Portraits - Perry Curties
Interview - Philip Goodfellow
Styling - Mark Anthony Bradley
Grooming - Rebecca Doney at Werth Represents using Cloud Nine
Shot exclusively for The 3rd Act at Olympic Studios, London, March 2026.

Some of the earliest credits on Eddie Marsan’s lengthy filmography are quite telling. ‘Yob’. ‘Gang leader’. ‘Intruder’. ‘Mugger’. ‘Young thug’. In an industry where typecasting has been a long-standing issue, particularly back in the eighties and nineties when he was first beginning to forge his career, Eddie’s distinctive look and background put him at risk of being pigeonholed from the outset. ‘They had very fixed ideas of me,’ he explains. ‘Even at drama school; every drama school has the people they think are going to be the lead actors, the big stars, and I was never that. I played smaller parts, so I always knew drama school saw me as being a utility actor. That’s no criticism of them; there were good looking posh boys who were going to play the leads and somebody like me, if I could, the best I could hope for was to be a good character actor, which is what I ended up being.’

Having left drama school, it would be almost eight years before Eddie was earning a living as an actor, but he continued putting in the work during that time, studying three nights a week with various drama teachers and taking on a diverse range of roles in fringe theatre plays across London, including Shakespeare, Pinter and Brecht. ‘By the time the industry employed me as a professional actor, they thought I was straight off the council estate. They didn’t realise that, for seven years, I’d been an artist. I’d been an actor.’

Growing up in East London, it was initially dance that provided Eddie with an expressive outlet; becoming an actor was never part of the plan. ‘I didn’t think it was possible,’ he says. As is often the case though, one creative endeavour ended up leading to the other. After Eddie and a friend were spotted dancing in a club in Hackney, the pair found themselves dancing on a film set as extras in the eighties British thriller Empire State. It was a pivotal moment for Eddie. ‘I saw Jamie Foreman doing a scene – he subsequently became a good friend of mine – and he was so good, it inspired me to become an actor.’

Initially cutting his teeth in various TV roles, Eddie eventually found himself appearing in films as well. Around the turn of the century, the British film industry was happily meeting the considerable demand for homemade gangster films, including Gangster No.1 which Eddie appeared in. Despite their success and popularity, Eddie quickly realised it was a passing fad. ‘I didn’t want to be a professional cockney; I wanted to be an actor. I didn’t want anyone to define me as anything.’ Taking inspiration from fellow British actors such as Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Timothy Spall, Eddie enlisted a voice coach, learned different accents, and educated himself on the general physicality of acting. ‘One of my advantages – which was a disadvantage at first – is that I had no academic points of reference. I never approached acting academically; it was always visceral. My influences have always been photographs or music or sounds or smells. There’s something about that; if you allow it to inform your physicality and your voice, all those aspects, you can become far more diverse.’

For any committed performer – particularly one looking to forge a career as a character actor – it makes perfect sense for them to expand their abilities wherever possible, but Eddie still found himself treated like a fish out of water. ‘When journalists first began to interview me, they would ask me how I’d escaped Bethnal Green. I found that quite offensive, because I hadn’t escaped; I was doing what I was doing because of Bethnal Green. I grew up in a diverse community and that’s one of the reasons I’m a diverse actor. Growing up in a diverse community, where people are from different religions, or you’d have sleepovers with kids and get to eat different food, you invariably end up questioning your own cultural orthodoxy. If you do that, if you question your own cultural orthodoxy, you’re then more open as an actor to take on other perspectives, which is what acting should be. That’s why I think it was to my advantage. Life’s funny like that; some of the things that people think are a disadvantage actually inspire you to find a solution.’

That talent for diversity played an important part in helping Eddie to establish himself as a highly respected character actor, both in the UK and the US. In 2004, he was cast in Vera Drake, his first experience of working with lauded British director Mike Leigh. Known for his fondness of relying on actors who have delivered for him in the past and successfully navigated his unique method of filmmaking, Leigh called on Eddie again two years later for the role of Scott in the comedy drama Happy-Go-Lucky. Due to Leigh’s approach of ensuring his actors only know as much as their character knows at any given time, the comedy element wasn’t something Eddie was initially aware of. ‘I didn’t know it had levity. In my own narcissism, I thought I was going to be the next Travis Bickle. I thought I was in a really dark film, until he told me to pick up Sally. Then I realised I was in an Ealing comedy.’ Whilst any lesser actor might struggle in such an environment, it is one that Eddie thrived in. ‘That’s the brilliance of Mike. To create a character, you create the prejudices of a character. When I say prejudices, I mean it in the most basic sense. Human beings are prejudicial creatures; we predict what’s going to happen based on what’s happened before. You work on your predictions and you allow yourself to be surprised when they don’t come true. That’s what acting is.’

With 150 films under his belt, many of them British, Eddie is well placed to comment on the current state of the industry. With increasing financial restraints making it difficult to get films made at all – particularly independent films – it is a precarious time. One knock-on effect Eddie has noticed is that filmmakers are returning to the fundamentals of their craft. ‘They have to do a film under a certain budget now, so they can’t use big effects or star casting. What they end up doing is getting good writers and getting good actors, going back to a kind of basics. I noticed that with films like No Ordinary Heist and All the Devils Are Here, just really good writing, really good films. There is a means by which creativity always finds a way and I’m finding that’s happening now. Financially though, it’s very hard.’

Based on the remarkable true story of a bank robbery that took place in Belfast in 2004, No Ordinary Heist sees Eddie – showcasing an impressive Northern Irish accent – play a beleaguered bank manager who, along with one of his hapless security guards, is forced into carrying out the robbery of their bank on behalf of the robbers. After reading the script, Eddie was particularly taken with the premise, not least of all the backdrop to the drama. ‘What really fascinated me was that the bank manager and the security guard had a history together, due to the Troubles. I thought that was fascinating. People who aren’t from Northern Ireland don’t tend to understand; there’s a class system even within the Catholic community, within Northern Ireland, and that’s what the film was trying to explore.’

Along with strong performances from Eddie and Éanna Hardwicke, who plays the security guard accomplice, the film’s claustrophobic feel and highly effective use of sound help to ratchet up the sense of anxiety, as does the occasional appearance on screen of a clock counting down the seconds for the desperate pair. ‘The sound wasn’t in the script, obviously, but the clock was there, so automatically you know the tension is being built up. Every script has to visually show you as much as it can on the screen. It won’t give you music or sound, but it will give you something like the visual of the clock, so you realise that the pressure is building. What you’ve got to do is play someone who’s under that pressure and create an authentic story to bring that to life, so the audience know that you’re really under pressure. It was all Colin McIvor really, he’d written it and directed it and it was all pre-planned. That’s the brilliance of good directing.’

At 57 years young, it feels like Eddie is at the peak of his acting prowess, with films such as No Ordinary Heist and All the Devils Are Here serving to cement the fact that he is more than capable of carrying a film as the lead. ‘The uglier I get, the more I work, and I’m really busy at the moment,’ says Eddie with a wry grin. ‘Certain actors play wish-fulfilment characters – I wish I could be as cool as them or I wish I could sleep with them. I’ve never been employed to do that. I’m employed to be believed as someone else and to find the humanity in them. Even when I was 18, 19, 20, my youth was never the means by which I earned a living. I’ve got a face like a smacked arse. My unusualness is what got me here.’

Upcoming appearances include six-part Sky TV crime thriller Prisoner, which was penned by Bridge of Spies writer Matt Charman, and Campeón Gabacho, a romantic drama directed by Jonás Cuarón. Still very much in demand in front of the camera, the idea of one day working behind the camera isn’t one that has escaped Eddie. ‘I have been asked to direct films,’ he reveals. ‘I didn’t do it initially, because I spent nine years doing Ray Donovan in the US and I used to commute back and forth, so there was never space enough for me to direct anything as I was always committed to have to go back in six months or so. That’s why I haven’t done theatre for years either, because I was working on a long-range show and had four children under the age of seven at the time. There was never any justification for me to go and do a play. I keep being approached though and there are things happening now. People are very interested to see how I direct. I’m interested.’

No Ordinary Heist is in cinemas now.
Prisoner is on Sky TV, soon.

Portraits - Perry Curties
Interview - Philip Goodfellow
Styling - Mark Anthony Bradley
Grooming - Rebecca Doney at Werth Represents using Cloud Nine
Shot exclusively for The 3rd Act at Olympic Studios, London, March 2026.

Interview - Perry Curties
Portraits - David Titlow
Styling - Lily Lam
Grooming - Nohelia Reyes using 111skin and Maria Nila
Fashion Assistants Theo James Elvis, Sasha Clegg
Shot exclusively for The 3rd Act at All Saints, London, November 2025.

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett arrives at our table in a very loud art gallery cafe, and for a moment, I’m genuinely not sure which version of him I’m about to shake hands with. In the last seven days I’ve watched him play the bruised but beguiling drag queen in Femme, the hysterically heightened Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest on stage in London’s West End, and the brooding, near-wordless enigma/anchor in Down Cemetery Road for Apple TV+. Usually, after a week spent bingeing someone’s work, you start to sense the person behind the performances — many actors in real life turn out to be perfectly aligned with the characters they play. But this guy’s recent roles are so wildly different that I find myself wondering: who exactly is Nathan Stewart-Jarrett?

He wonders it, too. “I think I’m in it all,” he says with a shrug. “Because it’s still me.”

And this is the peculiar magic of Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. He is not an actor who imposes a single persona on every project; nor is he a chameleon disappearing behind prosthetics and accents. Instead, he seems to stretch himself — amuse himself — by heightening certain facets in each role. He describes this with a kind of gleeful self-exposure.

“In comedy, I’ve amplified some of the worst bits of myself,” he says. “It’s probably the ugliest bit of myself that I’m putting out without even realising it.”

He says this like someone confessing to an innocent prank rather than an artistic strategy. Comedy, for him, is a place where he can be “petty, pithy or… [he cant think of anymore P words] things you’d want to do in life but you stop yourself.”

Anyone who’s seen him in Earnest might suspect some improvisation floating under the surface of the Wildean dialogue, but Stewart-Jarrett insists that’s an illusion. “No improvisation with lines,” he says. “It’s not allowed.” Wilde, after all, is practically holy text.

But delivery? That’s a different matter entirely.

“It changes every single evening,” he says. “Sometimes something happens, you just make each other laugh by mistake.”

He lights up as he recounts the live-wire unpredictability of theatre. There was the night that co-star Olly Alexander, shut his finger in a door mid-scene. “He was obviously in pain but I found it really funny.” Another evening, Alexander stood on his foot. “It really hurt, but that’s the joy of theatre. Mistakes are wonderful.”

At the mid point of a 3 month run had become, by then, a kind of shared hallucination — endlessly repeatable yet constantly mutating. “You’re a different person every day,” he says. “You find different ways of delivering the line. It means something different to you on a particular night.”

At one point we find ourselves discussing Laurence Olivier’s notorious meltdown backstage after a universally praised performance he feared he could never repeat.

Stewart-Jarrett nods. “You don’t really try to repeat or even perfect it” he says. “I really don’t want to get caught in that.”

On film, he’s learned to drop the idea of perfectibility altogether. Early in his career he’d keep pushing, tweaking, trying to adapt each take. It never worked.

“Now I call it polishing a turd,” he says cheerfully. “You get tighter and tighter. These days I just move on. Keep it loose.”

Given the spectrum of characters he plays, and duality of his town & country personas in his roles I ask whether there are multiple Nathans in real life too.

“Yeah, there are actually,” he says immediately.

“City Nathan is sharp, sociable, animated by restaurants, galleries, and the general hum of London or New York. Country Nathan is quieter: cooking, watching films, reading, wearing the same jumper for two days because “no one’s going to see you.”

For nearly a decade he’s lived in New York — which prompts a brief detour into a discussion about American wildlife. “In America, there’s wild animals,” he says with mock-gravity. “They’ll get you if you go for a walk in the country!”

