Will Antenbring Steps Up

At first, Will Antenbring couldn’t see it. It wasn’t even the first time that the 25-year-old actor had auditioned to play Harry Kane, arguably England’s greatest-ever football player, in playwright James Graham’s Dear England: a fictionalized retelling of how manager Gareth Southgate conquered his own footballing demons to revolutionize the waning national team, transforming them into a beacon of unity against the backdrop of broken Brexit Britain. It began life on stage at London’s National Theatre in 2023. Antenbring tried for the part then, but didn’t get it. Some time later, a TV adaptation was announced by the BBC. He tried again. Months of auditions followed. All the while, when he looked in the mirror, there was no Captain Kane. That’s until he did something he’d never done in his two decades and change thus far: he grew a beard.

“Suddenly, I just started seeing it on my face,” the actor says over Zoom. “I know I’m not a dead ringer [for him], but I was reading autobiographies, and looking at videos and pictures of him constantly. You suddenly start to see that person come over you.” Antenbring pauses. He smirks. “Crazy sentence.”

It’s an early May morning, some days after the first episode of Dear England has enjoyed a swishy premiere at a cinema on London’s Leicester Square. In a funny coincidence, this is the second time we’ve met this week, as I happened to be hosting the post-show Q&A panel. Forgive me for conjuring the specter of the part that every single handsome, debonair, and crucially, British actor has been linked to for the past decade, but I have to say it: he struck me as a little James Bond. Antenbring confessed then, as he does now, to some understandable pre-match nerves. “I was shitting myself,” he recalls, thinking about the moments before the panel kicked off. For what it’s worth, he nailed his time on stage. Even if he did reject my very public attempt to recruit him to my seven-a-side team.

Dear England was met with acclaim when it debuted at the National, both for its dissection of a nation in the throes of its post-Brexit identity crisis, and how the men’s national team—with all of its dizzying, pint-hurling excitement—has managed to bring people together despite it all. And as team captain, Kane quite literally wore the new values of Southgate’s England on his sleeve: tolerance, respect, belief in the collective, inclusivity, and joy.

He has also been one of the more cruelly pastiched players during his decade-plus run in the national team, owing primarily to his Daffy Duck lisp. It would’ve been easy for Antenbring to inadvertently slip into parody, but he was more interested in trying to find the essence of Kane than in striking a hammy impersonation. “I’m never going to be able to kick a ball in the way that he can, but I can try to understand what’s going on behind the scenes,” he says. “A lot of the show is about media scrutiny. To add on to that scrutiny, I think, would be completely missing the point...”

You’d expect this level of empathy from an actor playing any real-life figure — that’s just the job. But Antenbring is also an Arsenal fan, and though Kane now plies his trade in Germany at Bayern Munich, the footballer spent many years as the prolific talisman of Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal’s North London rivals, haunting the Emirates Stadium with a litany of heartbreaking match-winners. In a way, then, Antenbring kind of played the devil. What did his fellow Gooners think? “My brother mostly just said, ‘They’re not going to make you put on a Tottenham shirt, are they?’” he recalls. “But to be honest, even Arsenal fans, they do respect Kane…He’s like an everyman. Every person who has met him just beams about him. I always just wanted to just be as close to him as possible.” The goal wasn’t to take the piss, Antenbring says; it was to humanize.

Speaking to the national trauma associated with the England men’s team—the now sixty years of hurt, as the song goes, since they won their last and only World Cup—Antenbring’s earliest memory of watching them goes back to their torrid showing at the tournament in 2010. “I come from a small village, and [it was] everyone in the pub watching us against the USA,” he says. He specifically recalls one of many nightmare moments: goalkeeper Rob Green “having a mare,” as he puts it, as Green allowed a hopeful fifty-to-one shot from Clint Dempsey to trickle over the line. England entered the match as heavy favorites, but it ended in a one-all draw, an ominous sign for their early exit to come. “I think that’s a big thing about the show: there is that collective angst about performances from the past,” Antenbring says. “And I remember getting into my late teens, and into my twenties, and there being this feeling of unification under Southgate…That positivity definitely wasn’t there before.“

That’s not to say that Southgate’s tenure was without criticism or controversy. The tide might’ve changed as to the mood—but plenty of division remained, among fans and media pundits alike, around his tactics. “As a fan at the time, I was extremely scathing,” Antenbring says. Weren’t we all, I say. “We’re English, so you are as pessimistic as possible all the time,” he agrees. Like many others then caught up in the maelstrom of #SouthgateOut scrutiny, Antenbring’s perspective has shifted since. After all, it’s hard to argue with England’s most consistent tournament run of all time, outdoing the much-venerated Golden Generation of the noughties, and even the halcyon nineties: semi-final, final, quarter-final, final. “I think what he did for the England team hasn’t been matched since ’66,” Antenbring says. “Hopefully, we can take the next step at the World Cup.”

At the time of our interview, England’s first game at the World Cup is still a month and a half away; there’s optimism for how they’ll do under new manager Thomas Tuchel, but France and Spain remain the bookies’ favorites. On the plus side: neither of us know it yet, but Arsenal will lift the Premier League trophy in a few weeks, and make it to their first Champion’s League final since 2006. (“After every game, I text two people: I text Edem [Ita-Duke], who plays Rashford, and my dad,“ Antenbring says. “Every time we’re just like, ‘Oh god, it’s so close.’”) Perhaps the summer will come with a triple-whammy of joy for Antenbring: his small screen breakout, a first Premier League title in twenty-two years for Arsenal, and maybe, just maybe, football will finally come home. But right now, he’s mostly excited for people to see Dear England.

“It’s the first time I’ve had something like this come out,” he says. “And look, if we can have any sort of hand in an uptick in form for the England team, I will take that.”

Dear England is now streaming on BBC iPlayer.