By Craig McLean

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There’s no decorous way to say this, so let’s dive straight in. Nicole Scherzinger, Olivier- and Tony-winning friend of His and Her Majesties, has opened our conversation talking about … lady parts. I wanted to keep things above board. She’s immediately gone below waist.

To be fair, this has happened because I’ve asked the 47-year-old American to give me her best Scottish accent and/or phrase. Not something this Scotsman would have previously considered requesting from a Hawaiian-Ukrainian-Filipino former Pussycat Doll, X Factor judge and West End and Broadway superstar. But her husband-to-be is Scottish former rugby player Thom Evans. She’s surely learned some Jock bantz from him. “I have, but I’m afraid to say them,” she replies, simultaneously very demure and very mindful. “Oh, you’re gonna judge me. I’m gonna get in trouble from my fiancé… He says a phrase sometimes that is a funny thing, and so it’s the first thing I think of. But I don’t think I’m allowed to say it.”

Come on, Nic, we’re all friends here… “Have you ever heard the saying: ‘Get yer rat oot’?” Firstly: solid Scottish accent, respect. But secondly, er, no. What’s your “rat”? “Use your imagination!” Is it rude and genitalia-related? “Yes! That’s what you guys say! I thought that’s what you say. Anyways, I’m gonna get in trouble.” Get your rat out: would I say that to my wife, or would she say it to me? “You would say it to her!”

Blimey. To paraphrase the closing quote from Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the musical theatre adaptation of which made its leading lady a transatlantic stage-musical phenomenon: alright, Ms Scherzinger, I’m ready for my close-up. But I didn’t think we’d get that close.

When I speak to Scherzinger it’s a Wednesday morning in the Hollywood Hills. “I’m in sunny California, overlooking all of LA, so blessed to have a beautiful view,” she says. “I’m just dreaming big here and imagining up this show and working on the preparation — right up until I fly to London just a few days beforehand.”

The show is An Evening with Nicole Scherzinger, a one-night-only spectacular at the Royal Albert Hall. The mighty-voiced, all-the-feels performer will be playing songs from across her kaleidoscopic career, “but coming off of winning the Olivier and the Tony for my performance in the theatre world, it’s mostly inspired by musical theatre”. The 5,900-capacity concert sold out in little over a day. What does Scherzinger think that tells us about Londoners’ relationship with her?

“That they have my heart,” she replies intently. “They just get me. It brings tears to my eyes, because the gratitude … This is a dream come true, feeling as I do like an adopted Brit. I don’t know how many times I’ve driven by the Royal Albert Hall and said, ‘One day I’m going to play that,’ and wondered how I was going to get there.”

Having been a serial Saturday night TV fixture in the Simon Cowell talent industrial complex, and having premiered Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard musical at the Savoy Theatre in 2023, she also views the booking as a “homecoming. The British people have just been so supportive in every way.”

This time last year, before Sunset Boulevard transferred to Broadway’s St James Theatre, Scherzinger spoke to fellow multi-hyphenate Lin-Manuel Miranda in Interview magazine. It was an unabashed stage luvvie love-in. Him to her: “I thought I knew Sunset Boulevard and I thought I knew your voice —

I realised I knew f***ing nothing. You give one of the most electric performances I’ve ever seen on stage.” Her to him: “I’m a bit of an introvert.”

And yet here we are, staring down the barrel of a one-woman show in London’s grandest venue. Can she of the electric performances truly be an introvert?

“I really am! I’ve always been like that. In school growing up, during the lunch periods, I just walked alone. Sometimes I’d eat in the stairwell by myself. I’m such a homebody. But listen: if you get a drink or two in me, I’m ready to go!”

To excavate the old adage about New York’s grandest venue (in which Scherzinger is performing the same show two days after London): how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.

Similarly: how do you get to instantly sell-out an “audience with…” at the Royal Albert Hall, on top of having serenaded the King and Queen at the 2023 Coronation Concert, accompanied by Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang? Surely not courtesy of the Dolls’ libidinous, neo-burlesque choreography and some frothy pop songs. Does the secret lie in Scherzinger’s journey from enjoyable trash to august Tony? That is: has her award-scooping success in Sunset Boulevard provided a validation that her pop career hadn’t?

“It’s a different thing,” she agrees. “There’s definitely a prestige behind that. People put you in a box. They stereotype you. They think you can do one thing. They still question if you can sing! Sometimes! But then you do theatre. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it truly tests your mettle, as Glenn Close would say,” she says of the Hollywood titan, who played Norma Desmond in the first American stage production of the musical, in 1993. “Especially with this role — as Glenn said, it’s arguably one of the greatest roles ever written.

