“She, like Myrtle, has true vulnerability,” says Rufus Wainwright, who has written more than 20 new songs for the show. “I can tell instinctively that a lot is riding for her on this role and that she is fully committed to take this to where it has to go.”
Smith has only ever really known a life of performance: Her parents, Marilyn and Colin, played as part of a country and western duo and, from the age of six, a young Sheridan would sometimes join them on stage. As a teen she won a place in the National Youth Music Theatre and at 16, when a production of Bugsy Malone in which she was starring transferred to the West End, she moved to London and into a two-bedroom flat with five others. She bagged an agent and a role in Into the Woods at the Donmar Warehouse followed. Smith has worked consistently ever since.
I ask if the job is a lonely one, and Smith tells a story about how her mum would always badger her to have kids: “And my dad would say, ‘Oh, shut up, Marilyn. She doesn’t have to have them if she doesn’t want them.’” In the immediate moments after her father died, Smith recalls, she and her mother were sitting by his bedside, “And I’ve never told anyone this,” she continues, her voice breaking. “[My mum said], ‘You have to have a child, Sheridan.’ And I went,” she looks disbelieving, “‘Mum, like, now?’ And she went, ‘No, no, not for me—so that someone can care for you the way you just cared for your dad.’”
Suddenly, Smith is laughing. “It sounds [like] I’ve just had a child to look after me in my old age now! But that wasn’t the point of the story. The point being: It is lonely, but now I have my son I don’t feel lonely anymore. I don’t feel lonely.”
Billy, her son, was born in lockdown, when Smith and her then partner, Billy’s dad, Jamie Horn, were living in a big converted barn in the Essex countryside. Since they split in 2021, she’s returned to London. Now that she’s single in the city, is she on the apps? It’s the first time she blushes. “I did get on the apps… I met the father of my child on Tinder,” she says, “and then went on Raya, but I’m gonna lay off them,” she says, dissolving into laughter. “I’m too busy—I’ve got a script to learn!”