So he prefers winter walks. Summer walks, especially in the countryside, feel like tempting fate, he smiles, “To be honest I become a slob in the country. Maybe that’s what you’re meant to do.”

Discussing his most significant roles, a pattern emerges: Stewart-Jarrett keeps playing more than one person at a time.
In Femme: two.
In Culprits: “I was actually three people in that.”
In Misfits (his early breakthrough role): his character eventually shape-shifted into a woman.
In Ernest the entire premise is dual identities.
Even in Cemetery Road it feels like two characters, given the mystery of the role in the first third of the series.

“Is this a theme?” he asks, amused. “Maybe I should have been a twin.”

But he has a theory. “What I often play in characters is secrets… someone with a secret life. It’s a great conceit. Those characters are incredibly interesting.”

Secrets, he believes, are the engine of narrative. “We all have them,” he says. And dramatically speaking, “a secret is a great tool.”

When the conversation turns to Femme, his face brightens.

“It was something really special,” he says. “We could all feel that at the time.”

The cast reunited recently in his dressing room during the Ernest run. “It was special to be back in one place with all of those people at once.”

He believes the film will grow in stature. “It’s got a life afterwards,” he says. And he’s proud of how it looks: the softness of the lighting, the unexpected colour palette. “London films are usually more grey,” he says. “They went for a different aesthetic.”

Now, though, the focus is on Apple TV+’s Down Cemetery Road, where he plays the enigmatic Downey — a man whose silence becomes its own form of exposition.

“I didn’t speak for the first couple of episodes,” he says. “It was weird until I realised… it was a gift.”

He had to unlearn the actor’s instinct to fill the space. “You feel like you have to impart all this stuff,” he says. “Then I was like, Well, shut up. Just be.”

Episode 5 — which he confirms is “a big one” — brings Downey’s past into focus, introducing a sister who never knew he existed and revealing the central storyline that he’s been hiding.

He absolutely won’t say what happens next. “It’s Apple! They’ll deliver a poison apple,” he jokes. “It’s a Snow White situation.”

But he clearly loved filming it — especially the Bonnie-and-Clyde-style bickering with his co-star. “Our massive argument in the car was so hilarious to film,” he says. “You really get to feel their bond.”

There’s action in Cemetery Road too, and Stewart-Jarrett, it becomes clear, is unexpectedly enthusiastic about stunts. This wasn’t always the case. He used to be terrified — too many military uncles, too much pressure to “get it right.” But a revelatory experience on Disney’s Culprits changed his mind.

“Once I got over it… once I got into the fun of it, it was like being a 10-year-old wrestling with my cousins again,” he says. “Those stunt days were some of the best days ever.”

“I’d love to do pure action,” he says without hesitation. Something Charlize Theron-esque. Or perhaps, judging by his enthusiasm, something in the John-Claude Van Damme oeuvre. There’s one film he can’t stop laughing about, where Van Damme plays a fashion designer. “It’s so ridiculous,” he says, delighted. “It’s so good.”

As we wrap up our conversation, we circle back to the contrasting worlds he occupies as an actor: action roles, romantic roles, and the relatively recent — and vital — presence of intimacy coordinators on set. I pose a ridiculous hypothetical dilemma: would he choose a stunt coordinator or an intimacy coordinator if a project only had the budget for one?

“On Femme, the intimacy coordinator was indispensable. We couldn’t have achieved what we achieved without Robbie Taylor Hunt,” he says. The role, he believes, is akin to having a mediator. “You have to establish trust: don’t touch this part of my body, you can touch all of my body, if I do this… whatever. A third party is really useful.”

Over time, he’s become confident in setting his own boundaries. “If I have to be naked alone, I can say to a director, ‘You have three takes. If you don’t get it by the third take, I’ll put my clothes back on.’”
He laughs. “But of course you absolutely can’t work without a stunt coordinator — unless you want to lose a leg!”

We’re getting up from the table now, so I throw him one last hypothetical: which classic film role would he take on if he could go back in time? He relishes the dilemma and cycles through options before landing on two comedies — Ryan O’Neal’s role in What’s Up, Doc? and Cary Grant’s in Bringing Up Baby. “They’re both uptight,” he says. “They make me laugh.”

Then, reconsidering: “Actually… I’d love to be Lestat. I’d make a really good vampire.” He grins. “A lazy vampire, but a good one.”

And perhaps that’s the perfect way to leave him: an actor who is, at once, many things — comic and tragic, physical and vulnerable, sharp and soft, seductive and silly; a man who delights in secrets, dualities, and roles that transform him. Over one week I’ve seen him inhabit three wildly different worlds, and yet sitting here, he somehow contains them all. Whoever Nathan Stewart-Jarrett becomes next — vampire, action hero, uptight screwball lead — it’s bound to be unexpected, and entirely him.

Down Cemetery Road is on Apple TV+ now.

Interview - Perry Curties
Portraits - David Titlow
Styling - Lily Lam
Grooming - Nohelia Reyes using 111skin and Maria Nila
Fashion Assistants Theo James Elvis, Sasha Clegg
Shot exclusively for The 3rd Act at All Saints, London, November 2025.

Portraits & Feature - Perry Curties at John Parkinson
Styling - Ella Gaskell
Grooming - Charlotte Yeomans

The long‐awaited fifth season of Slow Horses lands with that distinctive slap of icy humour and existential dread that has made Mick Herron’s world, via Apple TV+, one of the finest spy‐thriller presences on British television. It’s like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, if everyone in the Circus was hungover, emotionally repressed, and permanently exiled to a grey office near a bus garage near the Barbican.

Slow Horses has always been less about glamorised espionage than about the losers, outcasts and departmental detritus of MI5. These aren’t Bond types. These are the kind of people who forget their lunch in the microwave and refer to minor nervous breakdowns as “a bit of a wobble”. In Season 5, this motif intensifies. Lamb is grubbier. River is more lost. Roddy Ho is still inexplicably confident. And into this rich soup of dysfunction steps a character who somehow manages to make all the others look positively well-adjusted: J.K. Coe, played with haunted stillness by the always-interesting Tom Brooke.

Introduced last season and expanded in this one, Coe doesn’t so much arrive at Slough House as haunt it. Hoodie up, headphones on, eyes flicking to exits — he’s like a man trying to blend into a hedge. He’s the kind of character you’d find staring into a kettle wondering how to use it as a weapon.

This season, Coe has room to stretch. Not in the physical sense — he’s mostly hunched — but emotionally. As the Slough House crew are all pushed toward their psychological and professional limits, Coe’s arc could be the one that explores what happens when a highly trained operative becomes untethered – when the machinery that once governed one’s actions no longer functions, whether due to trauma, betrayal or sheer existential inertia.

Is loyalty to one’s country still meaningful when that country betrayed you, erased you, or simply forgot to log your existence on the shared drive?

And, crucially: what did happen to Coe before Slough House? Every character on this show has a scandal behind them, usually involving some combination of bureaucratic mishap, bad decisions and whisky. But Coe’s past feels different. More… surgical. Like his mistakes involved scalpels rather than spreadsheets. There’s something feral under the surface, something simmering — and Brooke plays it like a man permanently holding his breath.

What Brooke delivers here isn’t so much a performance as an atmosphere. While others deliver zingers, punches or both, Coe often just… stands. Watching. Calculating. Occasionally vibrating with barely-contained dread. He doesn’t act in the traditional sense — he radiates.

Brooke’s brilliance is that he trades in absence and suppression. In a genre where too many spies are all guns and growling, Coe’s most lethal weapon is what he doesn’t say. A wince here. A glance there. A moment where you’re unsure if he’s about to bolt or explode. And when he does speak — when the silence finally breaks — it lands like a slap from a clown at a kids birthday party.

One episode features a flash of Coe’s past — a story involving handcuffs, PTSD, and the kind of quiet cruelty that MI5 presumably has buried under a few non-disclosure agreements and a server room somewhere in Cheltenham. He tells it without blinking, without inflection. That’s the genius: it’s not performed trauma. It’s just… there. Stale and unfinished.

What makes Coe’s presence so valuable is how he contrasts with everyone around him. Lamb (Gary Oldman) is all bile and brilliance, gassing out corridors with snide barbs and leftover sausage rolls. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is full of hot young confusion. Roddy Ho remains the world’s most irritating incel-with-clearance. But Coe? He’s the whisper behind the wall. The silence in the conversation. The glitch in the matrix.

And in a show that thrives on dread and dysfunction, Coe might just be its moral fulcrum. He’s the one character who seems to know how broken everything is. Not just the system — but the people. Himself included. Maybe especially.

Tom Brooke has quietly been doing the rounds in top-tier British drama for years. He’s the guy you definitely recognise, possibly from The Crown, Bodyguard, Empire of Light, Sherlock, or Preacher — where he played an immortal angel with the general energy of a tired Victorian librarian. On stage, he’s been lauded for turns in Jerusalem and The Kitchen at the National Theatre, performances brimming with pathos, rage and that trademark Brooke weirdness.

Slow Horses Season 5 proves once again that this is the best spy show on television by being the least spy-like. It’s not about action sequences or plot twists (though there are plenty), but about what happens to the people who’ve been discarded by the system, and what they might still be capable of — or not.

Amid the show’s bruised brilliance, Tom Brooke’s J.K. Coe emerges as one of the most memorable additions yet. A slow-burning cipher with a hoodie and a haunted past, Coe is the character you can’t stop thinking about — even if he’d very much prefer it if you did.

By the end of the season, we probably still won’t know exactly who he is. But we know he matters. And if Slow Horses keeps going (and it should), Coe could end up being the soul of the show — or its cautionary tale. Or, maybe both.

Slow Horses is on Apple TV+ now.

Portraits & Feature - Perry Curties at John Parkinson
Styling - Ella Gaskell
Grooming - Charlotte Yeomans

Portraits & Interview - Perry Curties
Styling - Lily Lam
Makeup - Isabel Concetta at Premier using Armani Beauty
Hair - Alex Szabo at Carol Hayes using Sam McKnight
Photo Assistants - Piotr Rulka & Jess Lax
Fashion Assistant - Lina Levein

I want to hug Chloe Pirrie when I first meet her. Not because she looks like she needs one — she’s calm, early to arrive, and softly self-contained — but because I only
finished watching her character in Dept. Q last night, and I’m still emotionally wrecked. For most of the show she’s trapped, isolated, and visibly unraveling. Watching her perform is like holding your breath for six hours. Now here she is in front of me, very much alive and offering a gentle smile. It’s all a bit disorienting.

You’d be forgiven for thinking she’s just now making her entrance into public consciousness too. Her current role — in Netflix’s latest series has all the trappings of a star-making turn. And yet, Chloe has been doing this for years. Carefully. Quietly. Picking roles that never quite sit in the centre of the spotlight, but instead hold your attention in the edges, the margins, the moments that linger longer than you expect. So people watching Netflix may well ask - ‘Where did she appear from overnight?’

She laughs. Its a confident Scottish laugh, perfectly pitched to rebuff such a cheap
question, and it’s followed by the revelation that acting success didn’t just fall on her plate, although plates did have a major role in her journey.

Before her film career took shape, Chloe was waitressing in Camden, juggling split shifts and late buses, enduring that humiliating rite of passage many actors face. One
particularly grim night, a table walked out without paying and she had to cover the cost.

“Then someone spat on me while I was walking home. I missed my bus. I just… I couldn’t do it anymore,” she says. “I got home and said, ‘Why am I doing this?”

It wasn’t a dramatic quitting moment. More of a quiet decision to let go of the backup plan and trust the path she was already on.

“I got in to my boyfriend and he was like, ‘Well, why are you doing this?’ Every creative person probably reaches that point where they have to let go of the second job for survival and just trust. They are where they’re meant to be, and you might have to go back to it, but there’s no shame in that as well. But also just trust where you are.”

