The Operation Mincemeat Cast Is Saying Goodbye to Their Show—But Not to Each Other

On February 22, after nine years working together on one musical, the original West End and Broadway cast of Operation Mincemeat will play their final performance, at Broadway's John Golden Theatre. In an interview with Playbill, as they stared down the barrel of a nine-show week, the cast was energetic, excited, and ready to get each other across the finish line. “We’ve been counting down since March,” says Jak Malone, who won a Tony last year for his performance in the show.

“Prepare your knees,” says cast member Claire-Marie Hall, who at over 1,000 performances has done the show the most across the U.K. and New York. 

This goodbye has been a long time coming.

When Operation Mincemeat first opened at the 80-seat New Diorama Theatre in 2019, creators David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts thought that was it for this little musical from a then-unknown comedy troupe that called itself SpitLip. But then, through avid word of mouth, Operation Mincemeat kept growing—much like a harebrained scheme that involved finding a dead body, pretending it was a British military officer, and convincing the Nazis that said dead body holds important secrets (the somehow real–life plot of Mincemeat).

This macabre musical, with just five actors playing 87 characters, transferred to two more Off-West End theatres, moved to the West End, and now to Broadway’s Golden Theatre—going from 80 seats to now over 800. And through it all, Cumming, Hodgson, Roberts, Malone, and Hall have been there, opening every new production of Mincemeat and helping inspire an intense legion of fans, called Mincefluencers.

But two weeks before their final show, the cast admitted it hasn’t hit them yet that the end was coming or that they wouldn’t be seeing each other every night. “​​I can't imagine missing each other,” says Hodgson, looking at her costars. “It's just been our reality for so long. I don’t know what it’ll be like.”

Says Malone: “Yeah, I tell you what: When we've done the show before and then stopped and started again, it's always when we get back to each other that I go, of course!” The other cast members murmur their agreement. “It's always when we get in a room together again and we're laughing…I look forward to that. It's not the missing—it's the return, it's the jokes.” Though Malone admits he’s going to have to work “really, really” hard to not cry throughout the entirety of his final performance of Mincemeat.

But before the waterworks begin, all five original West End and Broadway cast members of Operation Mincemeat sat down together to assess their journey. Watch the video above to see how well this quintet know each other and reminisce about the (sexy) night everything changed for them. And read on below to learn about their plans post Mincemeat and to experience them speaking over each other for (hopefully) not the last time. 

The conversation below has been lightly edited, though we tried to keep as much of the overlapping dialogue and in-jokes as possible.

Why are you leaving? Because it seems like the Mincefluencers really want you to stay.
Claire-Marie Hall: Our knees. Our ankles, our knees, our backs. [everyone chuckles]

Zoë Roberts: Contractually obliged.

Natasha Hodgson: I think we feel like it's our time to say goodbye to the show. We have had the best possible time with it. We feel so lucky and grateful. It's been so much more crazy than any of us could have thought. And now it's time to—all good things must end. If we went on any longer, we could start feeling—

David Cumming: Resenting it.

Hodgson: It would be an obligation.

Jak Malone: It's also an extremely physical and vocally demanding show. I always felt this shelf life in terms of what I'm putting my body through. And I think for me, I'm definitely reaching that.

Cumming: As the makers and the original cast of the show, we've been doing it much longer than just this one year on Broadway. We started writing it in 2017—it's been nearly a decade of our lives now, and we want to think about something else and move on. And also, as creators, it's really lovely for the show to continue past us. We're very excited to see how the new cast perform the show. We can't wait to see them.

Roberts: We've got an amazing new cast. We get to hand over to this amazing gang of new American people and it's running in the West End; it's now on its third cast in the U.K. It's the best thing, particularly for us as writers, to hand it over to other people and see it come to life in different ways and flourish.

Hodgson: And we have family back home. We have friends back home.

Hall: And dogs, I have two dogs!

Hodgson: Yeah, I've got a niece who's one and a half, so I've missed more than half her life. So I need to get in there and be the favorite aunt, spend some money on that girl.

Will there be a pro-shot?
Cumming: We’d love that! [everyone agrees] Not right now, though.

Roberts: Davey, put your phone in your pocket.

Cumming: I'll just put it in my mouth, put it in my hair. That's as close as we're getting right now. I’m sure there’s bootlegs, but there’s no pro-shot.

