Note: Levente Puczkó-Smith’s final show as Billy in the Hungarian production of Billy Elliot the Musical (BETM) was on Sep 22, 2019.
Debut: June 20, 2018 (Budapest, Hungary)
Total Performances as Billy: 14 (No partial shows)
Levente Puczkó-Smith, “Levi”, was 12 years old (D.O.B = 20-Apr-2006) when he made his debut as Billy in the third season of the Hungarian production of BETM at the Erkel Theatre in Budapest. He is a student at Madách Dance and Acting School.
When Levente was just six years old he announced, much to his parents’ surprise, that he wanted to do ballet. So sure enough they put him into ballet classes and he also took up rock n’ roll dance. A year later, when he was seven, Levente did the entrance exam for the Madách Dance School and successfully won a place. From then on he began training for around ten hours a week in a range of dance styles – ballet, tap, musical and modern.
Despite his young age, this is far from being Levente’s first time on stage, as he has a wealth of previous performing experience. When he was eight years old he danced in the 1400th performance of CATS and was in Jesus Christ Superstar when he was ten. In February 2017 he played ‘Cosmo Brown’ in Singin’ in the Rain at the Budapest Opera and in December 2017 he appeared as ‘Little Nutcracker’ in a production of The Nutcracker. For the past year Levente has been performing as ‘Tannenbaum’ in Lévy Jó Mindhalálig (Be Faithful Unto Death) at Théâtre Attila József in Budapest. He has also performed in several Madách shows including Peter Pan, Gulliver and A Bug’s Tale.
Levente first heard about auditions for BETM through the Madách Dance School. As his mother, Melanie, is English and knew and loved both the film and the musical, they watched both together many times, and Levente even learnt the English version of the musical first!
When the casting for the first season (2016) took place Levente was too young to auditon. He did audition for the second season (2017) but unfortunately his singing wasn’t good enough. This didn’t put Levente off his dream of playing Billy and for the next year he took singing lessons and a couple of acting courses. All his hard work and determination paid off, as in the third casting Levente won the lead role of Billy.
With his debut performance as Billy on 20-Jun-2018, Levente became the 248th actor worldwide to play the role in a professional, regional or community theatre production of the musical.
After his first season in BETM, Levente played the role of Ruben in Ari Aster’s film Midsommar, which will be released in the coming months. He underwent quite the transformation for the role, as can be seen in the picture below. The prosthetics took three hours to apply.
Levente returns to the role of Billy for the 2019 season of BETM at the Erkel Theatre.
For more information about Levente visit:
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