“So to be able to take it on — to even be able to do theatre in the first place — is an Olympian feat. It shows your true colours.” Based in London ahead of Sunset Boulevard’s opening, Scherzinger went all in. During the rehearsal process, “I was staying very close by, in my cousin’s basement. I would literally just eat, breathe and sleep this text.”

Then, during the four-month run, she bunked in Lloyd Webber’s “working flat” in Covent Garden. “I wanted to stay close to the theatre so that I could walk there every day.”

She was, then, fully immersed in the heart and the heartbeat of the capital. So I wonder: as we’re speaking the day after Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations in New York, does she recognise the London that he described — a place with a “terrible, terrible mayor” who wants to impose sharia law? “Oh, I’m the wrong person to talk to about politics,” she demurs. “I have no idea what’s happened. I’m immersed and focusing on the Royal Albert Hall, making it a show that people remember for the rest of their lives. So you can’t ask me anything about that.”

But does that sound like a London she recognises? “Oh…” she exhales, “London is my home away from home,” before seeking refuge in affectionate rhapsodies about our culture, food and “oh my God, all the restaurants, are you kidding me?”

She’s more willing to talk about Liam Payne. In 2010, she left the Pussycat Dolls after what she characterises as “a beyond intense time. There was no such thing as mental health back then!” The same year, judging on X Factor, she picked Payne as part of the One Direction line-up.

With the first anniversary of his untimely death approaching, she remembers the musician as someone with “just such a raw heart. He really wanted to touch the world with his music. And sometimes he wasn’t able to do that as much as he wanted to… So that was difficult on his heart. I can relate to that. I know what that feels like.”

How does she look after her mental health now? “A lot of help!” she replies with a laugh. “I’ve come a long way. I’ve definitely had my fair share of demons that I’ve had to battle off — and continue to seek help for. I have a life coach, I’ve had therapists, I’ve had psychiatrists, psychologists. I’ve got a bishop, I’ve got a priest! I’ve got my mom, I’ve got my friends. Just speak. Get it out. Speak to someone. Do not hold it in, and keep that communication open.”

And, when the online trolls come for her, as they wearyingly do for most women in the public eye, Scherzinger does her level best shut that stuff out. “I try to because I’m very sensitive. I would love to cancel ‘cancel culture’.

“I always go back to the scripture where it says: he who hath not sinned cast the first stone. I really pray for a more compassionate world. It brings tears to my eyes, because it’s not right. We don’t have these keyboard warriors — we have these keyboard cowards.”

Speaking to that idea of looking after oneself, physically and mentally: how much pressure does she feel to look perfect? I’m thinking about “reports” from the Time100 Gala in New York in April. Scherzinger apparently “shocked” fans because she had a face that “shifted, crinkled and showed some natural signs of ageing”.

“Ha ha ha!” she hoots gamely when I read her that nonsense. “This is where I thank Norma Desmond. I always did feel that pressure,” she admits. “I grew up with a lot of insecurities, a lot of my own issues. And I did one of the worst things you could ever do in life, which is compare yourself. That does not serve you!

“And thank God, I’ve gotten a lot of help from that. Because I was always worried about that. But then I did Sunset, and I had to show the ugliest parts of me outside and inside. That vanity went away! That’s why I’m like: I really don’t give a crap anymore, because I know what I have to give inside is even more beautiful than what appears on the outside.”

That said, “if I do a red carpet, listen: I’m gonna get beat, I wanna slay all day, OK?” Scherzinger adds, laughing again. “I want to look and feel my best! And anybody would.”

We can’t, though, all be Norma. So Scherzinger is here for whatever techniques people use to feel their best. As we saw in London Fashion Week, on the catwalk and on the front row, super-skinny is very much the new look. Mainly, one imagines, courtesy of weight-loss drugs.

Focused on the Royal Albert Hall, Scherzinger missed all the fashion weeks, “and I’ve not seen anything. But listen: it’s none of my business to comment on what anybody else does with their body. Whatever somebody does that makes them feel better about themselves, I support it. I champion them and celebrate it.

“Whether that’s packing on the weight or losing the weight. Whether that’s gaining muscle or losing muscle. Whether that’s dyeing your hair… Whatever that is, I only want to be a supporter for people feeling good about themselves from the inside out.”

This 21st-century star of chart, screen and stage? By her own authentic means, readier than ever for her close-up.

Photography by Emilio Madrid