Pedro Leandro on Identity, Ambition and Making Peace with the Soft Animal Within

In his debut hour Soft Animal, Pedro Leandro explores the link between ambition and identity, growing up queer across cultures, and why the need to be loved can be both funny and deeply human. We caught up with him to talk about childhood dreams, returning to stand-up, and finding meaning beyond the need for a “big break.”

Tell us about the inspiration behind Soft Animal?

The inspiration for Soft Animal came from the book The Velvet Rage. The book made me think it would be interesting to talk about my need for success and validation and how I think it may have been exacerbated by being a gay man. I didn’t start out thinking that this would be the show but most of my stand-up is about being gay or being an ambitious snob so when it came to pulling it all together to make my first hour that was an obvious theme. It’s also a good meta-theme because the reason that I want to do this show is obviously so that I become fabulously successful!

The title is from the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. The first line of the poem is “you do not have to be good” and I remember reading that and thinking: “wow I’d never thought of that. Is it weird that I never thought of that? Maybe that’s weird. That feels like fertile ground” The poem then goes on to say: “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”. So I guess the title of the show is aspirational. Because hopefully one day I’ll learn to do that rather than trying to get a BAFTA.

At ten, you were promised pop stardom - a solo album, rehearsals, the dream. When that spotlight vanished, how did it shape your sense of self, and does that early loss still echo in your work today?

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, it’s 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!

 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 (again, though, very lovely please).

You’ve returned to stand-up after time away in theatre and writing - what brought you back, and how has your perspective shifted since your first time behind the mic?

I came back to stand-up after a few years because I never stopped missing it and then in 2022 I dated a very funny very mean Hackney twink that gave me lots of material that I thought I should share onstage so that gave me my first set after a 5 year hiatus.

 I think when I first started doing stand-up when I was 19 I, like everyone else my age, was completely obsessed with Stewart Lee so my stand-up was what a lot of young male stand-up was at that time: Derivative Lee (pretty good name for a show). I think that through my acting and playwrighting career I’ve learned to find my own voice and I’ve learned to be funny as myself.

I also think playwrighting specifically taught me how to write an hourlong show. It taught me that funny funny funny for a whole hour is very tiring for everyone and that funny is, for me, one of the tools that I should wield, not the only one. Don’t get me wrong, I think stand-up should be funny, duh. But I think it should also be true and come from the heart and if a sentence doesn’t always end in a punchline that’s ok and actually maybe a good thing and might make the whole thing more bearable.

Soft Animal explores the compulsion to achieve as a way to earn love or acceptance. How did reading The Velvet Rage help you reframe your childhood drive to be extraordinary?

I think I was relieved when I read it. The fact that this man across the world was describing my experience so accurately was crazy to me and made me feel connected to other gay men in a way that I hadn’t felt before.

And it allowed me to have more empathy for child me. I was able to see myself at 13 or whatever and think oh you were just terrified that no one was going to love you when they found out you were gay so you thought if only you could memorise the speech from the Incredibles where the dad gets fired that might make you more lovable!

Annoyingly, learning all of that from reading The Velvet Rage doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped having that need for validation. And the fact that it’s still there sometimes frustrates me a bit. But hopefully I’m like that less and less. I think in the end the truth is that if the goal was to be rich and successful there were much easier ways to achieve that than a career in theatre and comedy. So the reason I’m doing what I’m doing, in the end, is that I love doing it. And it hasn’t given me enough glamour that the glamour would sustain me: I love being an actor because I love acting. I love being a comedian because I love being onstage and telling jokes. I love doing it, I love getting better at it, I love that that’s a lifelong pursuit.

Your show pulls from personal, often vulnerable, stories of childhood. What’s it like to share that on stage and what surprises you most about how audiences respond?

I think a lot about a rule Mike Birbiglia has for his stand-up: if you’re not telling secrets onstage, who cares? Simon Amstell also talks about how whenever he’s writing and he writes a story or a joke that feels like it may be a bit too personal or a bit too embarrassing, that’s usually the bit that ends up working the best.

I’m not saying that all comedy has to be about these deep, personal things. But, because of the nature of the stand-up that I do, I’ve also found that the stuff that feels vulnerable is the stuff that audiences react to most. And it’s such a high when you say something like that onstage and people laugh because it’s a sort of communion. It makes you feel so connected. It’s kind of spiritual (too much?).

That said, of course, my stories involve other people, real people in my life. For example, I do about 10min in the show about my dad and one of my greatest preoccupations when putting the finishing touches on my show was whether that bit would feel fair and whether he would enjoy it and whether it honours him. Me and my director Evan Lordan worked really hard to make the bit something that still had teeth but that is, at its core, true and playful and cheeky rather than rude or mean. And my dad came to see the show and really liked it I think. So, success!

Having grown up as a queer child in Brussels with Spanish and Portuguese roots - and English as a fourth language - how do you think that cultural mix shaped the way you see identity, performance, and belonging?

It’s definitely made me see identity as a fluid thing. When you’re from several places and speak several languages people often try to nail down where you’re from or what’s your mother tongue and it’s weird because I don’t see that as a straightforward question. That’s helpful because it makes nationalism a bit absurd and puts cultures into context. For example, one thing I hear a lot in the UK is this sort of self-aggrandizing-self-flagellation where they say “god, we’re just awful at speaking other languages aren’t we? Aren’t we awful?” And I want to say to them: yeah so’s everyone else in the world. Like Brits are so convinced of their own exceptionalism that they think they’re even exceptional at being bad tourists. French people are bad tourists. Chinese people are bad tourists. Everyone’s a bad tourist. Except for me.

I think being culturally confusing has definitely been a net positive on my life. However, I think that sometimes it may have held me back slightly in my career as an actor, because, identity-wise, I’m not always easy to put in a box, I sometimes end up either excluded or in ill-fitting boxes.

Same goes for queerness. I have a bit in my show about how I’m not what people expect when they think of a gay man and how that’s been a bit of a chip on my shoulder with regards to other gay men who don’t always consider me one of their own. Even though I’m gay! There’s more requirements for being gay than being gay??

I think we as a generation have made a lot of progress in centering identity and defending difference, but I think sometimes focussing too much on that makes identity a rigid thing. That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to do stand-up and create Soft Animal: so that I can introduce myself to the world not as a collection and intersection of identities but as an artist with a point of view - sometimes but really not always informed by those identities.

What do you hope Edinburgh audiences walk away with?

The show is meant as an introduction to me, really. It’s a statement of my aesthetic, the type of comedy that I love and my performance style. So I mainly hope that they come away with a sense of who I am as an artist. And that they like that sense! And that they tell their friends that they liked it! And that those friends come! And maybe one of them is Simon Amstell! And maybe he says Pedro would you like to come on tour with me AND would you like to be the lead in my next tv show? I hope Simon Amstell walks away with a professional crush on me. Everyone else can do whatever they want.

Pedro Leandro will be performing Soft Animal from 30th July - 24th August at Pleasance Courtyard (bunker two). Ticket link HERE.