Boo Is a Skill: Meet the UK Performers Who Spend Eleven Months Preparing to Be Hated

On a grey October afternoon in Nottingham, a man in a black wig is practising a laugh. It is not a funny laugh. It is the kind of laugh that tells a room of seven-year-olds they are about to be complicit in something deliciously wrong. In three weeks he will be on stage at a regional theatre, wearing a coat with more buckles than sense, informing a packed house that the village, the lamp and possibly the future of happiness now belong to him. The audience will boo with the force of a small jet engine. He will love every second.

With the 2026–27 panto season opening across the UK this month, venues from Hackney Empire to Newcastle Theatre Royal are deep in tech rehearsals, costume fittings and the annual search for a smoke machine that does not sound like a kettle dying. And while the dame gets the tabloid headlines and the principal boy gets the songs, the villain is the one who sets the temperature. I spoke to three actors who make their living, on and off, as panto baddies. All of them said the same thing: the boo is not an accident. It is a contract.

The boo is a contract

Panto villainy is often described as playing to the back row. That is only half true. The best villains are traffic cops in eyeliner. They set the rules of the room: you may boo me, you may hiss, you may warn the hero, but you may not talk over my next line. That takes timing, eye contact and the willingness to stand still while 800 people tell you exactly what they think of you.

Leanne, who has played villains and dames at venues across the Midlands and the North, puts it plainly. 'You are not trying to be hated,' she says. 'You are trying to be booed. There is a difference. The audience has to feel safe enough to enjoy hating you.' She talks about the pause after a threat, the half-second before the hiss, the way a good villain will sometimes step forward and lower their voice rather than bellow. 'The room wants to join in. Your job is to give them a door.'

That door is built in rehearsal. Marcus, a panto veteran who has played Abanazar, Fleshcreep and several variations on a scheming landowner, says the first week is about finding the rhythm of the script. The second is about finding the rhythm of the audience. 'Every house is different,' he says. 'A Saturday matinee in a big touring house is a different animal from a Tuesday night in a 400-seater. You have to read the room and then decide how much rope to give them.'

Voice as a shift pattern

A panto villain can have more dialogue than anyone else on stage, plus a song, plus a fight, plus the responsibility of making the second act feel like it has stakes. Over six weeks, with two shows a day and sometimes three, the voice becomes a shift pattern. The actors I spoke to were unanimous: the job is not just performance, it is management.

'Steam, water, warm-ups, and no shouting in the pub,' says Priya, who has played villains in touring pantos and now also works as a voice coach. 'The voice is the instrument, but the body is the amplifier. If you are tense in the shoulders, the audience hears it.' She recommends vocal naps, avoiding whispered conversations, and treating the interval as recovery time rather than a second performance for the crew. 'The costume is heavy. The boots are heavy. You have to budget energy like a runner.'

There is also the matter of the boo itself. A villain who tries to out-shout an audience will lose. The trick is to let the sound come to you, then cut through it with a line that is placed, not pushed. 'The best villains are not the loudest,' says Marcus. 'They are the clearest.'

The off-season is the job

Here is the part audiences do not see. Most panto villains are not villains for a living. The six-week run can be a meaningful chunk of annual income, but after agent fees, travel, digs and the January comedown, it is rarely the whole year. The off-season is where the rest of the career happens.

Leanne does corporate role-play for NHS trusts and law firms, which she describes as 'panto for people in lanyards, minus the songs'. Marcus voices audiobooks and does murder-mystery nights. Priya teaches at a drama school and works as a fight choreographer. Others fill the gaps with screen work, audio drama, cruise contracts, script writing and the kind of teaching that keeps a roof over the head while the next audition lands.

'Panto pays a chunk of the year, but not the whole year,' says Marcus. 'The six weeks are intense, then it is January and you are back to invoicing.' That is not a complaint. It is a description of the freelance economy. Regional panto helps subsidise the rest of a theatre's year, and the performers who return season after season are part of that ecology. 'People talk about panto as a guilty pleasure,' says Priya. 'It is actually a skills bootcamp with a fairy godmother.'

From Pantoland to screen

The skills translate more than the industry sometimes admits. A screen villain is often about what you do not do: the stillness, the choice, the intention behind the eyes. Panto teaches you to make a decision and commit to it in front of a live audience. Screen teaches you to trust the camera and dial it down.

Casting directors do watch panto. Not always in an official way, but the work gets seen. 'I have been seen for straight theatre off the back of a panto,' says Leanne. 'People forget that the same directors and producers are in the audience with their families.' Marcus has a screen credit that came from a producer who remembered his Fleshcreep. 'I did not get the job because I was scary,' he says. 'I got it because I knew how to hold a room.'

That is the thing about villainy. It looks like noise from the outside. From the inside, it is control. The best panto villains are usually kind offstage, generous with the company, and ruthlessly precise about the work. They have to be. You cannot ask an audience to boo you for six weeks if you are not in charge of the joke.

Why the boos matter

Panto is often dismissed as a Christmas cash cow, but it is also a gateway. For many young audiences it is the first live theatre they will ever see. For regional theatres it is a financial lifeline. For actors it is a place to learn how to handle a room, protect a voice and make a choice that lands in the back row without a close-up to help.

As the 2026 season opens, the villains are already limbering up. They are checking their boots, testing their laughs and preparing to be hated by people who will queue for their autograph afterwards. The boo is a skill. It takes a year to make it look easy.