She smiles. “It did work.”

We laugh about how this story would be seen as a rite of passage in Los Angeles, a practical and completely acceptable stepping stone towards a creative dream, “but here, everybody thinks you leave drama school and you just become…”

So, how did she become the actress she is now? Born and raised in Edinburgh, Chloe felt the gravitational pull of creativity early on.

“I think I just had a feeling of wanting to be part of something. I think anyone creative has this sense that there’s something amazing out there away from where you are currently that might offer you something else.”

That feeling sharpened into focus after seeing a performance of Look Back in Anger in Edinburgh.

“It was David Tennant and Kelly Reilly and just being like, whoa, really amazed by it.”

Cinema, too, played its part.

“Jodie Foster was somebody who I can really remember having a strong effect, I don’t really know what I was admiring, but I just remember being like -
something about this really speaks to me. But then, of course, you go off to drama school…”

British drama schools are often regarded as the best in the world and have
produced a lot of major talent but the failure rate is high and Chloe’s experience was as difficult as any I’ve heard.

“It took me 3 tries to get into drama school. When I finally got in I was hugely challenged by it. It is such an intense thing to do, you learn so much, but you’re so young and you see people graduate around you who are convinced that they are going to be a stars immediately.”

When she did eventually graduate, it wasn’t with a sense of arrival. More of a cautious
optimism.

“I didn’t leave drama school thinking I was going to work loads, because it was hard for me to even get into drama school. It was hard when I was there. I think they
respected me, maybe thought I had promise, but I didn’t feel very favoured. I just left thinking, Oh, maybe I’ll wait and see what happens.”

What happened was Shell, her breakthrough in the Scottish indie that won critical acclaim and gently etched her name onto the radar of casting directors and filmmakers looking for something a little different.

“I’ve played loads of quirky and unusual,” she reflects. “People who are peripheral to the story or are coming in memorably in some form, but they’re not necessarily the center of it.”

But they’re not forgettable either. Shell, for one, was unforgettable. A slow, spare film about isolation and identity — and Chloe carried it.

“Yeah, she’s an outsider. She doesn’t know.”

That’s a theme that has run, quietly but consistently, through much of her work. “When I think about Shell, and then I think about Emily Brontë, who I played, it’s
completely different people, but there is a shared quality.”

That quality — a certain friction between the character and the world around her —has become something of a trademark in Chloe’s performances, is it something she adds to her roles?

“I must do, yeah,” she says. “Everyone feels like an outsider on some level, but I always felt like… not the obvious choice for things.”

Maybe it’s just who she is. And the industry seems to sense it.

“Sally Wainwright, She’s an incredible writer. She’s from Yorkshire and is a really strong and distinct person. She was just like - ‘We are not making this a Southern impression of their life. There’s dirt. They die from TB. This is a dirty world’.”

Whether it’s Emily Brontë or under-the-radar detectives, Chloe brings a grounded, honest intensity that has a kind of gravitational pull.

“I think there’s something in [Jodie Foster’s] ability to communicate so much while doing so little,” she says. “Yeah, she really is someone who you feel like you can see every thought land, and I’ve always responded to those types of performances.”

It’s no surprise, then, that director Scott Frank cast her in two of his most visually precise, emotionally layered series: The Queen’s Gambit and now Dept. Q.

“I love working with Scott. I find him just the most amazing director. He’s such a brilliant mind, and I trust him so implicitly when I’m working with him… I can just surrender to the writing” Chloe explains. “Sometimes you work with
people and you feel like you have to assess the situation and guard parts of your performance from interference or [technical] things that might not be helpful to you… but with him, I just don’t have to think about that.”

In Dept. Q, she shot most of her scenes alone, entombed in a small chamber dubbed The Tube, by the crew (in a Scottish accent it sounds more like The Chib). You’re such a big part of the show, but you’re not really in any scenes with any of the other cast. Was that weird?

“It was so weird. I was staying in the same apartment complex as Alexi [Manvelov], and we’d be like, ‘oh Hi’, when I’d see him in the gym. But I was on my own schedule,” she says. “I saw people in makeup sometimes. But mostly, it was just me and my dog. Very solitary.”

It’s an image that sticks: Chloe Pirrie in a heavy psychological drama, spending the day filming dark, soul-baring monologues alone, and then padding around her apartment in woolly socks with a dog at her feet. Did she end up staying in character?

“No, No, you’ve got to break it. I think hanging on to an emotional state is a complete
fallacy. We can’t stay in one emotional state for more than seven minutes.” she says, “I feel like I just want to stay open and not deny what’s around me. Be aware of the camera on some level. Think of it as an ally, I found my own rhythm. I’ve always felt like there’s something unhealthy about the method style [of acting].”

“I think actors are very scared when we’re working,” she adds. “We’re right to be scared when we’re in front of the camera, it’s very exposing, and people deal with that fear differently, you’re making yourself vulnerable in front of a room full of people. I totally understand why some people feel like, I just have to be in this [character].”

That fear, she suggests, is not something to conquer but to collaborate with, perhaps only succumbing to ‘the method’ for accents.

“I think the first time I did an American accent I was like, I need to stay in this. I could be myself, but I needed to stay in the accent because I was improvising as well. There are elements of that where it’s helpful to keep part of it there. But every process is different. I would never say, I’ve got one process, and I’m always going to deploy that for every job I do.”

Her recent roles — from aristocratic outsiders in The Crown to emotionally frayed professionals the BBC’s Industry — all benefit from that same thoughtful, precise, often a little left-of-centre balancing act. And for someone often cast in roles that mirror loneliness or being on the outside, Chloe has a striking sense of calm about her place in the actual industry.

“Hopefully, that’s carried and it’s steadied as I’ve worked, because I’ve been grateful for what I’ve got.”

Maybe that’s why her work sticks. She’s not acting like someone trying to belong. She simply does — on her own terms. When I ask her about future dreams, her eyes light up.

“Well, I’ve said this a couple of times recently because I keep coming back to it. But I feel like I’ve got a bit of a yearning for, not guilty pleasures exactly but the original things that I fell in love with as a kid, that’s where I’m at. Jurassic Park! I cannot wait to see that, or anything that’s in space or deep sea, I really feel like I’d love to do something that has a more like sci-fi action-y thing, something not really in this world.”

She almost joined the Star Wars universe once — but turned it down.

“I got asked to do a little bit in one of the new Star Wars offshoots. I loved Star Wars as a kid… but then I also got offered a Paolo Sorrentino film. I literally looked at it in terms of - which was the bigger commitment and more money - it was the actor-y choice. I was like, okay, I think I’m going to do this.”

Any regrets?

“Star Wars? They never stop making them, maybe they will come around again” she laughs.

Right now, though, she’s immersed in a more literal sort of financial dilema with Industry, HBO’s finance drama.

“I play a politician — lots of big speeches. It’s challenging, but fun. The writing is muscular. You need theatre breath for it.”

And beyond that?

“There’s something else I’m doing,” she says, a little mischievously. “But I don’t think I’m allowed to say what it is.”

As we wrap up, Chloe remains as unassuming as she was when we started. No fuss. Just a woman with a lot of talent and a preference for the long game over the quick win.

“I’ll do the next thing,” she says. “Then maybe space.”

Dept. Q is on Netflix now.

Portraits & Interview - Perry Curties
Styling - Lily Lam
Makeup - Isabel Concetta at Premier using Armani Beauty
Hair - Alex Szabo at Carol Hayes using Sam McKnight
Photo Assistants - Piotr Rulka & Jess Lax
Fashion Assistant - Lina Levein

Where are you from?
I grew up in both NYC and the UK. I love to travel. That is something that I love about my job; I get to travel and see amazing places, meeting incredible people along the way who are infinitely interesting.

Who or what first drove you to become an actor?
I don’t think there is just one thing that did it for me. I have always loved and wanted to perform since I was very young. I loved movies and was continuously involved in something acting or drama related at school. Other than wanting to be a Marine Biologist (aged 7) or a Fashion Designer (aged 12), being an actor was the one that was always a constant for me. I just wanted to do it!

What do people tend to misunderstand about the acting profession?
I suppose the thing that comes to mind is that “it’s easy”. It has always been impressed on me that it is most definitely not easy. But I think that’s one of the things that I love so much about this job (which i feel incredibly lucky to do), is the challenge.

The world has just discovered you via Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, but what previous work should your new fans seek out online?
I think I am most proud of my role as Freya in a project for Channel 4 called I Am Ruth. It was a very challenging job to do from an emotional perspective.

What would your dream role or co-star be?
I’ve always loved Wes Anderson’s films so I think I have just achieved my dream role!

The most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given?
“Read the script over and over again”. This for me was so valuable, particularly as I’m dyslexic. For me this means that I often find it hard to retain all the information on the first read through of something. Additionally, reading and re-reading I find to be so helpful with character study and development. Once I feel I know the story inside out, everything comes much easier.

Is there anything else we should know about you?
I don’t understand any social media. I don’t have it and nor do I want it!
I make a mean banana bread, and don’t know why anyone would eat anything other than breakfast foods.

Photography Perry Curties
Styling Steph Kelly
Hair - Keiichirro Hirano
Makeup - Michael Gray

Mia wears green roll neck top by Weekday; green suit trousers by Mango; green pointed mules by Raid; gold earrings by Aloe.

Interview: Katie Baron
Photography: Perry Curties
Styling: Tom O’dell
Grooming: Joe Mills

Pleasingly, my interview with Nick Frost starts with some minor misbehaviour: a weird Zoom angle plus a serendipitously patterned cushion cues up the pretence that he’s in hospital having just had his appendix whipped out, an unlikely scenario I buy for at least a full minute. Such casually convincing dicking around is proof that although he’s now entered the spangly realms of Hollywood multi hyphenate (actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer) and starry projects like the new coming-of-age Star Wars’ series Skeleton Crew, in which he plays droid SM-33, he’s not entirely conceded to fulltime adulting. While now almost 53, in possession of numerous acclaimed roles, serious and comic, on both film and TV, the production company Stolen Picture (with Simon Pegg) and an ardent fanbase charmingly self-titled The Frostitutes he is ultimately “still mostly writing to make Simon and Edgar [Wright] laugh. If I'm at the premiere [of Get Away] in January and a joke I've written for Edgar makes him really laugh, even though I won't be able to see him in the cinema, if I can hear him laughing, that will be the best thing for me. There are jokes in there just for him, and others just for Simon.”

Dagenham-born Frost’s characters have previously been billed as archetypal good time guys – even layabout lad culture’s last men standing – but a quarter of a century after embodying the endearingly delusional, moustachioed TA reserve Mike Watt in beloved British slacker sitcom Spaced (co-written by then twentysomething Pegg and Jessica Hynes, directed by also twentysomething Wright) he’s covered masses of ground. Revelling in semi-autobiographical odd-bods, chancers and nerds (Spaced was loosely based on he and Pegg’s life as flatmates) plus a nice emerging line in psychopaths, his first writing credit was for survivalist TV show spoof Danger, 50,000 Volts! (2002) presenting tips for handling extreme situations like a zombie outbreak, volcano eruption or – stay vigilant – large windscreen-skewering poles. Like so many of Frost’s roles it’s completely of its time but almost unfeasibly funny now, too. Occasionally, it was also a labour of comedic love; for the post-atomic bomb episode he consumed smoked rat. Roles followed in zombie-com Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End (aka the Cornetto Trilogy); sci-fi adventure Paul (co-written with Pegg and lavished with SNL alumni – a legacy of Shaun of the Dead’s massive and enduring influence); inner city alien invasion story Attack the Block; underdog office-meets-dancefloor romcom Cuban Fury; unlikely partnership heart-warmer Kinky Boots; and Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, among others.