Hodgson: It costs so much more on Broadway than it does anywhere else to film it.

Cumming: Right now, we have no news on that.

Maybe back in London since it’s cheaper than here to film?
Hodgson: It wouldn't be us doing it if it was in London, but maybe that would be fun.

Hall: Unless we didn’t know about it yet.

Hodgson: I remember seeing the Hamilton pro-shot. That made it so accessible and so exciting. But, yeah, it's just money, as with all things. It costs a lot. And our show is still sort of building. So yeah, maybe one day.

How has it been performing a show about fascism in America at this moment?
Cumming: So sobering and heartening at the same time. There's a definite need; Americans are feeling a real need to hear this story, and are telling us that fact. At the stage door, we're hearing stories and a lot of stress and a lot of worry. And understandably.

Hodgson: I talked to a mother and son from Minneapolis. They came to see the show last night. And obviously, they were, like, it's so hard living in Minneapolis right now. But she was like, it's nice to go and see great art and to be entertained and feel like there's places where people are still actively in a community fighting against the fascists. What's nice about being in the room with our show, whether you're on the stage or in the audience, is like the huge vocal agreement of: fascism has no place in this room, has no place in our families and our communities.

Hall: We still get a clap. I nearly welled up again last night listening to people clap [to the lines “If people like us just blindly follow orders, then the fascists won’t need to bash down the door. They’ll have already won.”]. It does come out of nowhere, and it's so lovely.

Cumming: They applaud a line about how to stop fascism; 800 people every night confirm with each other that is what we want to do. And we hear that every night. And that's not a small thing. That's a lot of people across the year. That's a huge number of people.

Hodgson: Though we had somebody walk out during the “Make America Great Again” line [in the finale].

Hall: They waited ‘till then?!

Cumming: We also apparently had something from Trump's first term.

Hall: Maybe they were the ones who walked out.

Roberts: It's sad that it is becoming more and more resonant. 

Malone: I also want to preface that we're in no way responding to the current circumstances. These were the lines and the lyrics that were written in 2020.

Hodgson: We did start writing it in Trump's first administration. And Brexit was happening. I think we thought, certainly in eight years this will be water under the bridge!

What’s been the most surprising thing you’ve discovered about each other in the past seven years?
Malone: For me, it harkens back to the first time I saw these three perform [gestures to Hodgson, Cumming, Roberts] one of their horror comedy plays at Edinburgh Fringe. It was a revelation. It really was. I sat there not knowing what to expect. Somebody had taken me along, and my mind was blown over the course of this hour. They played, you know, 40 characters with hats and wigs. And I was like, “That is exactly what I want to do.” So to then be invited in and to be able to do exactly what I saw them do. And even though that was for an audience of 80 people at Edinburgh Fringe, now we're at 800 people on Broadway, we're still doing the same thing, and I still stand in the wings and watch them do what they do, and then get giddy at the thought that now I get to walk on and I get to join in.

Hodgson: This is the surprise, that we're still making each other laugh. Me and Claire in the wings, we watch you [looks at Roberts and Cumming] do Pobil and Haselden and we still laugh! We've watched it 1,000 times.

Hall: It’s a masterclass in comedy.

Roberts: Ultimately, we're never going to get rid of the impulse to make each other laugh. That's the greatest feeling in the world. Now, we get to make 800 people a night laugh, but really, it's for us first. They're [the audience is] secondary. Really, we're just having fun.

Hall: We’ve had ups and downs on this whole entire journey, and the fact is that we're still just having a nice time, trying to make each other laugh throughout the bad times and the good times for, what, six-seven years now….

How?
Cumming: That is the surprising thing! It shouldn't be the case.

Hodgson: You watch these long collaborations of, like, Monty Python, you hear how much they all hate each other by the end. Obviously, that's all to come for us. I just think we're so still amazed by the fact that this little drop of sort of mercy has happened to us.

Roberts: We are going to start our Fleetwood Mac phase. That’s the next show. The marriages and the divorces.

Malone: Me and Claire are getting divorced any day.

Hodgson: I think it’s a real testament to the fact that you should make work with people that you don't fancy. [Malone laughs loudly]

Hall: Guys! [laughs]

Hodgson: Apart from Claire.

Cumming: To be fair, she’s slept with all of us.

