Every so often, a play comes along that is so visceral, so gut-wrenching, that the audience can’t quite cope. In 2023’s A Little Life, depictions of self-harm and abuse led to walk-outs. An abortion scene in 2024’s The Years resulted in men fainting in their seats. This year’s Guess How Much I Love You?, a beautiful, shattering play about a couple whose world falls apart at their baby’s 20-week scan, had a similar effect.
“We had 10 ‘show stops’,” says Rosie Sheehy, who has been nominated for an Olivier for her ferocious turn as a mother-to-be. These “show stops” – where the production is paused and the actors leave the stage, while an audience member is attended to – happened at the exact same moment each time, at the point in the play where it dawns on the crowd that something is very wrong. “You could feel the penny dropping quite severely for people,” says Sheehy. “One lady vomited at that moment, and a lot of people fainted.”
Luke Norris’s production is a merciless study of a pregnancy – and a marriage – in crisis. It follows an unnamed couple, played by Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, who learn that their unborn baby has profound open spina bifida. The condition can have a significant impact on a child’s quality of life and life expectancy, and so the parents are faced with the agony of choosing whether to terminate. The show goes to unimaginably painful places, but the script is also funny, scalpel-sharp and moves at breakneck speed.
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Sheehy will be heading to this weekend’s Oliviers as a best actress nominee for the second year running. Last year, when she was nominated for her searing performance as a woman who kills her abusive husband in Machinal, she was pipped to the post by Lesley Manville for Oedipus (not a bad person to lose to). This year, she’s up against another magnificent lineup: Cate Blanchett, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Julia McDermott and Rosamund Pike.
When Sheehy’s agent called her, “screaming” to give her the news, the Welsh actor was washing the dishes. “I fell back into a chair, covered in soap suds,” she says. “I was so shocked, because I’d kept saying to my parents last year, ‘This is a bit like a wedding day, guys. It’ll happen once. Let’s just have the best day.’” Coincidentally, her Guess How Much I Love You? castmate Aramayo had also been doing the dishes when he found out, weeks earlier, that he’d got a Bafta nod for his performance in the Tourette’s film I Swear (which he later won, defeating Leonardo DiCaprio). “I was like, ‘Why are we washing dishes, the two of us?’ I felt so lucky acting opposite him, and that I was a much better actor after the run. I felt I’d really been pushed.”
After last year’s nomination, Sheehy has learnt that she needs to eat properly at the awards ceremony and keep her blood sugar up. “It’s nice, because I won’t be completely overwhelmed this time, hopefully. My parents are coming with me again. As a family unit, we’re like, ‘We’ve got this. We’ll meet beforehand, we know where to go.’”
Eating and sleeping enough, and staying hydrated, was vital for Sheehy while performing in Guess How Much I Love You? It’s the kind of play that not only leaves audiences reeling, but takes a toll on its actors, too. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me,” she says. “For about a week after it finished, I did walk around like, ‘I need to become a bit normal again.’ I always think that sounds so arty farty – like, calm down! – but nervous system-wise, something happens when you do that eight times a week.” Because the role required her to go through the emotional wringer, but also to lie quite still in a hospital bed for a lot of the runtime, she’d “come off stage having all this adrenaline, but with no exertion”.
The sold-out play was part of an exciting 70th anniversary season under new Royal Court boss David Byrne (not the Talking Heads one), which also includes the Broadway smash John Proctor is the Villian, Tilda Swinton reprising her role almost four decades on in Man to Man, and Gary Oldman’s take on Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
Sheehy says the theatre really supported her and Aramayo in their research for Guess How Much I Love You?, bringing in a gynaecologist, a midwife, a grief counsellor, a representative from a spina bifida charity, and two couples – one who kept their baby after a diagnosis, and one who terminated the pregnancy. The latter couple chose not to see the play, and Sheehy found herself advising some of her friends not to come, too. “I said to friends of mine who are pregnant, or who have new babies or young toddlers, to just maybe give it a miss.” She laughs. “Which is probably the worst press I could do, but I don’t have children and I just felt that it’s a lot for people to sit through.”
In one of the play’s stand-out moments, Sheehy’s character is so battered by grief and anger that she begins to spit excoriating obscenities at her partner. “I could burn you… Cut you from throat to waist and disemf***ingbowel you. I could scream and bleed and cry from every orifice. You make me hate you… I wish you’d end. I wish you’d never started. You, more than anything, I wish you’d never been, so you weren’t standing there in front of me, mewling around like this is tragedy for you when it is life for me, it’s every-f***ing-day par-for-the-course hot coals and razorblades.”
Sheehy remembers seeing that chunk of dialogue on the page, and wanting desperately to get it right. “Luke wrote the female experience brilliantly,” she says, noting how he contrasted it so empathetically with the male experience. “My character’s saying, ‘You don’t know what it’s like, because I’m the one physically going through it’.” It’s not fair, and it’s cruel, but there’s a hard truth within it.
Both Guess How Much I Love You? and Machinal required Sheehy to be raw and unvarnished on stage. That’s her happy place. And she did the same as a student making allegations against her professor in an acclaimed 2021 revival of David Mamet’s Oleanna. “At drama school, I always picked characters who were animal-like or feral or witches or social outcasts. Anything emotionally complex or tackling a big social issue, I’m completely immersed in. There’s a strange motor in me that wants to do the big stuff. People are like, ‘Do you want to calm down?’ My parents are like, ‘Oh God, what are we going to see now?’”
Sheehy grew up in Port Talbot, the Welsh steelworks town that brought the world a long line of acting greats, among them Michael Sheen, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Burton. Many of their faces appear on murals across the town, and Sheen and Sheehy actually attended the same West Glamorgan Youth Theatre. Has Sheen taken Sheehy under his wing – could she be his protegee? “I would kill to be,” she says. “I would burst at the seams to work with him.”
Whether Sheehy takes home the trophy on Sunday feels almost beside the point. This is an actor at the centre of some of the country’s most extraordinary theatre, and she will soon appear in a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1913 tragicomedy The Custom of the Country, starring Sydney Sweeney. The future looks bright. That said, I do hope she’s crowned the winner. She has really earned it, after all.
The 2026 Laurence Olivier Awards are staged on Sunday at the Royal Albert Hall