This year there’s How to Train Your Dragon, a big budget live-action reboot of DreamWorks’ 2010 animated film but it’s arguably Frost’s realness that gilds his genius – a slightly mouthy, on-the-verge-of-taking-it-too-far-ness that casts the illusion of relatability, combined with softer slivers of vulnerability, that have ensconced him in a multitude of cult comedy circles (“I am in a lot of Venn diagrams”). Consider the Horrible Histories cohort (he’s in the feature length movie), the Merchant & Gervais-iverse (see Merchant’s Fighting with my Family) and The League of Gentlemen (Reece Shearsmith who appears in both Spaced and the Cornetto Trilogy). He’s even had the supreme privilege of killing off other cult comedy icons – see Julie Walter’s Mrs Overall in Victoria Wood’s parodic soap opera Acorn Antiques who bit the bullet, sort of literally, when Frost’s armed robber shot her in front of Celia Imrie’s inimitable Miss Babs.

These off-kilter sketch show/sitcom legends light his fire. “I recently worked on Transaction [a 2025 sitcom about a transgender supermarket worker] with Doon Mackichan [co-creator of Smack the Pony] and she kind of gave me that same vibe I get when I work with Julia Davis or Kevin Eldon or Reece Shearsmith where I can just sit back and watch them do their stuff and it's fucking great. It's still exciting to get a chance to work with Julia Davis or hang out with Steve Coogan. You know, sex with Edgar and Simon is great but sometimes you have to keep it on the side.”

But it’s not been an easy road. The family tragedies he endured growing up are well-documented (including in his own memoir: Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies) as are his adult struggles with anxiety, to the extent it’s only in the last five years that he’s begun to believe he’s the real deal: “I had a road to Damascus style epiphany in terms of my life and where it was going and how I could change it.” Massaging scripts has been key, including TV series Into the Badlands, recent horror Black Cab, and even Skeleton Crew: “I think that one of the beautiful aspects of my career is that it's given me a voice, because I am a good writer I've been able to say to people, ‘hey, can I just have a little rewrite of this’? My scripts are chock full of drawings because it just fires me up in terms of thinking ‘okay the character should say this; this will be funny’. With Black Cab there was a great script; I simply made it smaller by making it more human.”

As an actor, some of the more serious fare has proved game changing. Playing dysfunctional commercials director John Self, a man insulated by raging excess, in the BBC adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel Money (2010) “was the first time I felt like a proper actor, not just the comic relief” while TV series Mr. Sloane (2014) in which he starred as a depressed accountant opposite Olivia Colman was a pivotal moment; the point when acting felt tangible, instinctual, almost transcendent. “It was like I was sat in a machine inside me watching her act and it was amazing, like the character I was playing was saying that dialogue for the first time. I still spend at least two to three hours a day getting the text into my brain but once it’s there… bingo! I can let my subconscious do all the work while I relax and follow my instincts. It’s a lovely feeling, like flying in a dream.”

Roles sometimes take their toll: “I'm always putting some of myself in. I think maybe that's why I find it quite a spiritually and emotionally difficult thing to do. You're always left with slightly less of yourself when you come out the other end but it's something you can rebuild. Once you get off set and spend time with the kids and your partner and you're back to your regular life it becomes refilled slightly.”

His favourite characters to date are wildcard dad ‘Rowdy’ Ricky Knight in wrestling film Fighting with my Family (“the real Ricky was just fucking fun and nuts and anything I could do he had probably already done it so I had free reign… it was great”) and – music to the ears of cornetto trilogy revivalists – the sensible “Andy Knightley in The World’s End, because that was the third film in a progressive look into how male friendships evolve as they get older.” The call for a ‘bronaissance’ is highly potent, topical territory, with the much-underrepresented focus on male friendship, aside cop-based buddy movies, becoming a much more poignant prospect when pitched against the blunt backdrop of Andrew Tate-ified toxic masculinity and terrifying statistics concerning socially regressive attitudes among teen boys and men. “If we do something else in five or ten years, I'm hoping that will be a look into how 60-year-old men behave.” How different might it be? “I don't think you'll ever see me and Simon in our sixties doing a film about skateboarding or drone pilots… although now I'm saying drone pilots, I'm kind of enjoying that.”

He does have some regrets (“I was offered a part in [Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist dark comedy] The Lobster – in hindsight I wished I’d done it”) but is largely sanguine about his opportunities, not least with the Steffen Haars-directed horror-comedy Get Away (which he wrote, produced and stars in) poised for release. Set on a tiny Swedish island it’s a tale, 15 years in the making, of insiders and outsiders with a major script-flipping mid-movie twist (“all done with an eye to people watching it for a second time”).

As someone who relishes a re-write and has coined more than a few catchphrases of his own, what’s the best line he’s ever dispatched, or served up for someone else? “At the moment I’m really enjoying Maisie’s line in Get Away: ‘Cocaine and fat dicks!’ [delivered just after the family’s daughter reassures Frost’s character Richard – her father – that ‘smoking weed isn’t her jam’]. It always gets a great laugh and makes me happy.”

Next up, another horror comedy is on the way (“but not as violent and gory”) and characters marked by stark dichotomies of light and shade, psychopath or otherwise (“surely a character is more human when they encompass every aspect of a human being?”) and family: “My legacy? I’m sure there’s never just one legacy but maybe if one day all my kids were sat round a table with their families having Christmas dinner and even though I was long gone they’d be sat around laughing about things Dad did. That would be enough.”

Get Away releases on Sky Cinema on 10th January 2025.

Interview: Katie Baron
Photography: Perry Curties
Styling: Tom Odell
Grooming: Joe Mills , founder of Woolf kings x and JMA, using Woolf hair products and Denman Pro Lab series and circa 1979

But there is one cinematic genre that owes more to the production designer than any other - animation.

Whether its made by Pixar, Dreamworks, Studio Ghibli or a smaller indie animation house, the characters that we follow in these highly crafted movies all inhabit worlds that have been built entirely from scratch, from the shape of the clouds to the amount of dirt on the pavement.

A man who knows more about this than most is Justin Hutchinson-Chatburn, production designer on the current Netflix Christmas hit, That Christmas - a family friendly, future classic from Richard Curtis.

Perry Curties met up with Justin to find out what it takes to build a world that contains as much detail and personality as a live action movie (if not more) and to see how far modern animation technology has evolved from traditional pen and ink.

Our meeting starts with a tour of his home studio in his North Hertfordshire village, ‘tour’ is a grand description given that we are in a small room containing little more than a computer and a drawing board (covered in half finished airfix models), a collection of hand painted 3d printed action figures and a Meta Quest headset sitting (altar like) on a shelf in the middle of the room.

‘Come in, come in’ bustles Justin in his Lancashire accent softened by 30 years in London, ‘this is where it all happens, im working on this environment at the moment but i cant talk about that, its for something you won’t see for a few years…’

He’s pointing at a grey object formed from odd shaped cubes on his computer screen, ‘but if you want you can have a quick look inside…’, and within seconds he’s got his head-set on and is waving his arms around in the centre of the room, and then it’s off again and he’s holding it in the air for me to slip my face into.

Wow! I expected my first experience inside a VR headset to feel more disconcerting, but im instantly immersed in a world that feels far more natural than it should, I’m standing in a life size room complete with set dressing and props, able to spin around and explore the space completely at ease.

‘This is how I designed all of the buildings and environments in That Christmas, with a £500 headset and some free software called Gravity Sketch I can build sets using my hands in a life-size digital space, colour and texture all the surfaces and let the director [Simon Otto a former Dreamworks animator] walk around the spaces and imagine how the characters interact with it before we even hand it over to the animators.’

For me, as a layman entering this 3d world for the first time, it feels like a no-brainer, i’m completely immersed and its only been a minute. For a director working on something as intangible as an animation this must feel like the jump from silent movies to talkies.

‘It’s been a real leap forward for everyone’ Justin confirms, ‘I started out as an illustrator, and built clay character models for previous projects but adapted to digital design and illustration early in my career’ - a career which started in illustration, then video work, then into early forms of digital design for advertising before maturing into a VFX Supervisor and Art Director for TV shows like Black Mirror and His Dark Materials.

‘We started work on That Christmas 4 years ago, it was lock down time so we all had to adapt and VR was a great tool for that situation, certainly for me. I’d been using it for previous projects and That Christmas gave me a big opportunity to use it for the production design. Its a very organic process, and the feedback is immediate, which means the space evolves around you, and in turn you react to the space more emotionally.’

‘The resulting 3D also has a naturally wonky feel that as an illustrator you can embrace, and in fact it played a part in the look of the whole film. This technique leant what I called “weight” to the architecture much like that which is observed in real life when walking around Southwold and Walberswick [where Richard Curtis based the story] and the inspiration for the film’s imaginary town of Wellington-on-Sea.’

‘And then being able to explore the environment at actual size with the director, let him walk around a set like the William’s house [the home shared by Danny and his Mum] which was designed to support not just their story but also how they relate to each other, and in that respect I treated their home like a couple of bus stops. Each character leaves the house using a different door, and we never see a living room. Theres always a space between them, often the hallway, this supported the fact that these two characters never get time together. Using VR meant that I could help Simon understand more physical and spacial concepts like this by putting him in the VR space and sharing that same experience.’

And how much detail does a production designer provide to the story team and the animators? Are you giving them a feeling for it or is it more involved than that?
‘We get fully into the details, as much as we can to support everyone. One of my team was initially credited as Set Dresser because she had such an acumen for set dressing, and so she took responsibility for a lot of the main sets in the film making sure that everyone knew what was in the room. She later moved onto to visual development and designed a couple of the locations towards the end of the movie. Unlike a prop house, we have to create everything, you cant just get it off a shelf somewhere and so we paid a lot of attention to that kind of detail even with visits to the prop houses to find real world stuff that made sense for our world.’

‘I should add, it’s also important that we try not to replicate things exactly. Our film is a version of reality; a good example is the washing machine in the William’s house - which no one will ever notice, but I searched online for the perfect model, gave a picture of it to one of our visual development artists to look at for for 3 minutes and then took it away so he would only draw from the elements that really stuck in his mind, and thats how we approached the whole design, its reality but not a photographic reproduction, it’s recognisable but softened, its a memory of place and things’

And did the cast get to go into the 3d world for their voiceovers? ‘No they didn't but i think thats the next step, they saw some 2d references but I think it would make sense to let them feel what the world is like’.

Is it easy to find teams that can work in this way? ‘Yes and no, it’s not a huge leap for a good designer with digital skills to jump from something like Pro-Create [an iPad app for illustration] to the software that we use. But its not everybody’s cup of tea, in fact our Art Director on the show, Mike Redman, who is an amazing 2D artist never set foot in the VR space. However I am finding more and more artists who work predominantly in 2D are now starting to pick Gravity Sketch up because its made 3D modelling very easy for their needs.’

Getting back to the look and feel of That Christmas I ask if Rebecca Cobb, the illustrator who created the original books with Richard Curtis, had much involvement in the process.

‘She’s obviously very connected to it all, and in the early stages we worked on character designs that where more sympathetic to her work but it soon became clear that an entire world and a community of characters in that style wasn’t going to be right, so after a bit of development we settled on the look you see in the finished film.’

It’s a very polished, warm and cosy world, even the bad things look good, I point out.

‘Ha, well it is a Richard Curtis film isn't it! We’ve had a bit of criticism from some journalists who don't think its dark and moody enough. Richard defended this recently in one of the press screenings by explaining that 99% of the time we are being told the world is falling apart and full of evil when in truth 75% of the time good things are happening. And that’s truth. I think the audience needs a little bit of nice at the moment.’

Back in Justin’s world, exploring his home and studio, it’s clear that he’s a man with aphenomenally creative mind; neat and meticulous projects (clay models, musical instruments, electronica and painted maquettes) are in development in all corners of his home,

‘Thats probably my ADHD, I can’t do more than half an hour in the headset before i need to come up for air, do a bit of something else and then go back in later. I also get really into stuff, a lot of stuff!’

