PETER McGOVERN
Actor, Voiceover, Coach
ABOUT
Peter is an English actor, voiceover and coach based in London and East Yorkshire.
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He was raised in Darlington, County Durham where he attended local state schools. Growing up in a large family, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Peter would seek attention and look for ways to stand out from the crowd.
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However, it wasn’t always obvious that he was destined for a career on the stage. His earliest forays into the world of showbusiness were a total failure. At nursery school, overwhelmed by the attention, he refused to take part in the Christmas Nativity, instead sitting in the audience with shepherd’s crook in hand and tea towel on his head. A few years later, whilst taking part in a singing competition, he forgot his words, swore profusely, and looked up to see his parents hanging their heads in shame. Fortunately, he would soon stumble upon the path that would lead him to where he is today.
Peter was introduced to Darlington Operatic Society by his mother and joined them as a child actor whenever the show needed children. At 15 years old, he became an adult member for their production of West Side Story, with the society lowering their age limit to allow him to join. This was, of course, on account of his extraordinary talent and had nothing to do with the lack of men in Darlington who were willing to sing and dance in public.
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Indeed, his experience prior to attending drama school was mostly musicals. The secondary school he attended was staffed by passionate and inspirational teachers and had built a reputation for delivering high quality concerts and musical productions. Arriving at secondary school short, ginger and with a voice seemingly several octaves higher than that of his peers, most young people would have lacked self-esteem and resolved to fade into the background. Not Peter. Embracing his height and his voice, he announced himself to the school community with a rendition of ‘Little People’ from Les Misérables. After this stunning breakthrough his school career quickly went from strength to strength, frequently taking leading parts in school productions and precociously adding songs when he felt his character didn’t have enough to do. Afterall, why shouldn’t Bugsy Malone sit at a bar stool and sing ‘One for My Baby’ into the middle distance?
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It was at school where Peter’s interest in classical drama and the works of Shakespeare in particular began to flourish. Having resolved that he would audition for drama school after completing his A Levels, he decided it might be a good idea to do a play before he started acting training. And so, despite having no experience of speaking Shakespeare he took on the title role in a local production of Hamlet. He still shudders to think about how bad he must have been.
At 19, having already played The Dane and several leading roles in musicals, and after a year spent gaining vital life experience working for the technical services department of the local council, Peter said goodbye to the North East and moved to London to train at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. There he was taught by renowned practitioners including George Hall, Ken Rea and Patsy Rodenburg. He landed his first job during the final weeks of the training and graduated in 2008 with first class honours.
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It was at the showcase, during his final year at drama school that Peter was spotted by director Christopher Luscombe and invited to audition for a play he was soon to direct. The play was Enjoy by Alan Bennett. It was to be Peter’s first professional role, his West End debut and the first of a handful of collaborations with Christopher Luscombe. The role in question was that of a feral, skin headed, bovver boot wearing thug and involved Peter shouting expletives, urinating through a letterbox, and reading pornography to an elderly gentleman before knocking him out with a blow to the head. Quite the way to announce yourself to the the industry. Just one day after his final performance at Guildhall School, Peter began rehearsals for alongside David Troughton and Alison Steadman. He was off to a flying start and naively ignored the wise words of those around him who kept on warning him that, “It won’t always be like this.”
They were right.
Peter’s youthful looks and regional accent (at that time, still something of a curiosity on British stages) meant that for a while he seemed to specialise in playing northern teenagers. Working with Nikolai Foster and Drew McOnie on a touring production of Kes before teaming up with Christopher Luscombe and Alan Bennett to bring the The History Boys to Leeds Playhouse and out on tour. These early experiences of touring did wonders for Peter’s geographical knowledge of the UK, but very little for his relationships with theatrical landlords up and down the country.
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He completed a hat trick of Alan Bennett plays directed by Christopher Luscombe when he accepted a part in a touring production of The Madness of George III starring David Haig. The show transferred to the Apollo Theatre, earned David Haig an Olivier nomination for Best Actor and marked Peter’s second appearance in the West End.
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In 2013 Peter got his first taste of rep theatre, working on a season of three plays at Theatre By The Lake. Here Peter rose to the challenge of playing complex, leading roles in Vincent In Brixton, An Inspector Calls and The Shape of Things, giving performances that he still considers to be among the best of his career. Sadly, with Keswick significantly further north than Watford, very few people saw him do it so you will just have to take him at his word. (If a tree falls in the forest and all that).
​The following year, he continued his love affair with rep theatre, this time making his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He joined the company for a special winter season, working on three plays to commemorate a century since the outbreak of the first world war. The season saw the same company of actors perform in two Shakespeare plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won, set either side of the great war. They also worked together on a new play by Phil Porter, directed by Erica Whyman which examined the events of The Christmas Truce. The season was incredibly successful, drawing great critical acclaim, and the Shakespeare double bill later transferred to the West End.
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​His next two jobs allowed him to continue to explore his passion for new writing, returning to Leeds Playhouse to create the role of Victor in Barnbow Canaries, written by Alice Nutter and directed by Kate Wasserberg, and then playing Ned in Nell Gwynn by Jessica Swale. The production, which played to packed houses at the Apollo Theatre, starred Gemma Arterton and won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy.
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​Now the wrong side of thirty, and with his days playing teenagers very much behind him, Peter found himself a role at the other end of the age spectrum. He would spend a year back in the West End with Mischief Theatre, playing Warren Slax, “an eternally unfortunate man of 67 years” in their innovative and gravity defying production, The Comedy About A Bank Robbery at the Criterion Theatre.
During the coronavirus years, Peter stepped away from acting. Unsure of exactly what to do, he found himself working in a school and even began a short-lived and ill-fated career as an English teacher. At one stage he pondered, if his next job, much like Fatima's, might be in Cyber…
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Ultimately though, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd proved too strong and after a brief hiatus he returned to the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe in Sean Holmes’s production of Much Ado About Nothing.
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Peter’s comeback was complete earlier this year when he was cast as Charles Cholmondeley in the multi award winning musical Operation Mincemeat at the Fortune Theatre. He is thrilled to be playing a leading role in his first professional musical and delighted to be back in the West End for the sixth time.
Now, in 2025, twenty years after starting drama school, Peter is immensely grateful that producers, directors and casting departments continue to put their faith in him. He considers himself fortunate that people continue to pay him money to do the thing he loves and hopes that the next twenty years will be just as fun.
