From Romeo and Juliet to Incendies, alum Antoine Yared creates magic on the stage

How does an actor who didn’t speak English until the age of 16 end up, within a decade, playing Romeo on the Stratford Festival stage?

Born in Lebanon, actor Antoine Yared, BFA 11, has called Montreal home since the age of five. Yared, whose first language is Arabic and second is French, conquered theatre while living in Stratford, Ontario, for five years, and has since added film and television roles in English and French to his repertoire.

Yared credits Concordia’s Department of Theatre with helping him to hone his craft, in part by exposing him to the world of professional theatre while he was still a student.

“I can retrace the steps to the blooming of my theatre career, that got me to Stratford, back to Joel Miller, says Yared. “He was an incredible teacher — generous and very smart. He made me appreciate Shakespeare’s texts in a way that no one had before.”

Miller was also responsible for connecting Yared with Paul Hopkins. Then artistic director of Repercussion Theatre’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park, Hopkins was visiting Miller’s class when he noticed Yared and invited him to audition.

“I went on to perform at Shakespeare-in-the-Park three summers in a row,” says Yared. “This experience led to an eventual audition for Stratford.”

‘I realized how lucky I was’

In CEGEP, Yared auditioned for Montreal’s Dawson College Theatre Program with no prior experience — or expressed interest — in acting, surprising his family, and even himself. This often left him feeling like an imposter.

“This feeling — that I didn’t necessarily belong there — stuck with me for a long time,” Yared says. “But I wanted to trust that life was guiding me in the right direction.”

Yared had hoped to dive right into professional auditions like his fellow Dawson graduates, but his parents insisted that he go to university.

“I half-heartedly auditioned for the Concordia Theatre program. I really thought that after three years of training, I had learned everything there was to know and needed to start working,” he recalls.

“Within a week of starting the program, I realized how lucky I was, how much more I had to learn and that this was the perfect next step to my training. At Concordia, I was able to start chiseling, perfecting and discovering the kind of actor I could be.”

A ‘magical’ experience

To date, most of Yared’s roles have been in English, but he says that’s changing, with the addition of French and Arabic parts to his repertoire.

He is now looking forward to performing in his first fully francophone theatre production this fall. Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies — the play on which the Oscar-nominated 2010 Denis Villeneuve film is based — will be touring theatres across Quebec, including at Montreal’s Place des Arts, from October 2024 to April 2025.

“I'm sort of straddling a bilingual career right now,” says Yared. “Which is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

While he’s spent months of recent years focused on television roles, Yared maintains that his “heart belongs in theatre,” adding that acting in a recent production of The Inheritance is his greatest theatrical experience to date — a sentiment shared by many fellow actors and audience members.

“It was a very significant, profound experience,” says Yared of Matthew Lopez's reimagining of the E. M. Forster novel Howards End. “When you work on a live piece of art that not only generates feelings within you, but also in the audience — there’s nothing else like it. That synergy, that connection — its magical.

“When a concerted effort has been made to tell a very specific story, to a specific group of people, and that is successfully experienced in the intended way — it’s very special.”