Giles Terera, Hamilton’s Olivier-winning Burr, and the stage career cameras missed

Giles Terera

Born	December 14, 1976 London
Occupation	Composer
Awards	Member of the Order of the British Empire

For most of his working life, the best of Giles Terera has belonged to whoever was in the room. He won an Olivier as Aaron Burr, the man in Hamilton who sings about waiting for his moment. He played Othello for Clint Dyer at the National Theatre, wrote a play about a slave-ship massacre and cast himself as its narrator, and turned Dale Harding into the quiet centre of an asylum at the Old Vic. Outside the odd theatre broadcast, almost none of it reached a screen. That is now changing, and on unusual terms: HBO has filmed him as the long-suffering husband in Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!, a role written as Abraham Lincoln, and the Old Vic has handed him Ebenezer Scrooge.

A Londoner, Terera trained at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts and went from drama school straight into the National Theatre’s acting ensemble, appearing in Troilus and Cressida, Candide and The Darker Face of the Earth. His first lead was a bird: the Ugly Duckling in the musical Honk!

Terera, who was born on 14 December 1976, spent the decade after leaving Mountview in 1999 building range rather than fame. He was Sammy Davis Jr. in The Rat Pack: Live From Las Vegas, played in Rent and Jailhouse Rock, and originated Gary Coleman in the London production of Avenue Q, a puppet musical in which he played, without a puppet, a comic version of the real former child star. In 2007 he crossed to Dublin and became the first Black actor to play Christy in the Abbey Theatre’s The Playboy of the Western World, the play that provoked riots at its premiere in 1907.

Shakespeare kept pulling him back. He was Horatio in the National’s 2010 Hamlet, a production broadcast to cinemas, and the following year played Caliban opposite Ralph Fiennes in Trevor Nunn’s The Tempest at the Haymarket. With Dan Poole he directed Muse of Fire, a documentary about why actors still wrestle with Shakespeare, built from interviews with Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Jude Law and Baz Luhrmann; Terera also wrote its score, and BBC Four screened it in 2013. For a generation of British children, though, he was simply one of the singing faces of Horrible Histories, the CBBC sketch show he appeared in across all five series. For the National’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2016 he reportedly spent months learning the double bass.

Then came Burr. Terera originated the role in the London production of Hamilton in December 2017 and in April 2018 won the Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He had kept a journal from the first audition onwards, and in 2021 Nick Hern Books published it as Hamilton and Me, with a foreword by Lin-Manuel Miranda. An MBE for services to theatre followed in the 2020 New Year Honours, and in 2023 the City of London gave him its Freedom.

His most productive partnership since has been with the director Clint Dyer, and it began with a setback. Terera was cast as Delroy in Death of England: Delroy, the monologue that reopened the National Theatre in 2020, but withdrew during rehearsals for emergency surgery; Michael Balogun took over. A year later the part came back to him: he played Delroy opposite Neil Maskell in Death of England: Face to Face, a film shot inside the National’s Lyttelton Theatre and broadcast on Sky Arts. In 2022 Dyer cast him as Othello. The Guardian’s Arifa Akbar wrote that Dyer made the tragedy feel “utterly new”, with a final half-hour that turns it into a play about domestic violence, and the man at its centre stops being the noble victim audiences expect.

The work Terera wrote himself has drawn the sharpest split. The Meaning of Zong, about the 1781 drowning of 132 enslaved Africans and the court case it produced, opened at Bristol Old Vic in 2022, co-directed by Terera and Tom Morris, with Terera as the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano. The Guardian gave it five stars. When it reached the Barbican in 2023, The Arts Desk found “a didactic strain” running through it, “as if the audience aren’t trusted to understand the magnitude of the issues.” Both readings point at the same instinct: Terera writes to make an audience listen, and he is less interested in leaving them room to look away. On screen the record is thinner than his reputation suggests. Away from the filmed theatre, his credits run to a waiter in London Boulevard, a voice in Netflix’s animated Scrooge: A Christmas Carol and supporting parts on television.

The last two years have been his busiest. He led the European premiere of the musical Passing Strange at the Young Vic in 2024, then played the bellicose General Buck Turgidson opposite Steve Coogan in the stage Dr. Strangelove at the Noël Coward Theatre, a run that reached cinemas through National Theatre Live in March 2025. In December 2025 he opened as Mary’s Husband in the West End premiere of Oh, Mary! at the Trafalgar Theatre, which earned him a 2026 Olivier nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. In March 2026 the musical short Kiloran Bay, with Alan Cumming, premiered at BFI Flare with Terera in the cast; in April he returned to Dyer for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Old Vic, playing Harding beside Aaron Pierre’s McMurphy. In July he went back to the Trafalgar opposite Escola, the play’s author and original star, for a short run that director Sam Pinkleton filmed; HBO will air it in 2027.

Next comes Scrooge. Terera leads the tenth-anniversary run of Jack Thorne’s A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic from 10 November 2026 to 9 January 2027, in Matthew Warchus’s final season as artistic director. Playing the part “in the round, in Matthew’s final year as artistic director, is a real honour,” he said. Burr’s defining song in Hamilton is “Wait for It”, and Terera sang it again at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022. Scrooge is a man who learns in a single night what decades of caution cost him, a sharp next role for an actor whose best work a wider audience is only now being allowed to see.

Tags: actors, Cole Escola, Hamilton, OH, MARY!, Giles Terera, A Christmas Carol