“I don’t want to trip myself running downhill,” actor Nadeem Phillip says over the phone from Toronto, where he is performing a play called Inside at the Summerworks festival. “I don’t want to let the quality of my work suffer because I’m physically exhausted.”

At 27, Phillip is currently in the enviable position of getting a lot of work. As we chat, he has already booked three more shows for this fall and winter. But when the conversation turns to the issue of diverse representation, the Pakistani-Canadian actor says, “I have to remember that I’m not experiencing success just because I’m a nonwhite performer and that’s what’s needed right now. It’s so easy for that to take all of the air out of ‘Oh, I’m experiencing success because I’m good!’ ”

Vancouver audiences who have seen Phillip perform in Cock, Doost, Never the Last, and Movements No. 1&2—all within the last year—will not doubt that he’s getting work because he’s good: Phillip is so transformative that he’s hard to recognize from one role to the next. Still, the combination of his talent and increasing diversity on our stages makes for a happy confluence—that comes in many shapes.

Phillip will play Prakash, one of two well-off brothers who get roped into begging on the streets of Kolkata, in Carousel Theatre for Young People’s production of Sultans of the Street, which will run October 29 to November 13 at the Waterfront Theatre.

All of the characters in that show are South Asian, but, as Phillip says, director Marcus Youssef “has a really powerful consciousness about how he’s casting this project”. Reached by phone, Youssef confirms that, of the five cast members, two are South Asian, four are artists of colour, and one is white. “I want kids to look at the cast and look around in the audience and see the same mix,” Youssef explains. That’s part of his strategy for driving home the point that there’s poverty in Vancouver as well as in “exotic” locations.

From February 15 to March 11, Phillip will play Hasan, the lead in Anosh Irani’s Men in White, at the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage. He declined to sign the contract for that gig until the one female South Asian role had been cast with a South Asian actress. Risha Nanda got the part. “I know that some non–South Asian actors are being cast,” he says. “And that’s okay. But roles don’t come around for South Asian actresses, like, ever.”

There’s also room for colour-blind casting in the evolving reality of representation. In Never the Last, writer Christine Quintana brought Phillip in to play Walter Gramatté, a historical figure who was a painter and World War I vet. Phillip points out that Gramatté was a fair-skinned German. “Christine just decided to cast someone who she felt could hit the target internally, and to say that the externals don’t matter.”