Which makes sense, but does immersing yourself in an artificial world for 4 years come at a price when the project ends? Do the creatives who’ve lived and breathed these characters and sets for years prior to anything going into production struggle with some form of separation anxiety when they finally have to walk away?

‘Yes! Absolutely, I felt a real sense of loss when we stopped work on this one, it was difficult for a few of us I think, everyone has their own way of dealing with it, my way was to build a 10th scale model of one of the sets as a way of processing out of it.’

If that doesnt tell you all you need to know about the level of dedication it takes to create a world for a film nothing will, and I guess if you think you’ve got the talent to do the same you should send Justin a message, just be prepared to make some tea for the team first.

That Christmas is on Netflix now.

Whether taking centre stage or battling his way across late night New York in a pink Gucci suit, Kelvin Harrison JR. is everything the modern leading man should be and more.

Born into a musical family in New Orleans, Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s exposure to films during his formative years was actually fairly minimal. Outside of being allowed to watch Disney Channel, his parents were very protective of what their children were exposed to. ‘They did show me Imitation of Life growing up,’ he recalls. ‘I remember that film vividly and being really moved by the performances and how real it felt to me at the time.’ It wasn’t until he came to the realisation he wanted to become an actor that he began watching a lot more films and, in addition to Will Smith’s appearances in Seven Pounds and The Pursuit of Happyness, it was strong central female performances that really struck a chord and inspired him to take the craft of acting a lot more seriously. ‘What really made me love performance was Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, Blue Jasmine and Notes On A Scandal, Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Viola Davis in everything. Those are the films I enjoyed the most. Those women really stuck out to me; I found them to be more vulnerable. Masculinity in movies was a little uninteresting to me at the time and still is to an extent. I don’t care for the posturing; as much as I think there’s a lot of truth in it in our society – actors do play these men accurately – I found that female actors tended to dig a little deeper into truth, there was a different kind of nuance to it. I think that, because I was growing up in a new generation, a new way of thinking, I felt watching those performers to be more interesting for me as I was starting my journey with acting, looking at material and looking at story – like, where is a more interesting truth?’

Small roles in productions such as 12 Years A Slave, Ender’s Game and The Birth of a Nation eventually led on to more substantial roles, including performances in the films Luce and Gully, both of which were screened at the 2019 Tribeca film festival in New York. Any up-and-coming actor would quite rightly be elated to have their work showcased in such a high-profile way, though Kelvin recalls being immediately brought back down to earth, leaving the festival only to find himself stranded in the middle of the night with no phone or credit cards and having to find his way from Brooklyn to the Bronx, all the while dressed in a bright pink Gucci suit. Whilst having two films featured at Tribeca will clearly have helped boost his profile, it was Kelvin’s standout performance in Waves – released that same year – that really caught many people’s attention. Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults, the film follows the lives of an African American family, primarily through the eyes of high school senior athlete Tyler – played by Kelvin – as he struggles with a fraught relationship, serious injury and a spiraling addiction. Whilst the film was well received on release, the timing meant that Kelvin wasn’t able to fully gauge the impact it had on his career, at least not straight away. ‘At that time, the pandemic happened and we went into lockdown, so nothing really changed from my perspective. I did a bunch of press – a lot more than I’d ever done before, which was a new experience for me – and I was really tired. I was still filming The Trial of the Chicago 7, still very much in a work mindset and also in a very specific time period, playing Fred Hampton, while talking to people about a movie that was very personal and emotional for me, so I don’t think I really got to process the whole experience properly.’

That performance as Fred Hampton, renowned activist and senior member of the Black Panther Party, marks just one of several real-life political and cultural icons he has tackled during his career so far, including B.B. King in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and Dr. Martin Luther King in the TV series Genius. Playing a real-life character, particularly one who is widely known and revered, is an undertaking that he feels comes with a considerable amount of responsibility, especially for a younger actor, and Fred Hampton was a lofty introduction. ‘That was the first time I ever played someone real, so I was very nervous. I wanted to make sure I was honouring his legacy but what I think I learned during that time is that I will never be them, I will never be able to fully get all of the nuances. There’s still a script and a structure that has to be fulfilled, there’s still a director, there’s still other actors, and I’m serving whatever this particular narrative is. There’s always a negotiation in that, so I had to release myself of this obligation of the audience and the people that loved and respected him and just made sure I was disciplined enough to do all of the homework that I could, put everything I could behind it, because if I wasn’t doing that then I would be disappointed. If I were doing that though, my best would have to be enough. It just comes back to respect and the role that plays in the discipline and the work ethic. You read as many books as possible, you watch as many clips and YouTube videos as you can, but ultimately I’m basically trying to find a little basket of nuggets that I can pull from reality and put it in there, so that when I go back to the script I can appropriately go “OK, let me place this here because this will help me make this more accurate; let me place this here because it will round it out a little bit more; this gives me a better sense of relationship”. I just want to make sure I have enough tools in my toolbox to be able to give the story the life it deserves.’

Having reached a point in his career where he has played a varied combination of both real-life and fictional characters, Kelvin is well placed to reflect on the contrast between the two. ‘When you’re playing fictional characters, you can do whatever you want. I can decide this is what he sounds like, he can be from here, here or here, I can use my own voice then tell you it’s a character and you would never know. There’s just a lot more freedom, a lot more creativity in it in some ways. When you’re playing a real person, which I’ve done a lot of at this point, it can be tough because there are so many non-negotiables. You can go down a route where you don’t have to honour all of those things though, like with the voice or the walk or the physical appearance. I just finished playing Martin Luther King for six months (for upcoming TV series Genius: MLK/X) and that is a very specific thing. I gained a lot of weight to play the role and you’re trying to get the voice right, trying to get the mannerisms right, especially when it’s – I would argue – the most famous black person that ever lived. So when you’re doing that, it’s such a tricky thing because it’s like, that person spent their entire life being them and I’ve spent most of my life being me and then trying to be other people, so how accurately can I get there in the timespan of two months prep, you know? Sometimes you just think “OK, this is not important for the storytelling”, but at the same time, if you depart too far from it, will audiences even be able to escape into whatever it is you’ve been distracted by, your make-believe version of that iconic character?’

Kelvin’s latest role sees him playing another real-life character, though one few people will have previously been aware of, including Kelvin himself prior to reading the script. Written by Stefani Robinson and directed by Stephen Williams, Chevalier tells the story of Joseph Bologne, the illegitimate son of an African slave and a French plantation owner whose extraordinary musical talent gains him unlikely entry into 18th century Parisian high society, eventually receiving the honour of Chevalier de Saint-Georges before becoming embroiled in scandal. ‘A lot of the time when I decide to do things, it’s instinctual; my instincts serve what I’m interested in at the time,’ he explains. ‘With Chevalier, I really loved the idea of a real-life character where it’s a period drama, there are costumes involved, there’s a transformation. I really loved Stefani’s script, the way she structured it. The movie has changed a lot since, but the original script I got, it felt like an opera. Stefani did it in multiple acts and it was just a stunning piece of work to read. The character of Joseph himself, he was so defined, so singular in that space at the time and I found that fascinating. I didn’t really understand how somebody could come from a plantation and be the son of a slave owner and a slave, then suddenly get the highest title in France and be friends - genuine friends, as history tells us - with the Queen. I could not fathom that, so I was like “I want to do the investigation; that’s a fun study”. Then there’s the violin aspect; I play violin – it was my first instrument – so I related to Joseph in that way. I also feel like a lot of my relationships, in a professional sense and in a social sense, have been transactional, simply because people want you around as a black person sometimes just to entertain, so I found that to be fascinating. I don’t want to get overly political, but I will say that there is still an element of people of colour feeling a need to assimilate to a society that doesn’t necessarily cater to them. We have to find our own community sometimes to feel really seen and I think that’s the story of Joseph. It’s the hypocrisy of it all I guess. There are just a lot of elements that I think I connected to.’

Next up for Kelvin is something he’s never done before – a musical – and he describes his character as ‘an unholy mix between Iggy Pop and Prince’. Helmed by Patti Cake$ director Geremy Jasper, who also wrote the screenplay, O’Dessa tells the story of a farm girl, played by Sadie Sink, who sets out on a search for a lost family heirloom. It’s a role Kelvin is very much looking forward to. ‘It’s going to be such a fun project and Geremy is such a cool director. I love a writer/director, that’s my favourite thing. There’s something so intimate about that process and Geremy is really special in that way, so it has been great. We’ve been recording some music and I’ve never done stuff like that before, I’ve never sounded like that before, and I’ll look like I’ve never looked before. It’s definitely going to be something to look at, for sure.’ Kelvin has also been in discussion with director Julius Onah about collaborating on a more personal project, Samo Lives, which will tell the story of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. ‘I got Chevalier, I was still doing Elvis, and Julius called me and said “Hey, would you be interested in playing Jean-Michel Basquiat?”. I said “Of course I would. Why are you asking me this? What do you have?” and he said “I want to develop a movie about him but I want to make sure that you want to do it first”, so I said “OK, I’m down, let’s go through the process”. He said “OK, I’m going to develop a pitch and I’ll send it to you and we’ll talk”. It was incredible; he was doing all this research for a couple of years or something. The original movie that Jeffrey Wright did, Jeffrey was incredible in that film, so sometimes you go “Do we need to do it again?”. The way Julius formatted how we’re going to execute this particular movie though, it feels like the definitive telling of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life. It’s through his eyes and Julius is really finding a way to make it feel like Jean-Michel is making the movie himself. At the top of last year, we took about four months of just travelling and visiting so many of the people in his actual life and we – I don’t want to say all of the things that we did – but we met a lot of people, we sat down and had dinner with them and talked to them about who Jean-Michel was and what he meant to them. We went to London, sat around for a week and just brainstormed, really trying to create this world that is so epic. It’s really been an incredible process, developing the script together. A lot of things need to get done first though. I have to go shoot O’Dessa, Julius is still shooting Captain America: New World Order right now, but we’re going through the process.’

Beyond those two upcoming projects, the message seems to be to expect the unexpected. ‘I don’t think anyone would be surprised by me at this point. If they know one thing about me, they’d be like “Oh yeah, he’s going to do something random”. I’m going to do a period piece, I’m going to do a musical, I’m going to do a drama, I’m going to be a bit political. There are just so many more interesting things to get into. I don’t think you’ll see me do any superhero parts any time soon though, that’s not really something I’m invested in yet. What I like about Chevalier is that it feels like a superhero role in some ways. He feels like an epic hero; Stephen and Stefani really mapped it out like a superhero story. He has the costume and the wig, he has the superhero name, Chevalier; that’s kind of my version of that sort of thing. Other than that, I’m really invested in horror right now and I’m taking a lot of meetings to see if I can find the right thing. I want to do an action film; I’m going to try and find something that doesn’t really fit the mould of what we’re kind of accustomed to right now. I think we’re really stuck in a space where we’re consuming the same type of movie, so if I can just throw it off a little bit, if I can find that thing and the right director and writer just on the edge of it, then I’m going to dive into that.’

Whilst Kelvin is understandably currently focused on an increasingly successful acting career, he is clearly someone who enjoys having input in the filmmaking process as a whole. So does he have aspirations to one day step behind the camera? ‘I really would like to. I have a lot of respect for directors though, I think it’s a really tough gig. I’m a big believer in the idea that people should do what their gift is; I don’t know that everyone should be a director is what I’m trying to say. I think the great ones should do what they do and everyone else should fall back. I don’t want to be one of the ones doing it just because my ego wants to. We’ll see though. If I really find a calling and the project seems right and I can make the right preparation to really do it well, then I’ll do it. Otherwise, I’ll stay in my lane and probably take on more producorial roles instead. I’m definitely not a writer though.’

