Constant pursuit Longtime Les Misérables cast member making his Canadian debut By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:18 PM CST Friday, Feb. 20, 2026

Javert is a role Hayden Tee can’t escape.

The New Zealand-born actor first played the wolfish Les Misérables inspector over a decade ago in an Australian tour, before pursuing protagonist Jean Valjean on Broadway, in Dubai, on the West End, in Taiwan and across the United States.

“I adore the character. I’m always grateful to return,” says Tee, who has also played the dastardly principal Miss Trunchbull in the West End production of Matilda.

Next week, following a weeklong run in Minneapolis, Tee’s Javert will make his Canadian debut in Winnipeg at the Centennial Concert Hall as part of the North American touring production of Les Misérables, the beloved, long-running musical based on the novel by Victor Hugo, featuring standards such as I Dreamed a Dream, Do You Hear the People Sing? and One Day More.

In the book, first published in 1862, Javert is introduced by the author as a man who “belonged to the police,” a “dog-son of a wolf,” who would arrest his own father and renounce his own mother in order to uphold his respect for authority and hatred of rebellion.

The inspector hounds Valjean, a former convict who has broken parole and is living a successful life in disguise, for decades in pursuit of what he considers justice.

What keeps Tee interested in exploring the character is that Javert’s obsessive commitment to the task at hand can be justified: he isn’t evil for evil’s sake, unlike Trunchbull, who tortures her students and whose mere mention provokes Tee to shiver.

“Honestly, I block her out a little bit. She was a character who was nice to let go of at the end of the day,” he says.

Whereas Javert has retained Tee’s interest for hundreds of performances, with each revisitation bringing fresh revelation.

“My perspective has kind of remained the same, in general, in terms of his function within the piece, which I think is my job as an actor — to always remember why the character has been written. And it’s there to propel Jean Valjean’s story along. So that’s always remained the same, but every night is discovering something different, even still after all these years.”

Nowadays, Tee wears Javert’s uniform almost like a second skin, but when he was first tasked with embodying the role in Australia, the actor started by tying a string around his belly button.

“When building a character from the onset, I like to choose a centre of gravity, essentially where the character moves from, and Javert felt very balanced and from the gut,” says Tee.

“Marius (Les Mis’s romantic student revolutionary, whom Tee has also played) was definitely a lead-from-the-heart character, but I remember thinking of Javert being led from the belly button, from the centre, from the gut.”

It was also helpful for Tee to consider his character’s bestial tendencies by constructing what he calls an animal totem.

“My friends refer to me as a meercock, which is half meerkat and half peacock, and I think that with characters, it’s actually really helpful to stack animals as well, so I started with a shark, a wolf and a tiger for Javert,” Tee says, cuddling his puppy, Baxter, in his Minneapolis hotel room.

Tee’s Javert — alongside Nick Cartell’s Valjean, Lindsay Heather Pearce’s Fantine and Alexa Lopez’s Cosette — will run at the Centennial Concert Hall from Tuesday to March 1.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman