Virginia Gay

Virginia Gay graduated WAAPA in 2005, then spent four years pretending to be a nurse on All Saints, six months pretending to be Julia Gillard in the STC’s Wharf Revue, and five years on Winners & Losers pretending to know a lot about high finance. That last one, particularly, was a stretch. 

She won a 2018 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress for Calamity Jane, in which critics described her as as 'unmissable', 'astonishing' and (her favourite) 'the pansexual butch of your dreams.' She toured the show in 2018-2019 to sold-out crowds across Australia.

She starred in Mirrah Faulkes' debut feature Judy & Punch which premiered at Sundance 2019, also staring Mia Wasikowska and Damon Herriman. She wrote and directed her first short film Paper Cut which made the Tropfest finals 2018. She is currently writing a new play for Belvoir and another for MTC, both of which will premiere in 2021.

 She’s been an apocalyptic squid in Eddie Perfect’s Vivid White, a prize bitch in The Beast, every stop on the bogan-to-hipster spectrum in On The Production Of Monsters, and Nancye Hayes’ granddaughter in Minnie and Liraz, all for the MTC. She played pacifist, suffragist, and feminist Vida Goldstein in The War That Changed Us (ABC), a five-year-old kid in Dean Bryant's Gaybies, a very old lady and drag-king-Hitler in The Producers, a fast-talking 1930s photographer in High Society, an even faster talking woman-about-town, Mame in Mame, and a mildly psychotic nanny in Cautionary Tales for Children for Arena Theatre Company, which sold out its Sydney Opera House season. She was was Bea Miles, iconic (and homeless) Sydney eccentric, in the immersive-theatre experience Hidden Sydney, and she hugely enjoyed being waifish (you ‘eard), highly-sexed, and rather-too-boozed as Blanche Dubois in the Australian premiere of Death Of A Streetcar Named Virginia Woolf.

She has written two solo cabaret shows, Songs To Self-Destruct To and Dirty Pretty Songs, both of which sold out at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and which toured nationally and internationally, most notably headlining the Famous Spiegeltent at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe. 

She has made regular appearances on The Book Club (ABC), CRAM (Channel 10), Adam Hills’ In Gordon Street Tonight (ABC), Good News Week (Channel 10), Studio at The Memo (Foxtel), and The Unbelievable Truth (Channel 7).