Edward Bluemel Is Sexing Up Shakespeare

Edward Bluemel was around thirteen years old when he first encountered Shakespeare on stage. He had just joined a new school and was soon recruited for that year’s ensemble of Macbeth. Playing Lady Macduff’s son, he was only in the play for one scene, at the end of which Lady Macduff and her children are assassinated. It was the stuff of tween dreams: not only did he get to spend most of his time hanging backstage, he was also brutally murdered in front of an audience.

“It was fabulous, I loved it,” the 32-year-old actor recalls. “I wore a little pair of tartan pajamas. I got killed on stage!”

Nowadays, Bluemel is used to having a little more stage time. The first time I can recall seeing him on screen was in Sex Education, in which he portrayed Maeve’s rogueish brother Sean; you might’ve also seen him as an assassin in Killing Eve. This year, he starred in Washington Black, Hulu’s adaptation of the coming-of-age novel that tells the story of a young Black inventor in the nineteenth century.

But here’s why we’re talking about Shakespeare: 2025 also marked Bluemel’s return to the stage for the first time in eight years, opposite Ncuti Gatwa in Born with Teeth, an electrically-charged ninety minutes of historical fiction that devilishly imagines a sexy series of encounters between the Bard and his contemporary rival poet and playwright, Christopher Marlowe.

The show, which was buzzily received across its run on the West End in London, bristles with queer sexual desire; it’s hot, frankly, not least thanks to its intoxicating pair of stars. Bluemel’s Shakespeare brims with neuroses about his art, handwrings over his attraction to another man, and is otherwise a powder keg of inner turmoil. In some scenes, the actor bounces around the stage with the raging power of a stallion. At other times, he adopts the skittishness of a house cat. Maybe it’s the goatee, but watching him in his magnetic pomp, I can’t help but think of a Before Sunrise-era Ethan Hawke.

Which is all to say: this isn’t your English teacher’s Shakespeare. “I’ve got a voice note on my phone that I forward to people who are coming to the play who want context, right,” Bluemel explains. “In that voice note, I describe Marlowe as sort of writing the Marvel films of the era. His are just crowd pleasers; they’re bangers, everyone is so obsessed with them. No one has seen anything like it, the drama, the spectacle…But a lot of it is quite paint-by-numbers.”

By playing with Shakespeare’s sexuality, Born with Teeth is inherently provocative; you might read it as a middle finger to the stuffier, more traditional Shake-scholars out there. But it’s not as though writer Liz Duffy Adams is the first person to have revisited a historical figure through a queer lens. In that sense, Born with Teeth feels very much in keeping with the spirit of Derek Jarman (who himself directed a movie version of Marlowe’s famously gay history play Edward II) and the broader modern shift towards acknowledging hidden queer identities throughout history.

“I find it amazing that people can even ignore it,” Bluemel says of Shakespeare’s alleged bisexuality as depicted in Born with Teeth. “It’s so prevalent in his work. I mean, the sonnets are the obvious ones, when two-thirds of them are written quite clearly to a boy,” he continues, suggesting that they were censored and changed throughout history to make them seem like they were written for a woman. “I’ve seen the occasional bit of backlash against the play, being like, ’Oh, we’re making Shakespeare gay now,’” he says. “And you’re like, ’Are you fucking insane?’ I don’t understand it. To me, it just shows a deep ignorance of all of his work.”

The men flirt against a backdrop of oft-deadly Elizabethean politics, espionage, and the Black Plague. Mortality hangs in the air like a sword of Damocles; no wonder Bluemel’s Shakespeare is such a basket case, almost locked into a perpetual state of existential terror. (Gatwa’s Marlowe has a lot of fun playing with his writing partner’s terrified neuroses.) Nonetheless, such deathly stakes somehow make the men’s dynamic even more charged. “It was important to us that there was the neuroticism that didn’t make it just seem like two confident, sexy, hot guys clashing together,” Bluemel says. “But I think that sexy Shakespeare is an important thing…I mean this not glibly, but sex sells, and we want people to be interested in Shakespeare.”

Perhaps this goes some way in explaining why the Bard has been so regularly horned up in fiction. I suggest that Bluemel is joining a lineage of sexualised Shakespeares: think Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, or his curiously hot depiction in that David Tennant-era episode of Doctor Who. “I think it works to make him…not necessarily sexy, but a sexual being,” Bluemel says.

“Obviously, it’s not always great to make someone a sexual object. But in this context, it just makes the play exciting and fun to watch. It’s a great balance of highbrow Shakespeare references and then, at the same time, [this] fun, sexy love story.”