How Pretty Woman’s villain helps complete the fairytale

There are few movie villains as memorably slippery as Philip Stuckey.

In Pretty Woman, he is the smarmy lawyer sidekick to Richard Gere’s Edward Lewis, played on screen by Jason Alexander with a mix of oily charm and looming menace. He is not the romantic lead, not the comic relief, and certainly not the heart of the story. But he is the one who brings tension to the fairytale.

Now, as Pretty Woman: The Musical prepares for its Melbourne season at the Regent Theatre from July, Australian actor Douglas Hansell is stepping into the role and, in the process, finding that the show’s so-called “baddie” might be one of its richest characters.

Hansell laughs when asked whether he has become typecast.

“I’m starting to create a niche for playing bad guys,” he says.

Fresh from recent theatre work in London, including new musicals Stiletto and Saving Mozart, Hansell has returned home to join the all-Australian cast led by Samantha Jade as Vivian Ward and Ben Hall as Edward Lewis. He says Philip Stuckey is a role that, on paper, could seem fairly limited. He does not sing, he is not part of the ensemble, and his total stage time is relatively brief.

But that, Hansell says, is also what makes the part interesting.

Rather than simply replicating Jason Alexander’s film performance, Hansell says the musical gives him room to reinterpret the character. That is partly because these stage adaptations are not trying to find exact physical replicas of the film cast.

“You’re kind of given free rein to interpret it as you want,” he says. “So, you’re not stuck to the way it was done in the film or anything like that.”

His version of Stuckey, he says, is more of a “lad”, someone who thinks of himself as funny, charming and everyone’s best friend, until the audience gradually realises just how damaged and dangerous he is.

To get there, Hansell has built a detailed internal life for the character: a man with daddy issues, a failed marriage and a desperation to prove himself through money and status. That backstory never gets explicitly explained on stage, but it gives him something much more human to play.

“Otherwise, it just kind of makes him a cardboard cut-out guy,” he says.

The result, he hopes, is a villain audiences are initially drawn to before they turn on him.

There are signs it is working. Hansell recalls one audience member telling him they “really liked Stuckey” until the very end.

“That’s kind of the sweet spot,” he says. “He’s not PC, but he’s kind of that thing that you can’t help but like a bit. And then you realise that you shouldn’t like him at all.”

It also helps that, backstage, the atmosphere is anything but dark. Hansell says he and Samantha Jade, who plays Vivian, are playful together in rehearsals and performances, something that makes their later confrontation scenes more manageable over a long run.

“If you sat in that whole heaviness and the darkness, that was one of my concerns early on in rehearsals,” he says. “How am I going to do this for 12 months?”

That concern led him to shape Stuckey as lighter and more comedic for much of the show, complete with what he describes as a “really annoying laugh” that emerged organically during rehearsals.

But Hansell is equally thoughtful about the broader appeal of Pretty Woman itself. He believes the show has genuine value at a time when audiences are craving relief from a heavy world.

“I think escapism is no longer a dirty word,” he says. “And I think that’s what this is: pure nostalgic escapism.”

That may explain why the musical continues to pull such a broad crowd. There are the obvious fans, older theatre-goers who remember the film’s original release and turn up dressed in Julia Roberts-inspired looks, but Hansell says younger audiences are there too, including groups of women in their 20s squealing in the front row.

The chemistry between Samantha Jade and Ben Hall, he says, is also helping drive that response. Off stage, the principal cast has become close, and that ease is translating on stage.

For Melbourne audiences, the production arrives with major pedigree. The Broadway and West End hit features music and lyrics by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, a book by Garry Marshall and J. F. Lawton, and direction and choreography by Jerry Mitchell. In Australia, it has already played strongly in Brisbane and now heads to the Regent as one of the city’s big musical theatre drawcards for 2026.

But for all the glamour, nostalgia and romance, Hansell may be right that the most interesting thing on stage is the man trying to ruin it all.

After all, every fairytale needs a villain.

Pretty Woman: The Musical will open at the Regent Theatre this July. Tickets on sale now via ticketek.com.au •