Hodgson: Sexual attraction is the death of creativity and I think it's really helpful that none of us have ever wanted to sleep with each other.

Roberts: Despite all being incredibly hot.

Cumming: We all love ourselves too much.

I think what factors into it is you haven't been taking this moment or any of the previous big moments for granted. It's always been a surprise that you are all going through together so no one’s having a diva moment.
Cumming: Also going through it together means that you have people to share how weird it is. We've said this numerous times, if you had to do all of this by yourself, you'd go completely mental, because you wouldn't have anyone to be like, “This is weird, and this is odd, and I'm exhausted, and I don't know what's going on.” But you've got your friends with you, it just pops that bubble. At least us five could look at each other and be like, “Yeah, it's a little bit much, isn't it?”

Hodgson: Obviously, it's been a roller coaster. But every step of the way we have fought and worked, and battled to get to the next stage. Every new stage we got to, there was the question mark of: Is this too big for them? And then we got to Riverside [Studios in 2022], was it too big for them? Got to the West End [in 2023], can they survive this? And then on Broadway, is this gonna work? On every single starting line, we all just put our armor on. We’re a team, we have to prove this. And we just did that over and over again. I think it's very hard to become a sort of singular diva force when you are so much in the midst of that battle, and you do it over and over again. We were so united in wanting to prove that the thing that we were making, the thing that we were doing, was worthy of the chances that we were being given.

Who has grown the most?
Hodgson and Cumming simultaneously: Certainly not Claire. [Hodgson stands up and bends over laughing, while everyone exclaims.]

Hodgson: I think you can tell now that none of us have grown.

Roberts: We’re all children.

Hodgson: We obviously came into it being like, can we do this? And we're leaving feeling like we did it. We've sort of grown into ourselves as creatives and as actors. And I feel like, hopefully, next time around, for better or for worse, we're not going to enter any project being like, “Oh my God, can we do this?” And that will be weird in its own way, and have its own difficulties. But I think we're feeling like we’ve all, collectively together, matured.

Cumming: As people in the industry, the industry here is very different to that in the U.K., and there's more celebration of it. There's also just more business around the industry here—and being thrown into that, not having any previous experience of it, was quite difficult and daunting. But I think we've all come out really well. We know what to do at the right time, at the right moment, if there's an event or an interview. And I think we've all come up smelling of roses!

Hall: Cheers!

In Mincemeat, you’ve all got to play against the type that you would normally be put into, across gender and across ethnicities. What do you want for your next project?
Malone: I'm definitely craving—having done something that's non-naturalistic and that leans towards the cartoonish, and also I'm playing against gender—I keep saying, I want to do a play where I can make an omelet on the set. Everything is so intricate and naturalistic and lived in. That's how I have to play it. I'm dying to try something like that.

Roberts: You want a drawer with knives and forks and spoons.

Malone: Completely. I want everything around me to be real. And I want it to be a play because I'm fed up with singing. [chuckles]

Hall: I'd love to do a play or a show where you can just go to the dressing room and have a cup of tea at some point.

Malone: Awww, imagine!

Hodgson: [mock outrage] You're welcome guys! Ungrateful! You know what? Next show it’s going to be even worse, you’re nude for four hours, you never leave the stage. [everyone laughs]

Cumming: Camera on your face!

Roberts: And it’s one song.

What about the next musical that you write?
Hodgson: We definitely want the three of us and Felix, our fourth writer who doesn't live here, we definitely want to write another show. In some ways, we were very blessed with this show that we had no idea how hard it was going to be.

Roberts: Or how long it was going to take!

Hodgson: Whereas now, it's like we've been through the looking glass, we sort of know—

Roberts: What we're getting into.

Hodgson: And so we really want to make sure that whatever idea we go to is the right one. But I think it's going to be, ultimately, we love comedy, we love adventure, we love stories that make you laugh and make you cry.

Cumming: And make us laugh.

Hodgson: We're not gonna fry Jak's egg.

Malone: [mock sadness] No!! [laughs]

Cumming: We’ll cast you as a singing egg.

Malone: Please, I can’t wait. I can envision the costume already.

Roberts: Is your head the yolk?

Malone: Paint it orange.

The really fun thing when I think about the future of the show is when it gets out to schools.
Cumming: Oh same, I’m already obsessed with it.

