images below are placeholders and do not belong to the client.
Joe Wells and Aria Regina: West End Murder Mysteries and Working With Talent Agent Vanessa Lennox
Here's the finished result!
Every week, murder mystery lovers gather in London’s West End to immerse themselves in staged adaptations of Agatha Christie classics. Joe Wells and Aria Regina are two of the acclaimed actors starring in some of these gripping murder mysteries. Here, they take us behind the scenes of The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution.
Vanessa Lennox’s Bold Agency represents both Joe and Aria, who explore the appeal of long-running murder mystery shows and share the best things about Bold representing them in this exclusive interview.
Joe And Aria’s Favourite Aspects of Their Murder Mystery Roles
Joe enjoys playing Giles Ralston in The Mousetrap because “he’s the counterpoint to a lot of the ridiculous guests that come into the manor house.” At the beginning of the play, he’s “a man in control,” but then audiences get to enjoy “the deliciousness” of him “losing that control.”
“Unfortunately, there are five or six idiots who are about to walk through the door and present him with all sorts of problems,” Joe explains. A lot of The Mousetrap’s comedy stems from the disconnect between the social norms that Giles expects and the reality that plays out.
Giles’ position as the husband of the house interests Joe, especially as Christie disrupted the gender norms of the time in this play. She’s “written a lot of good stuff about females being in positions of power and calling the shots, which is brilliant for someone writing about 1950s and 1960s Britain,” Joe says.
Meanwhile, Aria “absolutely loves” playing Romaine Vole in Witness for the Prosecution. “Romaine is so wildly intelligent and she’s got such a journey throughout the play,” Aria says. “As an actor, there’s such an opportunity to have a variation of scenes within the show.”
Aria finds Romaine “incredibly fun” to play. “She’s someone who does not adhere to the authority around her. If men tell her what to do, she’s got something in her that wants to do the opposite.”
The Biggest Challenge of Joe and Aria’s Murder Mystery Roles
When playing Giles in The Mousetrap, Joe’s biggest challenge is to handle the huge level of comedy that this character creates in the first act — and then segue into the more serious aspect of the role as the story unfolds.
“The trick with Giles is that you never stop,” Joe says. “For the first 50 minutes, I’m basically bringing in everyone’s bags and taking them upstairs… One of the hardest things is trying to remember the lines about luggage. There are four or five different lines about where I’m going to take the luggage, whose luggage it is, and which bedroom it’s going into.”
Remembering which room Giles has been to can be difficult. “I go offstage and all I’ve got is dead air, but I have to come back onstage as though I’ve just been in the dining room.”
Then, by the time the inspector arrives, “the story flips from this ridiculous entrance of all these guests to a serious issue,” Joe explains. At this point, he has the challenge of balancing Giles’ comedic side with his role as a concerned husband.
Aria has a different challenge to manage when playing Romaine in Witness for the Prosecution. “The hardest thing is, because she’s so intelligent, she thinks so fast,” Aria says. “I’ve got to be so on the ball and awake and present. I cannot take a step back. That’s what’s so hard: the level of alertness that I have to go on with every night.”
How Joe Created His Version of Giles Ralston
As The Mousetrap is the longest-running show in the world, many actors have played Giles before Joe, including Hugh Bonneville and Richard Attenborough. Unfazed, Joe has found creating his portrayal of the character a welcome challenge.
“I’ve seen Giles played so many different ways,” including as “a suffering, slightly pathetic husband,” Joe says. “I chose to play him as more of a little bulldog, very protective, someone who likes to let everyone know that he knows what’s going on, even if he doesn’t.”
Joe adds that “with long-running shows, as you haven’t originated the part, you are taking care of it.” When playing Giles, he feels he is “taking care of the writing and Christie’s legacy.”
“I’ve done a couple of long-running shows before and I’ve never felt the stress of trying to do it like someone else did. If you try to do somebody else’s version, it ends up as a bit of a nightmare and a creative dead end.”
The Appeal of Performing in Long-Running Murder Mysteries
Given that The Mousetrap is “the queen of the West End,” Joe finds “the appeal is that you are in something very recognisable.” With so many people booking tickets, there’s no “quiet Tuesday matinée,” Joe explains. “We’re full every day.”
“There’s a pride in saying you’ve been in such a well-known show. And you have a fraternity of other actors who have been through it. So, there are picnics and meals where everybody from previous versions comes back. You can meet all the other Giles and have a chat.”
Joe also loves that The Mousetrap is “a real actor’s show. There are no microphones. It’s just about acting. It’s just entering and exiting and telling a good story.”
Meanwhile, Aria finds being part of a long-running show “quite calming” because she knows that audiences consistently love Witness for the Prosecution. “When you are rehearsing for a new play, the thing that’s so nerve-wracking is you don’t know whether the work that you’re doing is going to land,” she explains.
Although Aria is glad of Witness for the Prosecution’s consistently great reception, she is also keen to put her slant on her character. “We were given a lot of freedom to make the characters our own,” she says. “We speak to some audience members who’ve come back, or we speak to other people that worked in the show, and they talk about how the last show was completely different.”
