Before Romeo and Juliet became a classic couple, there was Romeo and Rosaline — the jilted ex-lover passed over in favor of her cousin. An unseen and oft-forgotten character in Shakespeare’s most famous love story, Rosaline finally gets the main-character treatment in an endearing new rom-com for Hulu.
“This movie is about Romeo and Juliet, but there are elements of it being Romeo and Juliet adjacent,” says Sean Teale, who stars in “Rosaline” as Dario opposite Kaitlyn Dever as the titular character. The film‘s soundtrack is led by an Icona Pop single, and dialogue leans into contemporary teenage vernacular; this isn’t a dusty restaging. “The modernization of the dialogue and the modern music really take us down a different route,” Teale adds.
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It’s the morning after the film’s Los Angeles, California, premiere, and Teale reflects fondly on the experience of reuniting with the cast and crew after spending an entire summer filming in Verona, Italy.
“We laughed so much last night,” says the London-based actor. “It was gratifying because all of my wonderful, talented, funny friends [who worked on the film] were applauded and rewarded for their great work, which was a lovely thing,” he adds. “We got the band back together again.”
Teale notes that the film’s script, adapted from a book by Rebecca Serle, had been floating around in pre-production for more than a decade — long enough that he had read for the part of Romeo eight years ago and forgotten about it. This time around, the 30-year-old British actor was tapped for the role of Dario, the romantic lead opposite Dever; the character doesn’t exist within the Shakespeare’s text.
“It was the script that I remembered being so lovely and so funny and so charming and soulful and just great,” Teale says of the project’s appeal, adding that the combination of 20th Century Studios, Disney, Hulu, and emerging director Karen Maine were also a compelling combination.
“I grew up watching ‘Princess Bride’ and ‘Knight’s Tale’ and ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights,’” he adds. “Medieval comedies were always really fun. I haven’t stepped into that realm entirely, so that challenge was interesting to me,” he says. “It really was a no-brainer.”
Teale’s character, a soldier and potential suitor for Dever’s Rosaline, didn’t have precedent in Shakespeare’s original text. The actor relates Dario to his previous role in the Marvel series “The Gifted,” which was set in the X-Men universe. While many of his costars portrayed characters that already existed within the comics, Teale’s role, the mutant Eclipse, was a new addition.
“I’ve had this challenge before. It’s enjoyable, but it’s two different disciplines. I quite like sometimes having parameters because then you have to find your space within that,” he says. “And then sometimes you don’t have any walls at all, and there’s a freedom to it.”
Unlike many other young actors, Teale notes that he didn’t immediately discover an aptitude for acting. “I was terrible at drama when I was 12. I was useless. I did the ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ and I was like, the stoat number three, and I missed my line every night. I had one line, so I was useless. But something happened at the age of 15 or 16 where everything aligned, and [acting] gave me my life,” he says, adding that he had always been a “performative” child, even though it took time to find his sea legs onstage. But he’s been off running ever since. “It was like a lightning bolt shut out of the sky, straight through my head and into the ground. And it never shook out of me.”
Teale got his breakout on “Skins” a decade ago and more recently starred in the Apple TV+ series “Little Voice.” This past spring and summer he filmed “Palomino” in Barcelona, a female-led thriller series for Netflix produced by the team behind “The Crown.” Teale stars as the husband of the main character.
“The husband is the one in distress whose wife needs to come and save him,” Teale says. “It’s a story about a mother and a wife and head of the family; a brilliant woman dealing with some incredibly dangerous situations and then coming home,” he adds. “I enjoyed playing second fiddle to that.”