‘Evita’ Star James Olivas on Playing a New-Era Juan Perón, Political Parallels, and Puzzles

When we speak, just before call time and warm-ups, Olivas is a beaming, jokey antipode to his character. Diego Andres Rodriguez, who plays Che, waves in the background of our Zoom. (Rodriguez and Olivas share an apartment block in Camden, and a dressing room deep in the Palladium annals.) It’s both of their first times in the UK. “Every day off, we explore as much as we can,” says Olivas. They tried to pitch a trip to Brighton Pride to see headliner Mariah Carey, but couldn’t make it work; instead, they went for a Sunday roast at the Greyhound, walked around Kew Gardens, and had drinks in Richmond on the Thames. All the textbook tourist stuff was ticked off weeks into rehearsals.

Olivas grew up in Houston, Texas, before moving to Los Angeles for school and college. His focus on football, basketball, and water polo—and plans to eventually follow in his father’s footsteps to become a mechanical engineer—shifted after a knee injury, and being exposed to theater in LA. (Constantly hearing him sing in the shower eventually pushed his mom to push him into a community production of Ragtime.) “From then I did as much as I could,” Olivas says. “But I thought it was something I would do on the weekends outside of my reliable, steady, nine-to-five job.” His time in conservative Texas had also left him with “a lot of unlearning to do about what I could be.”

“In college, I stopped and thought, It’s theater or engineering. I took a leap of faith. So here we are, on the West End.”