As we chat in the corner of the stage that he is calling home for the next four weeks, Butterfield is surprisingly relaxed.
“I’m still coming off from the high of being on stage and I don’t think I’ve really processed it so my feelings are a bit TBC,” he says.
He appears calm but it’s clear he strives to be the best. After the show and before our interview, he heads straight to the director for a debrief on the performance and lists the areas he felt he needed to improve on.
Despite being only 27, Butterfield has been acting for the past two decades.
At 10 he played Bruno in Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and later starred as the lead in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.
He says he had been “putting theatre off for a really long time” but decided to bite the bullet as he wanted to push himself – and push himself he did as it’s no easy feat to stand on an almost empty stage for 90 minutes and perform a monologue.
He is happy with the decision he made as he says he finds being on stage “totally exhilarating”.
“After the first performance I didn’t sleep at all,” he says.