As well as things are going for Kelvin Harrison Jr. and his career right now, it is something he isn’t taking for granted and gets emotional when reflecting on how far he has come. ‘It’s interesting to me because there’s always a little fear that I’m not going to be able to keep doing it. It’s like being a kid. This is a really crazy reference and people might judge me for it – I don’t care – but Beyoncé has this documentary and there’s this clip of these dancers they found from some island somewhere. Beyoncé loved the way they moved and she wanted to use them in a music video. These guys come to set and they’re so excited – they didn’t even really know who Beyoncé was – but she said they didn’t want to leave because it was so exciting, to leave your country and come and have this incredible experience. She said she remembers feeling like that when Destiny’s Child first started and she never wanted to leave set, being so sad and crying to her mum “Please, please can we keep doing it”. That’s what it feels like when I get to do this, it’s like you never want to leave and every single time I get there I think “Oh my gosh, it could be over; I never want to leave”. I still feel that first time when I ever walked onto a set – doing Ender’s Game – and I remember looking at Harrison Ford and Viola Davis and Sir Ben Kingsley, everyone there, it all felt so magical to me. So, I don’t know, I haven’t really settled into it I guess. I settle into my leadership role when I have to, because that’s part of the job, but I don’t know if I feel like I’ve arrived. I always feel like I’m just really grateful to be there and I’m begging people to let me keep coming back.’ 

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Where are you from?
I was born in China but grew up in Co. Down, in the countryside with cows and sheep as my neighbours.

Who or what first drove you to become an actor?
I grew up surrounded by myths and legends about our Emerald Isle, and my father used to make up bedtime stories, so storytelling has been very much ingrained in my upbringing.

What do people tend to misunderstand about the acting profession?
It can get very lonely! It’s such a privilege that part of the job is getting to see incredible locations around the world, but living out of a suitcase with no solid postcode can leave you feeling quite unsettled.

Which of your projects or roles are you most proud of?
Im proud of everything, Wreck on BBC3. Walking in the shoes of someone so unapologetically herself was freeing and seeing Ryan J Brown, our creator, so highly regarded in a genre he’s grown up loving and admiring fills my heart with pride. Getting onto Sex Education was a big deal but really working with Sharon Horgan is unbeatable, it’s an amazing cast and crew and Sharon is an amazing writer.

The most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given?
To not change your voice for anyone. I had two brilliant voice tutors who taught me how to ‘breathe with your experience’, not against it, and encouraged me to harness my accent rather than adapt it for the industry.

Where will we see you next?
Im the quirky new detective on Bad Sisters!

Photography Perry Curties
Styling Steph Kelly
Hair - Keiichirro Hirano
Makeup - Michael Gray

Thaddea wears yellow tapestry jacket with pearls by Ana Ljubinkovic

Interview Philip Goodfellow
Photography Perry Curties
Stylist - Tanja Martin
Grooming - Michael Gray at David Artists
Retouching - Rob Crane at Makular

It may seem unlikely to anyone familiar with the actor’s oeuvre, but the earliest inspiration for Daniel Mays taking the career path he has came courtesy of the King of Pop. ‘Way back when, the first performance I ever saw that captivated me was Michael Jackson on the Bad tour. My mum took me along in 1988 and it was a definite light bulb moment. It was the dancing, the physicality of him. I locked myself in my bedroom with the black trilby hat and that became my party piece. Any school disco, if a Michael Jackson song came on, all my mates would form a circle and I’d do my moonwalk and all that stuff.’ One of four brothers growing up in Essex, it was unusual amongst his family to want to perform, though his parents were wholly supportive and signed Daniel up to a local dance school, which led on to enrolment at Italia Conti. Initially, Daniel’s focus was on musical theatre but, as tends to happen during teenage years, his interests began to change and a burgeoning fondness for independent American cinema drew him towards acting. An afternoon spent bunking off from ballet to see Pulp Fiction in Leicester Square sealed it for him. ‘No more tits and teeth,’ as he puts it.

Attendance at Italia Conti led to a successful audition at RADA but, whilst the pathway is a natural one for anyone looking to carve out a career as an actor, RADA proved to be a stark change. ‘I didn’t take to it well initially. It was very different from stage school; my classmates had been to university and were all really well read, they could talk until the cows came home about what acting is. I felt very self-conscious and shy at the beginning, but then I thought “What are you doing? You can’t be like this”. I was always very aware I was walking into RADA, every day I went there; I recognised it was a great opportunity, that it was a privilege to get a place there, so I just started stripping the walls of information. In the end, it’s all about getting in the space and freeing up your inhibitions. I always believed that whatever talent you have, that’s the thing that gets you through the door at drama school; the talent never leaves you. What they do is give you the techniques and tools to hone that talent and unlock the gift, if you want to call it that, or the desire to act that you have. In drama school, everything just opened up for me. It was incredible.’

As enriching and fulfilling as RADA had been, it was back down to earth with a bump following graduation. With no work coming in for six months, Daniel took a job at a casting agency filming auditions for extras. Having initially signed himself up with a smaller agent, he was soon approached by Sarah Spear who at the time was working at London Management. Daniel turned to Nicholas Barter, his principal at RADA, for some guidance. ‘Nick said to me “Stick to your guns, go with your decision and stay with the smaller agent,” and I went “You’re absolutely right”.’ I got out of the office, picked up the phone and immediately went with the bigger agent. I just thought, I might as well go for it.’ Now at Curtis Brown, Sarah Spear remains his agent to this day.

Work eventually started to trickle in and a handful of episodes on TV soap Eastenders were followed by a small part in the film Pearl Harbor, Daniel’s character credited as Pilot #3. ‘It was kind of extraordinary to be on that set. I had a scene with Ben Affleck, it was in this kind of pub setting, and just before we started to turn over it began to rain. I had like three lines in this group scene, we were really struggling with the rain, and of course it never made the final cut. That was the only real bit of acting I had in it and immediately I ended up on the cutting room floor, but nevertheless it was an amazing experience to be on that set.’ Though his experience to that point was still limited, Daniel quickly came to the valuable realisation that progressing his career was all about networking and forming relationships, particularly with casting directors. One such relationship, with Nina Gold, would prove to be a game changer when the revered casting director put Daniel forward for a part in the Mike Leigh film All or Nothing, the story of three working-class families in present day London. ‘I had to go and meet him in his office on Greek Street, just an initial chat, then I got called back. Then you do that infamous improvisation for him where you don’t speak, you just kind of exist. It came my way and I was the last actor he started rehearsals with. It felt like everything I had learnt up until that point just went out the window; a year out of drama school, there I was working one-on-one with arguably one of the greatest directors this country has ever produced. You’d hear horror stories about actors and Mike Leigh where they rehearsed for six months and only had one line or they don’t even end up in the movie, so I was quite gung-ho. It’s like life and death when you first start out and I thought “I’m going to throw the kitchen sink at it”. I was lucky that he responded to what I was giving him and out of that came this horrendous character Jason. I had eight or nine meaty scenes, really good scenes, and he was hopefully a memorable character. It’s a beautiful film that.’ Any doubts Daniel might have had regarding whether he’d done a good job were quickly dispelled by Mike Leigh himself. ‘I remember him standing next to me on set and he said, “That’s a wrap for Danny on All or Nothing,” and I got a lovely round of applause, then he leant over and just whispered in my ear, “See you on the next one”. I was like, “That sounds pretty good”. And of course, the next one was Vera Drake.’

Despite working with the same director and some of the same cast and crew, Vera Drake would prove to be a very different experience to All or Nothing, in terms of both production and success. Set in the East End of London in the fifties, the film tells the story of an unassuming working-class woman, portrayed brilliantly by Imelda Staunton, who secretly performs illegal abortions. For Daniel, who plays Vera’s son Sid, the film would prove to be a major turning point. ‘It was a hard film in terms of preparing for it, the importance of the research. All or Nothing was a lot easier because it was contemporary, everything was around you, whereas on Vera Drake you were having to improvise and the work you’d poured into the research had to be there at the forefront of your mind.’ As if accurately capturing the essence of London in the fifties didn’t present enough of a challenge, there was also the long, arduous process of working with Mike Leigh, individually at first before gradually being introduced to the other characters, all the while only knowing as much as his own character knew. ‘I do remember having a bit of a moment, because I had such a strong narrative with All or Nothing but here, I was literally just improvising in this family in the fifties. I said to Mike, “I’m not going to be in the film, am I? Nothing’s happened”. He said, “Just trust me, go with it”. Then of course, we get into character one day, really early, and we’re improvising the engagement of Alex Kelly’s character, Sid’s sister, who marries Eddie Marsan’s character. You never come out of character until Mike tells you to or until one of his assistants does. So, we’re cooking food and getting ready, we’re all dolled up, the relations come round and we’re sitting there in this rehearsal flat in Crouch End, having been in character for about three hours. Suddenly, bang bang bang, there’s this knock at the door. The actor antenna goes up; I’m thinking, “All of the actors I’ve rehearsed with are sat around this table, who on earth can that be?” There’s another knock, Phil Davis goes to the door and in pile all these police. Unbeknownst to any of us, there was a whole other wing to this disused hospital we were rehearsing in that we never even knew existed. Imelda was dragged away, interrogated all night - it went on for about 12, 13 hours this improvisation. It was like being hypnotised, like this bomb had been let off. Then Phil came back, sat down and said, “Your mum’s been helping young girls out”. I remember I had like this physical sensation of my stomach falling away. Then you come out of it, you talk about it with Mike, and what that does is, all the emotional, physical, psychological impact it had on you, you apply all of that into the improvisations, which eventually become the script. You never improvise on camera – that’s the myth that everyone thinks happens, but that’s not the case. It’s very meticulous, very detailed and all entrenched in the character work that you’ve done over months and months.’

For Daniel, working with Mike Leigh on those two films in quick succession at such a formative stage of his career felt like vindication for wanting to become an actor in the first place, so artistically rewarding was the experience. ‘I thought, “If films are going to be this good, the world’s my oyster”. He doesn’t just treat you like an actor who’s shown up for the day, who’s learned his lines and is just there to get the scenes done. It is such a unique process and once you understand how much it takes out of Mike, you realise then why a lot of actors reappear in his films.’

The subsequent success of Vera Drake substantially increased Daniel’s profile and the last two decades have seen him establish himself as a go to character actor for both television and film. Despite the increased freedom to choose what he works on, he has shown he has a keen eye for a project worth taking a risk on, such as the 2008 independent British film Shifty. Shot on a shoestring budget, the film tells the story of a fraught relationship between two friends, Chris (Daniel’s character) and Shifty, played by Riz Ahmed. The film is a shining example that strong writing and committed performances can often overcome considerable financial restraints and it’s a project Daniel is clearly proud of, with good reason. ‘Shifty really was an important movie in a way. It was such a success story. My agent was like, “Darling, there’s no money in it, it’s a micro-budget”; I think she was persuading me not to go for it because she wasn’t sure, but it’s such a brilliant script from Eran Creevy. To me, it had such depth; it was so rich in terms of the relationship between the two characters. There were a lot of other urban London films going on at that time like the Kidulthood series, which was fantastic, but to me it was all about the dynamic between the two best friends. They were broken and it was all about them reconnecting. I didn’t know Riz or Eran at the time, or Ben Pugh the producer. It was a fantastic role on the page, then I met Eran and we got on like a house on fire. That’s what it is, you meet these people and you think “Yeah”. I had such a connection with Riz. We spoke a lot, we grounded the characters, so to me it was more a Mike Leigh/Ken Loach type movie than a sort of urban thriller type of thing. The great thing about the movie is that the violence only really happens towards the end; it’s the foreboding that gets you to that point. There was so much unsaid between the characters, that’s what was really interesting.’

