Tan France reveals ‘shameful’ reason he once tried to hide his identity

By Pierra Willix, Press Association Senior Entertainment Reporter

Tan France has admitted he feels “physically sick” recalling how he once tried to hide his cultural background as a gay man.

The 43-year-old Queer Eye star, full name Tanveer Wasim France, is the son of Muslim Pakistani immigrant parents and was raised in Doncaster.

He has recently been named as a producer for The P Word – an Olivier Award-winning play which first premiered in 2022 and charts the parallel lives of two gay Pakistani men.

Written by Waleed Akhtar, he stars as Bilal or “Billy”, who has been “ground down by years of Grindr and the complexity of being a brown gay man”, while Esh Alladi plays Zafar, who has fled homophobic persecution in Pakistan to seek asylum in the UK.

Speaking to the Press Association after seeing the show for the first time, France described how “emotionally charged” it was.

“I can handle some real emotion, but last night, because of the specificity, it really got me. I thought it was really touching and I couldn’t believe how much they managed to pack into 90 minutes,” he said.

When asked if he saw any of his lived experiences reflected in the show, he admitted he “shamefully” connected with Bilal, who he described as having “internalised self-hatred”.

He continued: “I think that’s the reason why I struggled with my emotions yesterday, is because I saw myself in Bilal, or some of the actions that he takes.

“I remember that I did those things in my late teens and really wanted to pretend … I couldn’t do a good job, because I’m obviously brown, but I tried to convince people that I’m OK to be in this space, because I’m not going to scare them, don’t smell that different, and don’t speak that differently.

“It was to keep myself safe, and it was to feel like I might be loved, and if I lied enough about just how non-Asian I am, hopefully I could find a partner, and it’s one of the reasons I moved from the UK.”

France added: “I was not willing to pretend any more about who I was, and I wasn’t willing to put up with the racism of it all. So, I moved to the States, where I could just be really Pakistani.”

The TV personality and fashion designer said “couldn’t believe” how he once acted as he was now so proud to share his culture with the world, and was even the first person to wear a sherwani suit to win an Emmy.

“I’m really proud of my culture and I’m really upset with myself that I was a version of Billy … but I think that’s the same path so many brown queer people take in the UK because they feel like there’s no other option,” he added.

France said that although he felt “physically sick” thinking about his past actions, he saw his support of The P Word as a way to spotlight the Muslim community.

In the years since his play first hit the stage, Akhtar said he would regularly be stopped by people in the street sharing how much it had impacted them.

“I felt this real responsibility to try and get it back, and unfortunately the themes of the play just seemed to be even more relevant in 2026, so it felt like the right moment as well,” he said.

The love story between Billy and Zafar unfolds against a backdrop of the British asylum system and the effect successive governments’ policies to cut migration have had.

He said: “I wrote the play in 2021 and had a naive hope that maybe it wouldn’t be an issue by the time it hit the stage or would be a time capsule piece … unfortunately, that has not been the case.”

He went on to explain how he has wanted to humanise asylum seekers and show audiences they were so much more than a statistic.

“A lot of the time when we see these stories about asylum seekers the story ends with them arriving in the country after they’ve been through horrors. But what I really wanted to do was also show that once you’re in the UK, the system grinds you down, and I think that was a shock for a lot of people and opened their eyes,” he said.

Despite the show’s heavy themes, France described the play as “hilarious” at times and said: “The audience laughed so many times.

“I’ve never seen comedy used in a way to desperately save you from such an emotional moment, but it’s not just that it’s funny, it’s used in the most comprehensive way, like the way comedy should be used. I thought it was a masterpiece.”

Meanwhile, Akhtar said his approach was to “lure you in with humour and then slap you with some politics”.

The P Word is running at the Holloway Theatre (the Bush Theatre’s main space) until June 27th.