Hugh Dancy Is Not Hiding His Secretly Pervy True Self

Don’t read too much into his wearing a dog collar onstage.

By Jada Yuan

New York Magazine

October 31, 2011

According to Hugh Dancy, the age of the repressed British man is over. “There’s this idea that we’re all people who are buttoned up and then underneath there’s a whole cauldron of complexity and neuroses,” he says when we meet for breakfast not far from where he and his wife, Claire Danes, live in Soho. “A generation ago, it was definitely true. Now that’s not the case. I mean, in essence we’ve all been Americanized, you know?” But that doesn’t mean he thinks it’s appropriate to talk about certain matters in public.

Which is difficult not to do, given that he’s starring in an S&M play-within-a-play called Venus in Fur on Broadway. His character, Thomas Novachek, is a somewhat priggish playwright who willingly but fitfully sheds his inhibitions for a force-of-nature unknown actress, played by Nina Arianda. In the play, she’s auditioning for Novachek’s adaptation of the scandalous 1870 novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The term masochism is derived from Sacher-Masoch’s name, and the book is about a man who persuades a woman to take him as her slave. Yes, in the play version, Dancy-as-Novachek ends up with a dog collar on. But the power dynamics between director and actress shift, and not always in tandem with the slave-and-“goddess” relationship on the page. As Dancy puts it, “I feel like I’m having multiple personality breakdowns at the same time.”

http://nymag.com/arts/theater/features/hugh-dancy-2011-11/