Mike Faist on Brokeback Mountain: ‘It’s more than a gay cowboy show’

“The gay cowboy show,” says Mike Faist, rolling his eyes. “That’s how Brokeback Mountain came to be seen in Hollywood when they were trying to make the movie. Before Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal signed up, the screenwriters spent 10 years watching actors get interested then flake out because they didn’t want to be in ‘the gay cowboy show’.” 

Faist, the 31-year-old American star of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021), shakes his head. “It’s such a shame because Brokeback hits so much deeper than that. It’s about fear and love and the limits we put on ourselves.”

Eighteen years on from Ang Lee’s groundbreaking film, Faist’s decision to take a role in a new stage version of Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story looks like less of a risk. But he still admits to being “terrified” about making his West End debut in the piece – not least because the film, featuring subtle, Oscar-nominated performances by Gyllenhaal and the much missed Ledger, is “so beloved” that audiences might not welcome a new approach.

Rocking on his heels backstage at London’s @sohoplace theatre, Faist – who received a Tony nomination for the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen – is still wired from rehearsals as he admits: “At first I thought adapting Brokeback for the theatre, with music, sounded like a bad idea.” He laughs. “But then I read the script…”

Playwright Ashley Robinson draws less on the film than on Proulx’s original story to explore the intense, intimate relationship between two young men hired to herd sheep for the summer of 1963 in the wilds of Wyoming. Jack Twist (played by Gyllenhaal in the film and Faist on stage) is a reckless rodeo rider who initiates the physical relationship between the pair, while the quiet Ennis Del Mar (Lucas Hedges taking on the role played on screen by Ledger) is more confused and distressed by his feelings.

Proulx has explained that the story, originally published in The New Yorker, was inspired by a ranch hand she had seen in a Wyoming bar, a lean, muscular man, in his late 60s. She was struck by how “his eyes were fastened not on the dozens of handsome and flashing women in the room but on the young cowboys playing pool”. Perhaps he was just following the game, but the “bitter longing” Proulx read in his gaze led her to wonder if he was “country gay” – and how life might have been for such a man “growing up in homophobic rural Wyoming”.

“Fun fact about Wyoming,” Faist tells me. “There are only two escalators in the entire state. It’s that undeveloped. That’s revealing, right? It tells you a lot.” Faist is an actor who thrives on research. While working on Dear Evan Hansen (about a teenager who dies by suicide) he spent time in online chat rooms talking with people who had attempted to take their own lives. To find the character of Jets leader, Riff, for West Side Story he spent hours poring over Bruce Davidson’s 1959 photographs of “sad, carnal, nihilistic… emaciated and joyous” teenage Brooklyn gang members.

He had already learned a little cowboy swagger for his role in Amazon’s short-lived 2021 drama Panic, in which disaffected Texan high school graduates dare each other to risk their lives in a series of heart-stopping stunts. But to find the “f--- it pulse” of Jack Twist, he “leaned into James Dean. You look at his life, how short and on fire it was. Live fast and die young really was his philosophy. He had such a deep well of gifts to offer in that gorgeous, magnetic way, but he took all the risks and he just didn’t care. And then there’s his sexuality…” 

Although it was covered up after his death, aged 24 in 1955, Dean had sexual relationships with both men and women. When asked about his sexuality, he famously replied: “I’m not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.” Like the Marlboro Man, he had become a pin-up for straight American masculinity, while the truth was much more complicated.

I am definitely getting a little of Dean’s electric energy from Faist today; he is dressed in jeans and white T-shirt and his hair looks hand-raked into a scruffy quiff. But there is no angst in evidence. He drops vintage exclamations of “Jeez Louise!” and “Shucks!” He assures me he’s “an old soul”, but there’s something adorably boyish about him – a wide-eyed sweetness in his zeal that reminds me of Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Faist was born in Gahanna, Ohio, in 1992 and adopted as a baby by Kurt and Julia Faist, who run a real estate business. “My parents were always open about the fact I was adopted and I’m glad they were – although I look a lot like my [adopted] dad, so people couldn’t tell.” He traces his “determination to act” back to watching Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain as a small boy. “I wanted the umbrella and the lamp post. I wanted the music. I wanted all of that magic.” He grins. “Then I saw Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, chasing a tank on a horse, and I was certain that’s what I wanted to do.” Not every child in suburban Ohio would consider that was possible, but Faist “just figured: why not me?”

