Pedro Leandro guest blogs for BroadwayWorld ahead of bringing Soft Animal to the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
When I was about 10, some music producers asked me to record an album. I was just a choirboy in Belgium (I lived there, I didn't commute) and this offer came out of nowhere and was incredibly exciting.
We spent weeks in the studio recording choirboy bangers like the American national Anthem and Gounod's Ave Maria. The producers would tell me how big a star I was about to become, how I was going to go on a world tour and how all the girls were going to fancy me. I really thought my life was about to change. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, it all just... ended. There were no more calls, no more studio days, I never saw the producers again.
I'd sort of forgotten about this whole story for years until, a few months ago, it came up in therapy. The story sort of poured out of me, the excitement, the disappointment, the lack of resolution. Straight away, I thought that this had to go into the show. My debut stand up hour is called Soft Animal and it's about needing success, prestige and validation. This story about being plucked from my choir rehearsal at 10 and being told that I was going to be a big star then that all suddenly disappearing, it seemed like a perfect illustration of this need, almost like an origin story. I even called my mum and asked her if she remembered what had happened and she just confirmed that, yeah, it all just went away really suddenly. We never really found out what happened.
I guess the first thing to say is who knows whether stardom was ever going to be an actual possibility there. Now, almost a decade into an acting career, I've gotten ok at sensing whether I'm being sold something that's too good to be true (and in pretty much every job I've ever done someone has tried to tell me that it's going to make us all big stars which is an exhausting habit that loads of people in our industry seem to have) but back then, because I was 10, I didn't know the difference between a bullshit merchant and someone legit. So who knows!
I think what probably happened, to be honest, is that these were semi-serious guys who took a chance and it just didn't work out. What we probably did was record a demo that was then shopped around some people to garner interest and there just ended up being no bites. Could this have been communicated to me better? Yes, and it should have been. But that's not the same thing as the whole thing being a crazy scam.
But I guess what I'm grateful for is that at the age of 11 I was already a grizzled veteran who'd never achieved his potential. It means I'm now slightly (slightly!!) less naïve about my career: I know that there's probably no "big break" and there's no "making it" and the dream of stardom is a fiction and a career in performing is a long plodding one where hopefully you make good work along the way and if people like it (please like it!) and give me loads of money for it one day then that would be very lovely but no longer entirely necessary and certainly not something that should be an expected destination.
What I'm beginning to see as an adult (that I couldn't have known aged 10) is that "stardom" is a really toxic concept. Being promised it is weird. Believing it is super weird. Wanting it is mega weird. We should be aiming to make work that makes us happy in the context of a life that makes us happy. Promoting anything beyond that is, if you actually think about it, very ew.
My show is in part about how that need for stardom is insatiable and derives from being a child and not being sure if people will love you if you're not the best, the funniest, the cleverest, the richest, the most famous. But I'm slowly learning that people actually will love you even if you don't have a global smash hit choirboy album with the American national Anthem as a single. And even if it turns out – tragically – that you're gay, Pedro!
I hope this doesn't make it sound too much like I've figured it all out and I've achieved Nirvana. I haven't. I'd still like for my Edinburgh debut to go really well and for loads of people to say nice things please. Maybe one day I won't need a 5 star review. But at the moment, I still very much do.