Why Audiences Love Onstage Agatha Christie Murder Mysteries
Joe notes that although “Christie said she didn’t necessarily think The Mousetrap was the best of her writing, something caught the imagination of people.” The play has now been running for 72 years and “keeps itself going.”
“I think that’s the joy of it,” Joe says. “People want to go and see it for that reason… You’re in a room with 1,000 other people and you can turn to your mate and elbow them and say, ‘I think it’s that one.’”
“When they’ve seen it, people say, ‘Oh, I want to go back and see if I can work out the clues.’ For example, the actress Tilda Swinton came to the show and then came back with other members of her family.
“It’s joining the dots in your brain as live theatre,” Joe says. “It’s like a difficult crossword that people love to do. It’s the satisfaction of having worked it out.”
During the interval of The Mousetrap, Joe remembers hearing audience members discussing their theories about which character had committed murder. “We’d hear people getting up and going, ‘Oh, I think it’s this person,’ ‘it’s that person.’ We would hear these brilliant thoughts that people had, like, ‘Oh, I think it’s this person because of that moment there.’”
Quintessentially British and Richly Historic
Joe also believes that staged Christie murder mysteries are popular for their quintessential Britishness. “You see the RSC for Shakespeare, but you see Christie because it’s this idea of Britishness encapsulated. It’s a bit like watching Downton Abbey on TV. It’s a period piece and everyone’s as British as it comes,” especially with the forties and fifties costumes.
“The other thing is you have this beautiful red curtain, which you don’t usually have in the West End any more,” Joe adds. “We don’t have old red curtains that get pulled up as the show starts because we have so much technology now. But this show celebrates the mechanism of theatre as it was in the previous century.”
To add to the appeal of Christie’s plays, she has sold more publications than any other writer bar Shakespeare. She’s also the only female writer whose work is a regular on the West End. “She’s been there for 70 years and she hasn’t moved,” Joe says. “It is an extraordinary feat. It really, really is.”
Complex, Layered Plots
Meanwhile, Aria says that “Christie’s writing appeals to multiple people for different reasons and on different levels.” For example, on a surface level, Witness for the Prosecution has “a really clever plot.” Christie “allows you to think that you’re ahead of her and then, right at the end, she rips the rug from under your feet.”
“But then, on a deeper level, Witness for the Prosecution isn’t just a murder mystery. It’s a play about prejudice, privilege, the systems of justice in our country, class, passion, and betrayal. She’s exploring things that really appeal to modern audiences. It’s complex and layered. Everyone walks out having loved it for different reasons.”
Audience Immersion
Joe believes The Mousetrap is especially captivating because of its “suggestion to the audience.” He enjoys “giving little red herrings” by looking “suspicious at absolutely nothing,” “leading people down a bit of a path and then other times smoothing things over.”
Witness for the Prosecution offers a similar level of immersion, with the audience forming the jury for the story. Aria finds this “so exciting.” This is the first show she’s been in where the audience is “such a part of the experience.”
“When you walk onstage, you can hear them whispering and chatting,” she says. “In other shows, you want them to be completely silent. But in this show, it’s really exciting because they are part of the journey with you.”
“As you take the audience along the story step by step, they’re so vocal at every twist and turn of the plot. That’s really satisfying. When they’re reacting, whispering, hissing, gasping, it propels you because it gives you such an energy.
Each audience is different, with the interactions “fizzing in a slightly different way every night,” Aria says. “Sometimes they’re really quiet, but you can feel them listening and that gives you a really lovely type of focus.” Other audiences are much noisier, especially when they’ve booked tickets for a festive get-together.
Signing With Vanessa Lennox’s Bold Agency
Vanessa Lennox’s Bold Agency signed Joe in 2017 when he was on a National Theatre tour of Jane Eyre. “It just so happened that an agent who used to work for Bold had seen the show and loved it,” Joe says. She arranged for Joe to meet Vanessa Lennox and some of her team at the Bold Agency.
“More than anything, I liked that they were women,” Joe says. “In the arts, there are egos. But, to me, it feels like a lot of women are brilliant at removing that aspect and focusing on the work and what you need to do together.”
Bold signed Aria two years later. At the time, Aria was “frustrated” with where she was in her career. “When I joined Bold, it really changed everything,” she says.
“What I love about Bold is that they’re a very small team. Because of that, it’s a really personal relationship that you get. I need agents I can chat to and ask for advice. I really feel there’s that relationship between us, where I feel comfortable and there’s a back and forth.”
“Second to that, they’re really nice, good, kind people. In this industry, you can run into people who don’t prioritise kindness. But they’re kind, empathetic people, which gives you that comfort and safety net.”
About Vanessa Lennox’s Bold Agency
Bold is a talent agency that represents outstanding actors and creative professionals in television, theatre, commercials, and film. Led by founder Vanessa Lennox, the agency’s experienced team offers comprehensive support and guidance for all aspects of its clients’ careers.
