Once passed over for being a ‘brown queer guy,’ this Toronto star is about to climb the Mount Everest of acting

Shortly after, he breathed fresh life into the part of Hedda Gabler’s academic husband Jorgen in Coal Mine Theatre’s new adaptation of the Ibsen classic.

And now he’s preparing for what’s widely considered the acting Mount Everest: the title role in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to be performed in the open-air, 1,000-plus-seat amphitheatre at High Park until Labour Day weekend.

“It all just worked out, timing-wise,” said the Toronto-based Khan during a rehearsal break at Canadian Stage. “It was the alignment of three different directors who thought I could do something for their shows.”

He’s being modest, of course. A banner year like this doesn’t just happen by chance or scheduling. It takes years of training, discipline and proven performances in a wide range of roles.

In Khan’s case, these performances include everything from a queer South Asian man who hides his identity from his traditional Pakistani-born mother in “Acha Bacha” (by “Sort Of” creator-star Bilal Baig) to the charismatic outsider in “The Playboy of the Western World” last season at the Shaw Festival. He even played Hamlet’s pal Horatio in High Park seven years ago.

“Qasim has this quality of seeming like a very good person, thoughtful and fair, but at the same time, he never reads as naive or earnest,” said Canadian Stage artistic director Brendan Healy, who directed him in “Acha Bacha” and “The Inheritance.”

“He brings complexity to everything he does, while at the same time maintaining a kind of heroic energy, which I think is totally the right mix for Hamlet,” Healy continued.

Khan admits that, early in his career, he didn’t get to show off everything he felt he could do. While a member of the prestigious Soulpepper Academy in 2012 — where current “Hamlet” co-star Diego Matamoros was his mentor — he was often passed over when it came time to cast productions.

“I was not given opportunities to practice the acting skills the instructors were teaching us, partly because I’m sure the leaders there had no idea what to do with this brown queer guy, and so I left the academy missing the kind of confidence and artistic fortitude that I had hoped for,” he wrote in a followup message after our in-person talk.

He got a boost of confidence when he won an International Actors’ Fellowship to work at London’s Globe Theatre in 2013 where, on a replica of the original stage where many of the Bard’s plays premiered, he got to perform scenes as Romeo, Henry V and Malvolio, and “directors weren’t averse to seeing a Pakistani guy play those parts.”

Khan feels a deep kinship with the role of the Danish prince, whose murdered father returns as a ghost to get him to avenge his death by his uncle, who’s now his stepfather.

“My dad passed away when I was 12,” he said. “And I had an uncle who was trying to be very helpful around the time that he died. I remember all that and watching my mother mourn my father. Grief has been part of my life since I was very young. So as big as this part is, and as big as the play is, if you look at the story it’s actually a pretty simple tale of a guy who’s grieving his father.”

According to Khan, what director Jessica Carmichael has done in her production — which, like all High Park Shakespeares, has been adapted into one 90-minute act — is assemble a script that ties together strands of grief, loss and mourning, along with some additional poetry that expands on those themes and gives the audience a contemporary connection.

“She’s streamlined the story to be about a family that’s stuck in mourning, a kingdom that’s mourning, and the ripple effect all of that has on personal and political relationships, and what’s driving Hamlet to act the way he does,” said Khan.

Carmichael has encouraged the cast to explore their characters’ relationships with one another. So Khan has been busy filling out details of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother, Gertrude, as well as his altered relationships with childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern versus Horatio, whom he probably first met at university.

All of this character-building is typically part of Khan’s process. During the audition for “The Inheritance,” he asked Healy about the character of the Jewish Eric Glass, whom López had written in the script as “30s, White.”

Eventually, the two created a backstory for Khan’s Eric in which he came from a Sephardic Jewish background, his grandmother having emigrated from Morocco to France and then the U.S.

Khan has done a lot of thinking about his own family, especially his relationship with his late father, who came from a traditional Islamic Pakistani background.

“There’s a cultural element my parents didn’t want me and my sister to have, so early on we moved to a very white suburb,” he said. After his father’s death, he broke off ties with his father’s side of the family.

“It was a tumultuous time, and similar to what happens in ‘Hamlet,’ I didn’t know who I could trust,” he said.

Over the years, he’s heard from cousins who have said they’ve seen him in things or heard about things he’s involved in.

“But,” he added, “I don’t engage with them much about queerness because I don’t think they’re capable of talking about it.”

He dealt with some of this material in his autobiographical segment of “The Home Project,” presented at Soulpepper during the second year of the pandemic. And he’s currently collaborating with his “The Inheritance” co-star Daniel MacIvor on a film about his relationship with his father.

After ‘Hamlet’ wraps in early September, Khan says he’s looking forward to taking a nap and catching up on paying bills. He used to have a list of roles he’d like to play, but these days he says he’s more excited to work with specific artists. He and Soulpepper’s current artistic director, Weyni Mengesha, have been talking about projects. And of course he’d like to work with Healy again.

One role he’s always dreamed of playing is the masked title character in “The Phantom of the Opera.”

“It was the first piece of theatre material that came into my household as a kid,” he said, laughing. “We had the cast album. The story is so theatrical, and the character is fascinating because he’s a man who hides away writing music. It’s so dramatic and emotional, and it veers into rock, which is my jam as a musician. So if there are any producers out there thinking of putting it on, I’d love to play the Phantom.”

“Hamlet” runs from Sunday until Sept. 1 at the High Park Amphitheatre, 1873 Bloor Street W. Visit canadianstage.com for tickets and more information.