Before turning 18 he moved to New York to study drama, but dropped out to spend more time auditioning. He scraped a living selling tickets in Times Square and briefly lived in the parking lot of a McDonald’s.

More than a decade later, he is still a vagabond. During the pandemic he sold his apartment in New York and bought a truck that he shares with his 65lb mixed-breed dog, Austin. Faist skirts other questions about his personal life and claims not to remember the first time he got his heart broken. In his mid-20s he shared photographs of his then-girlfriend (dancer Alexis Tilly Evans-Krueger) but now prefers to keep off social media.

What he will say is: “I wasn’t such a risk taker in my mid-20s. But something changed during the pandemic, maybe. I think grief teaches us a lot. Once you’ve really experienced grief for the first time, everything kicks into perspective. You stop stressing about how other people perceive you – which is out of your control anyway – and start choosing to do the things that light you up.”

Faist says van life allows him to escape from an industry he finds “a little incestuous and full of itself at times. It feeds on our egos and that means you can get in your own way. But the minute you drive off and talk to normal people – it’s so nice. I might get recognised occasionally, but in the grand scheme of things no one cares who I am.”

Travelling also allows him to take the cultural temperature of the US. He was in Arizona in November 2020, driving up Route 66, when Joe Biden won the election (and the state). “I was filling up at a gas station,” he recalls. “I was the only one with a mask on. There was a lot of anger and animosity. I could feel those people were at a boiling point. It threw me back to when Trump won in 2016 and I was in New York: I got on the subway and everyone was in mourning. You could hear a pin drop.”

I ask Faist if he feels homophobia is on the rise back home now. Last summer Florida passed “Don’t Say Gay” legislation preventing teachers from “encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels”. Faist is stoic. “We evolve and we don’t – that’s the sad reality,” he sighs. “Just a few days after I flew back from my first visit to this theatre there was a shooting at a gay club in Denver.” (Five people were killed by a man who claimed he wanted to “cleanse society” of homosexuality.) “I don’t think we’ll ever get there. Not in my lifetime. But we can do better and that’s what we can hope for…”

Neither of Brokeback’s main characters have the language to express emotions which run against their fundamental idea of what it means to be a man. Proulx wrote of Ennis: “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” To express this on stage, Ashley Robinson (who grew up in a “dirt poor” rural town in South Carolina) entrusts some of the emotional heavy-lifting to music: he commissioned a collection of country songs from English musician Dan Gillespie Sells which will be performed by a live band fronted by Scottish singer Eddi Reader.

As for the sex scenes, Faist refuses to tell me how those will be handled. Recently, photographs taken of Happy Valley star James Norton performing nude on stage in A Little Life were leaked to the press. I ask Faist if he is worried whether audiences for Brokeback Mountain will similarly misbehave.

“Who knows?” He shrugs. “Life is weird. People are weird. Good people forget to turn off phones. We’re humans, we f--- up. Who cares? It is just a play.” At the same time, he adds, “In an ideal world we would like people in that intimate space to respect the communal experience. If we can all get out of our own heads for 90 minutes, then it’s the most present we might all be all day. So, just don’t be a dick.”

As Faist springs up out of his chair I ask if the cast has heard from Proulx and he laughs. “She sent Ashley a letter and he read it out to us: ‘I don’t really have much to say,’ she said, ‘so I’ll just tell you about the weather here in New Hampshire.’ And then she described the weather and wished us luck.” Faist shakes his head, clearly thrilled that the famously concise author has lived up to her reputation. “I thought, fair enough. So cool!”

Brokeback Mountain is at @sohoplace, London W1 (sohoplace.org) from Thurs–Aug 12