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Tony Award winner Alex Sharp: a quick introduction

And the Tony award for best performance by an actor in a leading role goes to... Alex Sharp? You aren't alone if you're unfamiliar with the 26-year-old Brit who just beat Bradley Cooper and Bill Nighy to the most coveted award on Broadway. Allow us to make an introduction.

What has he been in before?

Kinda... nothing. His role as Christopher Boone in the American production of Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time is his first professional acting job.

He was the wunderkind of his drama school, then?

Not any British ones - every place to which he applied rejected him. So he went to America where he worked as a handyman.

**A handyman?

** Yes. Until one day, while painting a house in Connecticut, he decided to go to New York's Juilliard performing arts academy, on the basis that it was cheaper than Yale.

To stroll into Juilliard like that means he must have given a killer entrance audition.

Well, the panel might not have been so impressed if they had realised that he was breaking the rules: he did a scene he had written himself and lied that it was by a minor English playwright.

**When Curious Incidentcame over, how hard did his agent have to lobby to get him in front of the casting director?

** Agent? Sharp had never had an agent in his life. A friend of his was involved in the production and was able to have Sharp considered.

**Bet he has an agent now.

** Oh yeah. CAA all the way.

**The Gods are smiling down on Alex Sharp, aren't they!

** He doesn't seem to believe his own luck either, judging by his pre-ceremony tweet last night: "Going to the f***ing Tonyzzzz!!!!!" The result, however, suggests that what he has going for him is rather more than good fortune.

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