One of Broadway’s leading men, with a CV ranging from Shakespeare to The Lion King, Patrick Page is making his UK stage debut at the National Theatre in Hadestown. He tells Mark Shenton why it’s crucial that actors are proactive in finding work and how addressing mental health has made him a better performer.As a well-established Broadway, classical and screen actor who has run his own acting studio in New York for the past three years, Patrick Page is used to advising his students to be prepared for auditions and to actively seek out work. It has been following his own advice on both those fronts that has brought him to London to appear on a UK stage for the first time.Sitting in a backstage office at the National Theatre during a break in rehearsals for US-originated musical Hadestown, he explains: “Because I teach acting, I’m always reading the trades to look for jobs for my students. Luckily I have an agent, so I don’t have to read them so much for myself, but as I was reading them, I saw there was a [development] lab for a musical that had a breakdown for the character of Hades – and I thought the idea of Hades and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was a splendid idea for a musical, but in addition to that it said they were looking for a true bass. That’s not something that ever gets specified – and I rarely get to use my bottom notes in a show.”