Interview | Actor Jordan Waller talks ‘daddies, dykes and dicks’ ahead of his debut solo show

Words: Tim Heap

Openly gay actor Jordan Waller is set to open his first ever one-man show, The D Word.

Having starred in historical dramas including Victoria and The Darkest Hour, the actor has created a show based on his own experience growing up with three mums.

Jordan sits down with Attitude for an interview about living with three mums, growing up gay and telling ‘the impossible story of definition — mainly through masturbation’.

Your new show, The D Word, is about to have its first run at London’s Vault Festival. What is the D word in question?

I’m lucky as there isn’t just one D in my life. There are so many… Daddies, Dykes, Dicks and Death. Also Dawn, my dead mum and the beating heart of the show.

She’s not my biological mother, but rather my second mother, as I was raised by two women via artificial sperm donor insemination.

After I lost Dawn to cancer two years ago, I suffered from an existential crisis, struggling to understand what she was to me and therefore who I was as a person.

All of a sudden I wanted to track down my sperm donor father to try to fill in the gaping hole that she left in my life. The D Word ultimately tells the impossible story of definition — mainly through masturbation. 

Is it your first one-man show? How long has the idea been gestating?

I always warned my mother’s that the payback for bringing me up in an unconventional way would be that I’d write a French Farce about them and their lesbian friends living in a big house, somewhere like Eastbourne.

And that I’d play every part. So this is that, but more truthful. It’s the first thing I’ve written and performed like this and I’m very scared!

You were born by sperm donation, have three mothers and are gay yourself – how did you navigate growing up? Did your home set up cause problems for you?

Before school, my set-up was utterly mundane. It was — gasp — normal. To me, at least. It’s only when I started school that I noticed I was different.

And when my mothers were outed by a rather pernicious little teacher at St. John’s Primary in Bristol (no qualms in naming and shaming) I was bullied relentlessly — like every fabulous person is.

But then I moved to a different secondary school and suddenly gay was brilliant. It was cool. People were jealous of my manifold mums. Not to mention all the dogs.

I’m so lucky to live in a time where it’s more acceptable — and I think it’s crucial that we never forget the huge human sacrifice and struggle that the gay community has endured to get us where we are.

And, while life in the leafy, bougie provinces of Bristol in the early noughties was more or less accepting of me, there’s still miles to go in the world and we must continue to fight for those rights and ensure their longevity — all the while working to preserve difference and helping to better our heterosexual cousins, who just get it so wrong so often. 

Will your mums be coming to see the show? How much do they feature in it – and do they know?!

They will. They are the show. It’s a sad fact, but without them, I’m nothing. My mums are the most supportive parents alive. Even the dead one.

I could not ask for better — they will come and support whatever I do. They’ll never be offended, no matter how much I take the piss out of them, or impersonate them or criticise them.

Women are incredible because they take whatever you throw at them with deep understanding and unparalleled grace. Their love is unconditional and I’m the luckiest boy in the world to have it, threefold. 

Was it cathartic to write?

I’ve written two feature films to date that are showing later this year (a Brexit comedy-horror called Go Home, and a comedy-drama with the wonderful Bill Kenwright called Off The Rails): they both have daunting budgets and a lot of pressures attached to them.

But this show is without doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. And the scariest I will ever perform.

It’s very autobiographical, and I find it painful not so much because of the subject matter (losing a parent, coming from a super gay family, being desperately alone), but because it’s very tricky to make a compelling story out of the muddy narrative of real life.

I had to detach myself from what actually happened, to a certain extent, and really mine my experience for the truth in order to make something that is entertaining and not purely onanistic.

Whether it’s successful or not, I don’t know — but it was hugely rewarding and even healing at times. 

Did you ever crave a father figure growing up? Or did you have that to an extent in someone else?

I think all the world’s problems are based on absent fathers. So many wars could have been avoided if a dictator’s father had just said, ‘I love you’. So, in many ways, my absent-father syndrome is the very lack that drives me — creatively, socially and, perhaps, sexually.

And I’m incredibly grateful for the mystery, and difficulty, that it has wrought on my psyche. It’s a tremendous pain to accept absence of any kind — and I talk as someone who recently lost his mother.

But living alongside that absence is also wonderful: accepting it as part of you makes you cherish what you do have, including yourself, even more.

Without wading into the nature/nurture debate, do you think that having gay parents meant you felt more freedom to explore your own sexuality?

As it stands, the narrative is that we’re all born straight and then ‘become’ gay. If you flipped that around, everyone would be gay, obviously — it’s more fun, you’re richer, and you live longer.

So societal narratives are a part of the puzzle, but maybe not the key. I would say that if we didn’t feed stories about daddies and mummies and Peppa Pigs to our children at bedtime, we would all probably turn out to be very fluid.

Sex is ultimately pleasure and thank the Lord Gloria there are so many ways to achieve it. Really, there’s no such thing as gay or straight. Society forces those definitions on us. 

Gay as a word and concept didn’t really exist until it needed to; it is a heavily political term, I think, because it inherently implies a choice to be yourself: to shout out, ‘This is me and I have the right to exist.’ It’s incredible and should be applauded wherever we see it.

What was your coming out experience like? Were you nervous?

Not at all — my mother told me I was gay in a Pizza Express when I was eleven. Then I ordered the dough balls. 

Do you think alternative family set ups have become much more normalised and ‘accepted’ in recent years?

The word normal is so ugly. We shouldn’t normalise the gay experience — we should keep its uniqueness and its wonder alive.

We need to keep churning out narratives of different types of experience, in order to show how wonderful it is to be different.

Everyone is different and this is where the gay experience is queen. Gay is different and fabulously so. We lead the way — by not being normal.

I read in an interview that you were going to donate sperm yourself – what’s your reasoning for wanting to do that?

Heterosexuals seem to be imbued with some mysterious ability to procreate — which is great, but, as Jeremy Kyle evinces, it doesn’t mean they necessarily make the best parents.

The wonderful thing about gays having children is that they can’t do it by mistake; their level of commitment is, by definition, going to be greater on average just because it’s such a bloody biological faff.

And more expensive than seven pints and a two minute fumble in the back of a Mazda.

Therefore, I think it’s wonderful to be able to give the opportunity of life and family to those who, for whatever reason, might not have the right puzzle pieces themselves. It created me and I’m eternally grateful for that. Gay it forward.

Also — wanking is great. Imagine making people happy when you do it (as opposed to deeply disappointed, or disturbed).

Do you hope you have a family of your own one day?

Yes. And lots of kids. 

You play Lord Alfred Paget in ITV’s Victoria. Though there’s no hard evidence that he was gay in real life, he has a gay storyline in the series. Do you think those kind of revisions are important, for representing different types of people where they otherwise may be absent?

I don’t really care if he was actually gay — he had a wife and lots of children and yeah, there’s little evidence of any homosexuality (though he did keep a Golden Retriever he called Mrs Bumps whose neck was adorned with a locket carrying an effigy of the queen in it… so who knows?).

History, ultimately, is a fiction that we use to understand the truth of humanity. The truth is that there were gay people throughout time, who may not have been out and I think the show maps very sensitively the difficulties that these individuals would have faced. Facts are boring; truth is great.

And we need more gays on the television! More gay stories. And more gay actors playing straights. That’s progress.

Jordan has written and stars in The D Word, running from 13-17 February at London’s Vault Festival. Tickets available here. Photographs by Bartek Szmigulski.