What advice do you have for the next people to play your role?
Cumming: Have fun! The school version, we think it will probably be like more than five [people], like an expanded cast. So it’ll be a different kind of show in that respect. I just can't wait to see loads of teenage girls getting to play Monty!

Hodgson: I don't think you need to give those kids any advice, because no one takes theatre more seriously than a teenage girl doing a musical. Most of my memories of high school are doing musicals. I get a lot of stage door girls being like, “I always get cast as the guy.” I’m like, “I'm with you. I was Adam in a mixed [program]. We had a whole division and I was still cast as the old man.” So giving those girls who always get cast as boys, the parts that we've written that are more for women or anyone who doesn't necessarily fit into the expected gender or the expected role in their school or their family or anything—just giving them an escape to become the hero that they have inside them is so exciting.

But let them just get on with it. They know what they're doing. They do not need help.

Roberts: Tell them to wear trousers with really big pockets.

What are your plans for the final “Glitzy Finale”?
Malone: Just try and get through without crying!

Cumming: Honestly that last show is going to be five hours long with all the tears.

Malone: In the West End, I cried through the entire thing. And I'm really, really trying, I'm really setting myself the challenge to just perform the show, don’t cry!

Roberts: “The Glitzy Finale” of all things is so chaotic that you haven’t got a second to have a feeling. It's gonna be the rare, more chill moments in the show.

Cumming: I mean, the very, very final moment, when we have to hug each other and look into each other’s eyes.

Malone: The last line being, “Soon the journey will be done.”

Cumming: It’s too much!

Roberts: If we manage to sing that at all it’ll be quite impressive.

Hall: “Useful” got me so much when we did it [in the West End].

Hodgson: I think the worst is gonna be waking up back home, that first day back home being like, "Did that mad dream just happen?"

Malone: I've already pre-warned my family, because I'm going back to my hometown. And I've warned them that you might not see me for the first few days, because I'm going to be in a state of confusion! I truly am going to be hazy.

Roberts: It’s the fact that we're going to be home, not doing it, but it is happening without us. I think that's the weird thing: You feel like you're wrapping up this kind of big journey, but also…

Hodgson: I don't know when it's happened before, the thing that we've done: Who writes a show, takes it to the West End for a year, takes it to Broadway for a year, and then just go back to their normal lives?

Hall: I don’t think any of it will sink in for me. I think a month later, I will be like, “Oh God, that happened!” I don't think it's even sinking in now that we're here. I have to have the distance from it to register in my brain.

Cumming: For nine years, whenever we finished, it was like, “Yeah, but we've got the next one. We've got the next one.” And so it's gonna take us a while to sink in and be like, oh, it's done. It's done, done, done. Like, we're not going back.

Malone: I've been going around the theatre begging every crew member to quit with me. I can't bear the idea of all of my friends and all the fun and all the jokes that we have—because this crew at the Golden [everyone murmurs in agreement], it’s the most fun I’ve ever had in my life! They are wild. and I'm begging them, “Please leave.” I don't want to know that all of my friends are in one place having fun without me. It’s horrifying to me. Yeah, I'm livid about it. So far I've been unsuccessful.

Will you ever come back to the show?
Cumming: Highly unlikely, unless something has gone very wrong.

Hall: It's been a long time. Such a long time like, and we are ready to go on and do other things.

Malone: Unless they do call about a pro-shot. [Hodgson and Hall laugh]

What will you miss most about New York?
Roberts: Pizza by the slice. [everyone murmurs in agreement] The best invention.

Hodgson: Martinis done properly. Cold martinis after 11 PM at night is like a religious experience.

Cumming: Stuff being open at night. And açai bowls.

Roberts: I would also say, the Broadway community.

Hall: Yes, the community is probably mine.

Roberts: There’s such a wave of love and support and championing of each other, of other shows, of really lifting each other up. That was such a huge, wonderful surprise when we got here.

Malone: For me, I'm gonna miss the events and all the galas and all the things that we had to sit through together. It's so unifying. It puts everyone in one spot who's going through the same thing. We can all relate to each other. We all have something in common, and so we're all fast friends. I'm going to miss that energy. I really endeavor to try and take some of that back with me.

Hodgson: More galas and martinis in London.

Roberts: West End Martini Club.

Cumming: Operation Martini!

Hall: We’ll swap it with Greggs. We can bring Greggs over here.

Cumming: Yes! Sausage rolls here, martinis there.