Whilst many of his earlier roles could be said to be on the more serious, darker side, over the years Daniel has come to combine those types of roles with more light-hearted, warmer characters. ‘I’ve always felt just as comfortable with comedy as with the serious stuff, but it was maybe a need for me to go in a different direction and lighten things up, have a bit of both.’ That more comedic side was brought into play for his latest film, Your Christmas or Mine?, streaming now on Amazon Prime. ‘A lot of the work nowadays is straight offers, which is incredibly flattering; that’s never lost on me. This was a straight offer and I sat down and read it – it’s Tom Parry’s first ever script – and within the first five pages I was like, “I’m completely in”. The premise is about two aspiring drama students who are just falling in love, they jump on each other’s trains and this snowstorm happens, so they end up spending their Christmas at each other’s family homes. It reminded me slightly of Sliding Doors, that kind of film. It’s a really wholesome family film and, above all else, it was the character and how funny his dialogue is. I’ve been involved in that kind of movie - Fisherman’s Friend springs to mind - that kind of feel-good movie, it’s a really difficult genre to get right. You have to fully, whole-heartedly commit to it and we definitely did that with Your Christmas or Mine?, it really does punch above its weight. I think the inspiration was, when’s the last great Christmas movie you’ve seen? It hopefully does that. It is an absolute treat.’

At the time of speaking to us, Daniel is on a flying visit back to London, having been busy working on a lavish new production for Apple TV being filmed on location in France about Benjamin Franklin’s time spent there in the 18th century. Appearing alongside his good friend Eddie Marsan and Hollywood royalty Michael Douglas, who plays Franklin, Daniel has put on some weight for the role in keeping with the physique of his character, one more example of his willingness to throw himself into his work. The role itself is also another example of his standing as an actor and, given all he has achieved already throughout his career, he would be forgiven for feeling that his feet are well and truly under the table and he is now a fully-fledged member of the British acting establishment. That isn’t necessarily how he views things though. ‘To a certain extent, I probably feel like I’m still out there on my own a little bit. I don’t try to second-guess it though. It’s a difficult thing to categorise or get your head around really. Things you think are going to be great don’t quite land and vice versa; you just have to turn up and do everything you can to make the character work and whether it’s a success or not is kind of out of your hands. It’s a question of why you keep doing what you do ; you have to pay the bills, the mortgage and all that stuff, but I always get really inspired when I see great work from other actors, because it feels like they’re raising the bar and in a way that galvanises you as well to continue to be as creative and entertaining as you can for people to watch. Stephen Graham is a great mate of mine, people like Eddie Marsan and Sally Hawkins, actors of our generation, I’m always hugely proud when I see how good their work is. I’ve never really had a game plan, I’m not one of those actors who goes “Right, in five years I’m going to be here”; the industry doesn’t work like that. Actors can talk about their career but, in a way, there’s sort of no such thing. It is what it is. The breaks come your way or they don’t. I’ve been lucky that I’ve had a great agent who’s been there every step of the way with me, a supportive wife and everything else.’

Scottish dynamo Lesley Paterson, or ‘Les’ as I feel exceptionally smug to be invited to call her in our preliminary emails, is an irresistible combination of wildly personable, razor-sharp (the ‘Les’ is no accident) and candid beyond belief. The latter may be because she’s relatively new to the business of making Hollywood movies. Or, if not exactly new (a labour transcending most loves, All Quiet on the Western Front was a whopping 16 years in the making) then not an industry native, nor hardened to the ferocious, round-the-clock campaigning that encircles any Oscars contender. Or it could be the screeching adrenaline-crash comedown of awards season climax, considering things didn’t go exactly according to Paterson’s usually precision perfect game-plan, making her wholly ready to unleash.

Whichever, it’s four days after the 95th Academy Awards in LA where All Quiet on the Western Front – an astonishing adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel, showcasing the abject horror, futility and treachery (personal and societal) of WW1 via every hellscape possible from behind German lines – didn’t win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Her devastation is both intriguing and endearingly palpable: ‘It burnt, absolutely; I’ve never felt like that before. I’d just spent the last two months creating a narrative around how I’d willed this film into existence and I’d totally believed it. I couldn’t understand in that moment how that hadn’t won through. Also, having been on the outside of the industry for so long – and it’s so, so hard to penetrate that network – there’s a massive fear of closing doors. I’m still processing it all to be honest, trying to settle back into the work.’ It’s not entirely surprising – you don’t get to be a world-beating athlete by feeling chuffed just to be in the running – but in a world of media-rehearsed soundbites and (particularly for women) stage-managed PR, it’s a slice of unvarnished, even subversive humanity that’s thrilling to hear. But settling she is not. Self-described as ‘obsessive’, she is so relentless in her quest to continue the momentum she was ‘already making new plans to capitalise on the opportunity, emailing people that same surreal night.’ 

The journey of making the film (technically the third cinematic adaptation of the novel, following versions in 1930 and 1979, but the first to be crafted in the German language) is, as Paterson herself might put it, bananas, and dispels any notion that ‘the narrative I’d created’ was some kind of hype. To understand how it was birthed – i.e. to get a handle on the Paterson supernova – it is necessary to track back to the beginning. 

One of four siblings, Paterson grew up in Stirling, central Scotland, and was competitive from the off. She played girl’s rugby as the captain and the only girl in the league, until it wasn’t an option anymore (no girls’ teams), started fell running and was introduced to triathlons by her father when she was 13. By 15, she was representing Scotland and then Great Britain. You’d never bet against her. Well, not until a change in the competition rules decreed competitors had to be top tier swimmers (it was her weakest of the three disciplines) and she felt her time was up, heartbreakingly just short of the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Athletics gave way to theatre (at the time, she was studying drama at Loughborough University), she met her late husband, psychology professor Simon Marshall who became her writing partner (while uncredited on All Quiet on the Western Front, she says he was ‘instrumental to many parts of it’) and moved to California, settling in LA where she still lives. A Master of Arts (MA) in theatre followed, as did a short-lived stint as an actor, which she has zero plans to resume. In her mid-twenties she began collaborating as a producer and writer with fellow Briton Ian Stokell, a former journalist who served in the British military and was her co-writer on All Quiet on the Western Front, alongside its German director Edward Berger.

The novel was apparently always on her radar, a work she’d long felt an affinity with: ‘I read the book back in school and really felt the weight of betrayal of a youthful generation. As a Scot, I very much related to the sense of being an underdog but also being something of a chess piece for the powers that be.’ Indeed, All Quiet on the Western Front, a story that pre-dates Nazism but so painfully reveals how the seeds of it were sown in the ravages of those trenches and the aftermath of its war rooms, hinges on mostly old, privileged men sending oblivious young patriots to die, quite literally by the lorry load. In one of the earliest scenes, which Paterson conceived and remains most proud of, we see the ‘tracking of the uniforms’ – firstly being removed from the corpses of dead soldiers, then washed by hand before arriving back to clothe the next legion of troops. As the main character, student Paul Bäumer receives his kit still bearing the nametag of his recently deceased predecessor (a moment blithely swept away by the commanding officer). It ghoulishly presages everything to come – the posturing and the naivety and the nightmarishly calamitous deceit. ‘Writing that was an experience where you just know you have gold; you’re not sure where it came from but you can feel in that moment just how powerful it is. The way it worked out – the music, the cinematography, the dialogue – the whole thing was just incredible.’ 

But back to getting the thing made. In 2006, Stokell and Paterson initially optioned the book but a revolving door of actors, directors and producers saw it stall again and again. Every 12-18 months required a renewal to the tune of $10- £15k dollars, racking up an estimated $200k as the years ticked by and the ‘day job’ remained just as demanding: ‘I’d got back into doing triathlons by that point [aged 31, she won her first of five world Xterra championship titles], which was funding the dream in part, and we’d set up a training camp for elite athletes, but we still had to remortgage our house and there were credit cards…’ On the final chance to re-option in 2015, the cash had run out and, more cinematic than Scorsese, Paterson did the entrepreneurial equivalent of just one last heist and got back on that bike. However, in a test ride the day before, she broke her shoulder, necessitating racing, riding, and swimming with one arm strapped up. With brutal determination and bags of painkillers, she won – of course she did – and the game was back on. But it wasn’t until two world titles later when they pitched the idea to director Edward Berger and producer Malte Grunert (the duo came on board in 2019) that the proposition coalesced. Still living a double life, she and husband Simon were knee-deep in coaching trials for their elite athlete wards on the day the Oscars nominations were announced. 

Berger has referred to the project as a vehicle for exploring, and to some extent exorcising, the cultural guilt and shame he says is inherent in being German as a result of the war that followed – a sentiment writ large in one particularly visceral scene set in a crater where Bäumer comes eye to eye with a Frenchman he’s just bludgeoned to the brink of death and the stark reality of their parallel lives comes full view. Despite being distributed by Netflix, and Paterson herself citing influences including Saving Private Ryan (‘tonally’) and Apocalypse Now (‘for the emotional chaos’), it’s no American tale of the hero’s (any heroes) journey. Indeed, the film’s capacity in such moments to invoke sympathy for its disenfranchised youth without obliterating that shadow of contrition is testament to Berger’s work on the script (‘Ed really infused it with a critical German sensibility that was so vital, there is something very uniquely German about the conversations, of understanding the Zeitgeist’). 

Paterson and Stokell’s involvement, as both co-writers and executive producers, was less recognised via much of the promotional campaign. ‘Writers are marginalised,’ she states simply, and from a promotional perspective it’s clear their involvement risked diluting the award-chasing narrative of authenticity – i.e. a German perspective, this time from an actual German perspective. PR machine aside, its arguably the British involvement that serves to bolster its credibility in telling a story of universal carnage, shared misery, and of those fatal historic missteps to which every side must lay claim. Paterson and Stokell spent a solid year in the research phase, scouring everything from war diaries and political dossiers to academic archives, switching ‘the quite ethereal, meandering pace of the novel into something that felt like a ticking clock.’ The details soon laddered up. ‘I have a very strong sense of empathy and I not only wanted to send out this anti-war message, I wanted to create a film about WW1 that did it justice, because it’s such a pivotal point in history with so much we can learn from, but also to show the other side. Because mainstream cinema has predominantly been made in America, Germans have largely just been caricatures.’ 

All Quiet on the Western Front is arguably the ultimate origins warning story for the grotesque realities of ‘modern’ war and while the current Ukraine-Russia conflict has undoubtedly played into its Oscars success (it won four overall, including Best International Film), Paterson says it transcends a purely wartime narrative; it’s an allegory for our polarised society in which the blossoming of cancel culture, 0-60 outrage and a perverse pleasure in divisiveness is rife: ‘I was extremely motivated to create something that discusses the need to listen to the other side, of not always wanting to simply crush our enemies.’ Despite the tensions concerning recognition and the frustration of not being able to be on set during filming as a result of Covid, among other things (‘It was all shot in Europe and we were in LA; I can’t tell you how many times I cried about that’), Paterson remains steadfastly grateful for the learning experience (‘Edward is the best and the most talented in the business, it is a masterpiece’) and the opportunity she now has via her own production company. 

She still trains (‘I’m addicted; it’s very hard to relinquish that addiction to how you feel and look’) but says her perspective on it is now different: ‘It’s a tool for unlocking creativity, rather than performance in terms of winning. Creative training and physical training are the same in some ways. You essentially create a castle to allow you to walk around it, you fill it up [with information] and trust in the process, know that something will come to you that will help you get over that creative or physical block or barrier.’

In late 2023 her personal story took a tragic twist when her husband Simon was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and after a short battle with the disease she announced the death of her ‘darling boy’ on instagram in June 2024.

So what’s next? After some time for reflection she is back in training and working on future projects which include a psychological thriller set in Scotland (thank you, Simon), a movie focussed on the travelling community in Ireland and another set in Ghana in 1901 that will deal with British colonialism. Once again, she’s battling for the other side: ‘I like to tell the stories that haven’t been told, or at least not how you might have known them.’ 

Shot in Los Feliz, California. 

Sandy Powell (OBE) doesn’t mess around. Thrillingly uncompromising and wholly intimidating in all the best possible ways (both in her art and in the flesh – more on both later), Powell isn’t only the costume designer’s designer. She’s also cinema’s bridge to fashion-fascinated audiences for whom the characters she has stirred into theatrical life are as real and enduring as they come.

