Stratford vet steps into the Trumpian shoes of Matilda’s chief villain

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It's highly unlikely that the author Roald Dahl was thinking of Donald Trump when he dreamed up the impressively nasty boarding school headmistress Miss Trunchbull for his beloved 1988 novel, Matilda. Yet, people see Trump – or their own paranoid projections of him – everywhere these days.

And so it was that, a couple of weeks ago, a Boston Globe critic writing about the musical adaptation of Matilda now on a North American tour suggested that the stout and hairy Trunchbull, a former Olympic hammer thrower who is played onstage by a man, might remind theatregoers of "another raving, splenetic bully, currently in the public eye, whose name starts with a T."

So, even if Dan Chameroy, the actor who stepped in as Trunchbull when the tour hit Pittsburgh about a month ago, doesn't actually come out and say the name of the presumptive Republican nominee, he does acknowledge his character has a deep capacity for self-delusion.

Make of that what you will.

"I think people can see a similarity between her grand thoughts and the way she believes so wholeheartedly in what she does," nods Chameroy, who is based in Oakville, Ont., "and other people on this planet who are as broad – and in the news these days."

Chameroy (pronounced "Sham-er-oy") is sitting in the upstairs lounge of the Ed Mirvish Theatre, during the week off between the show's Boston engagement and its opening in Toronto next Thursday. Though he's been in the business for decades, he's never really been on the road before, and it's unclear whether he'll be with the company once it leaves Toronto. "I'd like to do a tour, but I'm getting older. And I have a daughter, and my wife," he explains.

He won't give his exact age – "I'm fortysomething," he offers cagily – even though it is pointed out to him that, these days, most actors share their ages. Meryl Streep, for example. "Yeah, well, she's a movie star and she's very rich, and she can afford to do that!" he snaps, chuckling. He doesn't want, he says, for a casting person to say, "'Well, he's over 40, he can't play ingenues any more!'"

Wait, does he think he can actually play ingenues? "No, but I like to be delusional about that fact," he replies.

A winning, romantic mainstay of Stratford musicals (Gigi, Oklahoma!, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), Chameroy was one of the founding members of Theatre 20, an artist-led company created a few years ago to develop Canadian musical theatre talent.

"It's great to have a company that's been formed by artists," he says. "As actors, you get hired, you show up for work, you learn your lines and you leave. When you become a producer, it opens your eyes to some of your delusions."

With Matilda, Chameroy is back as a simple actor for hire in a tale about an imaginative, book-reading nine-year-old girl whose miserable parents send her off to a miserable school, where the motto is "Children are maggots." The show began its commercial life in the West End, under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company, before opening on Broadway in 2013, where it won four Tony Awards. Its Toronto engagement is currently slated to run until the middle of October, but an extension – especially heading into Christmas – is a possibility.

Which would be fitting, since this is the part of town where Chameroy has frequently played another self-loving, oblivious female character: Just down the street is the Elgin Theatre, where he was a regular of Ross Petty's Christmas season pantomime, as the dizzy, frizzy-haired, love-hungry woman-child Plumbum. (For the record, his CV also includes a number of oblivious men, such as Beauty and the Beast's vainglorious Gaston.)

But while both characters are absurdly larger than life, Chameroy notes that the only way to play them is truthfully, with empathy and understanding.

"From the outside, they may seem broad, but from my perspective and where I'm playing – it needs to be real," he explains. "An audience may think it's schticky, but I'm not playing it for schtick, I'm playing it for truth. Plumbum is a real woman and she thinks she's gorgeous and she's oblivious to truth. But it's not because I'm trying to get a laugh; it's who she is! In terms of Trunch – she thinks she's gorgeous, she thinks she's in shape, she thinks she's the smartest person in the room. But because she's so big, in terms of her physicality, the audience finds that funny."

When the audience first meets Trunchbull, she is sitting in her office watching videos of her former Olympic exploits, revelling in her memories of glory. Informed by a teacher that the new student Matilda Wormwood is a genius – "an exception" – Trunchbull is aghast. "An exception? To the rules? In my school?!" she asks. Then, motioning to her trophies for hammer throwing, she launches into a musical ode to self-control: "If you want to make the team / You don't need happiness or self-esteem. / You just need to keep your feet inside the line."

In her other major song, The Smell of Rebellion, which praises exercise as a means to sap children of their insurrectionary energy, Trunchbull is a blur of physical activity. "There's burpees, there's pushups," Chameroy explains. After he was cast, he went to New York for physical training. He jokes about how, if he is not in peak physical condition, at his (unspecific, fortysomething) age, he could bust a kneecap just climbing the stairs to his dressing room.

"Here's the thing about the part: She's not onstage for [the whole] 2 1/2 hours, but when she's onstage, she's like a bomb. It's like" – he smacks his hands together, and the sound echoes through the upstairs lounge – "there's an explosion of energy. It's nuclear. She goesgoes-goes-goes-goes – and then she leaves," he says, with a slight smile. "Then I go in my dressing room and sleep."

Matilda: The Musical opens July 5 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto (mirvish.ca).