There’s something delightfully impish about the way Michael Man moves onstage.
I noticed it when I saw the actor in the Stratford Festival’s world premiere production of Jovanni Sy 施崇梵’s The Tao of the World as Dr. Wilson Wong, a sexually repressed, buttoned-up physician from Saskatchewan caught in the social chaos of a wealthy Singaporean family. I noticed it again in The Hobbit, when he played the instantly recognizable Gollum, a creature who has spent centuries skulking around Middle-earth obsessing over a certain band of gold.
These are very different characters. But as Man plays them, there’s something familiar in their movement: a particular looseness and elasticity. A little mischief.
Dr. Wong and Gollum are just two of the three roles Man is playing in his second consecutive season at Stratford. He also appears in a smaller role as Robin Starveling, one of the mechanicals, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, giving him the opportunity to move between wildly different theatrical worlds over the course of a single season.
So when I got Man on the phone one afternoon, I asked him about his approach to characterization.
Physicality, he tells me, is one of the ways he begins to understand a character. But he doesn’t have a formula: “I follow whatever gets my imagination going and really listen to my instincts. Then, I hear how this instinct might respond to certain things,” he told me.
He considers the character’s place within the larger story: what purpose they serve, what obstacles they encounter, and what the text reveals about them. Man lets those pieces accumulate until something physical starts to feel truthful. Embodiment becomes a method of discovering who the character is.
For The Hobbit, Man’s process was somewhat different, and considerably more… Gollum.
Peter Jackson’s films have given generations of viewers a very specific image of the creature, and Man knew he was stepping into a role that many people already feel they know. Rather than chasing a preconceived version, he went back to Tolkien’s original descriptions and considered how centuries of isolation, obsession, and deprivation might translate into physicality.
There’s also a practical element to that physical work. “When you’re doing a show for eight months at a time,” Man explained, “you have to make sustainable choices, and find ways to keep the character physically alive without doing more to the body than what it can sustain.”
Perhaps that impish quality I noticed in Man’s movement comes from his willingness to let his body respond to a character’s dramatic circumstance. Rather than deciding exactly what a character should look like and forcing the body to comply, Man lets the physicality emerge through instinct, imagination, and the demands of the story.
This same adaptivity extends to parts of his artistic practice beyond acting.
Man was born and raised in Hong Kong, and eventually immigrated to Toronto where he attended Claude Watson, an arts elementary school. He began studying piano at seven, and later worked as an accompanist to support himself through two degrees at Queen’s University: a bachelor of commerce and a bachelor of arts in theatre studies. He developed a musical sensibility that would eventually find its way back into his theatrical endeavours.
That happened this season in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Man plays one of the tradespeople rehearsing an amateur play-within-a-play. As part of the mechanicals’ final fictional performance, Man draws on his musical background, curating and playing classical pieces to accompany their performance.
It’s the kind of artistic cross-pollination that Man traces back to his earliest piano lessons. His teacher, Alla Zacarelli, encouraged him to think of music as an imaginative exercise as well as a technical one. If a piece was supposed to evoke a meadow, she encouraged him to imagine what that meadow sounded like, and how his touch on the keys could evoke it.
“She is an artistic mother of sorts to me,” Man said. Those lessons gave him permission to embrace his creativity and to nurture his sense of whimsy.
Whether he’s finding the physicality of Gollum, listening for Dr. Wong’s instincts, or accompanying a group of amateur actors inside a Shakespeare play, Man returns to the same fundamental idea: playfulness.
“What we do [as actors] is play,” he quipped. “We imagine and play fearlessly.”
For Man, that playfulness exists alongside a keen awareness of what he brings into the room — particularly the ways his body, identity, and lived experience shape how he is perceived onstage.
When he considers what it means to play an Asian character, Man first asks whether Asianness is a fundamental part of the storytelling: “If a writer is using a character’s race to articulate a particular perspective, then my responsibility is to understand that perspective and serve the writer and director’s vision wholeheartedly,” he explained.
Even when race isn’t explicitly part of the text, he cannot — and wouldn’t want to — separate it from his performance. “You cannot devoid my colour [from my presence onstage],” Man said, then took a pause. “I bring the totality of me to all the parts that I play.”
That awareness is especially resonant in Tao of the World (which Sy also directed) — a play that places Asian diasporic experiences at the centre of its storytelling. Man sees the production as part of a broader movement toward Asian stories entering the mainstream of Canadian theatre, while emphasizing that representation cannot stop at casting: “I want to see Asian artists involved throughout the theatrical ecosystem. I want writers and artistic leaders shaping the work, supporters and donors investing in it, and institutions developing the relationships necessary to sustain it.”
Being visibly Asian myself, I recognize exactly what Man is advocating for — having a hand in shaping the stories we tell, and not simply appearing in them. Yet, for all the ways our identities shape how we move through the world, there’s still something wonderfully ordinary underneath it all: the human impulse to connect. As Man puts it, “We are all just looking to care for someone or to be cared for, looking to connect, and what connection means to us regardless of skin colour or background.”
Maybe that’s where whimsy comes in: making room for curiosity, and leaving a little room for wonder alongside everything else we carry. Judging by the way Man moves onstage, I have a feeling he keeps plenty of that in his heart.
The Tao of the World runs at Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre until September 26. The Hobbit runs at Stratford’s Avon Theatre until October 23. More information about the Festival season is available here.
The Stratford Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Krystal Abrigo
Krystal is Intermission’s Publishing and Editorial Coordinator. At any given moment, you can probably find her at a concert, or on a long walk somewhere in Toronto (or elsewhere).
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