Now, 50+ films into a four decades-long career, those lives are diverse and many. As a whirlwind explainer: she’s a triple Academy Award winning creative as lauded for her work on ground-breaking indie films with meagre budgets and arthouse flavours like Caravaggio (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) as blockbusting megaprojects with couture grade fashion and forensic detailing including Cinderella (2015), The Aviator (2004), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Disney’s upcoming Snow White (2024) comprising literally thousands of handmade costumes. There are also those that fall beautifully in-between, like cult classic Interview with a Vampire (1994) which has spawned a million Halloween cosplay fantasies, the poignant restrained glamour of 1950’s era Carol (2015) and the audacious period black comedy The Favourite (2018) for which BAFTA glory came despite or maybe because of shoe-string spending (“working on a tight budget definitely comes with a degree of adrenaline, and the impetus to innovate”). From politically charged realism to epic aristo-odysseys, predictable she is not.

Born in Wandsworth, brought up in Brixton, London, where she still lives, Powell recalls always wanting to stand out visually (“I was obsessed with trying to look different, or maybe just wanting to show off,” she laughs) drawing and sewing for both herself and her dolls from an early age. Hitching her appetite for getting stuck in onto her penchant for rebellion (“I don’t intentionally intend to break the rules, but it happens”), in the ‘70s she did an art foundation course at Saint Martin’s School of Art, then studied theatre design at Central School of Art & Design but dropped out in her final year to pursue fringe theatre with “partner-in-crime” and choreographer Lea Anderson MBE, whose degree show was her first piece of costuming proper. That early appreciation of fashion in motion and the power of DIY creativity led her to iconoclastic mime artist, choreographer and Bowie mentor Lindsay Kemp whom she’d tracked down to London’s famous Pineapple Dance Studios where he was teaching. Incredibly, she was taken under his wing and immediately entrusted to his show, including Nijinsky at La Scala in Milan. She describes it as a formative period of profound influence and opportunity (they remained friends until his death in 2018): “He was theatrical about everything, which was exhausting but so fabulously entertaining. And he made everything seem possible.”

Working with Kemp led to the equally avantgarde brilliance of the late Derek Jarman, another seminal figure in London’s subversive ‘70’s/80s creative scene, whose phone number she’d cadged from a mate in a club. Initially supporting his vision on music videos for bands including Scritti Politti and The Smiths, her first feature film was Caravaggio, a fictionalised reimagining of the life of the titular Baroque painter (also the cinematic debut of legend Tilda Swinton). “It was a wild party,” says Powell. “I think most of us involved in it were under 25. We’d shoot, make costumes, go clubbing at the Café de Paris.” The influence of ‘70’s London, including Bowie (albeit from afar), Kemp, and Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba – the department store that epitomised the era’s electric merging of music, fashion, and sheer attitude into one mesmerising presence – remain a powerful aesthetic touchstone for Powell, and her feel for fashion as a catalyst for transformation: “I’m not sure if it was because it was such a creatively explosive time or because you’re at your most sponge-like as a teen, but it’s a point I often return to. Biba in particular was somewhere where I learnt that fashion was also armour.”

While Powell’s a professional time-traveller – no epoch is out of bounds, with many regularly fused together – it was especially handy for musical drama The Velvet Goldmine (1998), the sumptuous story of a gender fluid superstar in the orgiastic throes of glam rock. It was her first time working with director Todd Haynes who remains, alongside Martin Scorsese, an enduring collaborator. They share, she says, a wealth of commonalities in their visionary approaches to filmmaking: “They’re both very well-read, they understand how to communicate visually, including with clothes, and they also both want to know what every scene, every second will look like. They also come with extraordinary layers of information.” With Scorsese, she’ll receive what’s tantamount to a dossier of research relating to characters, plots, spaces and places (“some films will have been in the research phase for years when I come to them”), while Haynes always has a playlist, sometimes with songs featuring in the film, other times purely to establish mood. “I want to know everything they’re thinking about, I absorb it all.”

On occasion, even the tempo of the script influences the costuming. On Yorgos Lanthimos’s royalty-skewering The Favourite (“a film too low-budget for the costumes to be historically accurate”), she switched damasks, silks and velvets for monochrome cotton and laser-cut vinyl from Shepherd’s Bush – not solely to subdue costs but to give a modern edge to the weight of history, reflecting the subversive bite of “the contemporary writing and reducing the normal flamboyancy of the styling to leave space for the dialogue.”

While choosing favourite characters isn’t really her thing, Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2022) would be the main contender, offering up a great example of her continual need to navigate the psychological territory of director, actor and character to hit the perfect mark: “Despite the brutality, he [Bill the Butcher] had to be dandified to show his wealth and power in that intimidating way a well-dressed person can have. Daniel had his own fairly fully-formed ideas of how it would work, but when he saw what I’d done – taking a long, lean silhouette and making it even more slender, grander and more dominating, with the accentuated top hat and the sweeping canvas coat [made from an old army tent], he knew it was the way to go and the character clicked into place.” The story also reveals her hands-on design process (actress Olivia Coleman has previously quipped about Powell chasing her around to pin a textile swatch onto her back) where sketches generally only appear as a PR sweetener after the fact. “I like to work directly onto a mannequin and the first time I meet an actor I’ll generally try something on them. When you first meet them, you have to gain their confidence, which is why I tend to show instead of telling.”

Her capacity to remain creatively resolute, inextricable from that rebellious streak, power the Powell mythology. Aside from the obvious rigour involved in project research, work ethic (“some projects last as long as a year, during which time you basically have to sacrifice your relationships with friends and family”), passion and humour, she has a palpable air of not giving too many fucks about what others think; the magnetic hallmark of those who don’t need the sustenance of adulation. Which isn’t to suggest arrogance – she is respectful and emphatic about never enforcing her choice on an actor or director (“it is always, always a conversation”) – but that her vision is crystal clear, a necessity for top tier filmmaking: “I am uncompromising, I’m not afraid to say what I think.” It’s compounded by the aforementioned look, for Powell is a relatively rare breed of designer whose personal style is as distinctive as the characters she births. With her signature soft shock of vermillion hair and unparalleled line in suiting she’s become a poster-woman for individuality. Currently starring in Loewe’s SS23 campaign, she’s anti-normcore to the max (“I don’t go for perfection like Anna Wintour, but I would never go to work in a tracksuit”).

Indeed, the ordinary can often be the hardest thing to crack. Summoning everyday style with accuracy is, says Powell, exceptionally difficult. Most pertinent when casting extras, particularly children, she reveals it’s key to

remember that most people’s clothes won’t fit perfectly orbe new “because real life means eclectic style, things bought at different times and in the process of being grown out of”. Like the awkward styling of so many swiftly manufactured bands, all-new screams you’re faking it. Current film, Oliver Hermanus’s Living (2022) about a civil servant in post-WWII London whose terminal medical diagnosis overhauls a dreary life, is a key example, involving reams of rented vintage fashion: “It’s a quiet film about a real person and one of the most satisfying things was seeing the original footage at the beginning segueing into our work. It matched perfectly, which was wonderful.”

With so much under her belt, is there, I ask, a story she’s itching to get her hands on? Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion is the answer. A novel traversing themes including the construction of desire, gender and sexuality and a beacon of magic realism (real life co-mingling with the wonders of surrealism), it’s been aborted several times to date with no takers on the horizon but could just be the most thrilling Powell project yet.

Hair & Makeup - Margot Schifano

When Jing Lusi’s musically inclined primary school teacher found out that Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat would be coming to Southampton, where Jing’s Chinese parents had relocated to after her father secured a scholarship to study at the university, she immediately urged her pupils to get involved. Before Jing knew it, she had successfully auditioned and found herself in the show. ‘It was pure liberation,’ she recalls. ‘It’s a show where there’s no dialogue, just music and dancing throughout, with a live orchestra pit. It’s so feel-good.’ Jing spent seven weeks performing in the show, by the end of which she was in little doubt that, whatever that was, it was exactly what she needed to be doing when she grew up, even convincing herself that the ten pounds a week she was being paid would be plenty to live on. It wasn’t long though before elation started to turn to disillusionment, as the disappointment and grind of failed auditions and weekend stage school gradually took a toll on her aspirations.

Jing’s thoughts turned to more academic endeavours, eventually leading to her studying Law at university. ‘I was like “Right, OK. I’m an only child, I’m Asian, there’s a lot of pressure – Law”.’ The desire to perform never fully diminished though; Jing just kept it to herself. ‘I never really spoke about it again. When I graduated, my Law friends were like “You never talked about acting”. It was so serious to me that I didn’t really want to tell people about it in case they shat on it. At that time as well, when I was at uni, Big Brother and The X Factor were coming through and it was as though “I want to be an actress” was synonymous with “I want to be famous” and that wasn’t my aspiration, so I just kept it a secret. I didn’t want people to judge or mock.’ Jing graduated with a good degree, but that only served to bring about very mixed feelings. ‘It would have been easier I think if I had flunked my degree, because then I’d have been like “There’s no option”, but because I had the option of actually becoming a lawyer, it was very difficult to actually go “That’s the end of that journey, we’re now going to pick up what my childhood self wanted to do”.’

The decision proved to be the right one though, a varied array of film and TV roles – including Stan Lee’s Lucky Man – ensuring that Jing has worked steadily since that time and her international profile was raised considerably in 2018 by her appearance as Amanda in the hit romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians. Whilst reading the script for the first time, Jing recalls being wowed by the Asian female characters – the likes of which hadn’t been seen before – and she knew early on that the film was going to be a game changer. She also knew who the main roles were most likely to go to. ‘In my mind, I was like “Surely this is going to go to Constance Wu” – I just saw her in there – and of course it did, then they asked me to audition for the role of Astrid and that time I was like “Surely this is Gemma” and it went to Gemma (Chan). Then finally I auditioned for Amanda. It’s funny how it is such a small pool that you know where these characters are going.’ The audition process ended up being fairly drawn out and Jing didn’t get to meet director Jon Chu until she had been cast and was on location in Kuala Lumpur. ‘When I got onto the film, I was filming something else at the time and it only caught up with me later on how monumental it would be to be involved in this, especially when I got to know the cast, got to know the creatives involved and was like “Oh god, they want this to be a real moment, like a real move the needle moment”. It started hitting me that this was going to be something extraordinary. It’s always weird when you work on a project – particularly movies, because they take longer – and there’s a lag between finishing it and the world seeing it. In that space of limbo, you’re like “We’re on the cusp of…I can’t tell you about it…well, I can tell you but you won’t get it, but we’ve experienced it”, then it’s like watching the world catching up. That weird time in the middle is very odd though. I remember saying that if the world could experience a fraction of the love and the fun that we had making this film, it will be a success.’ The film was indeed a success, staying at number one for three weeks at the US box office, and the cast and crew got to relive the same levels of excitement and joy they had felt during filming. ‘We had a WhatsApp group that was going mad every weekend with the new box office and Jon Chu, in the first week, he wrote this little one liner going “Guys, our summer camp video went viral!”. Even talking about it now, it feels emotional because it was like, at some point during the process of making the movie, we just forgot we were making a movie. It was such a celebration of Asian fantasticness and we were in the location of our motherland, we were eating the food that we were born to eat and speaking a lot of our mother tongue. Such a huge, extraordinary shift within us, within the group, that we forgot we were making a movie. Then they put it together a year later and it does what it does and we were like “Holy shit, yeah! We were doing that!”. To be on that kind of pioneering revolution, where things open a lot of doors for other Asian projects and actors and artists – across the board – it was just wow.’

That sentiment of elevating and supporting Asian creatives is something clearly close to Jing’s heart and the last five years or so appear to have seen Asian actors and filmmakers receiving considerable attention and acclaim. Jing herself acknowledges that there has indeed been a positive shift, though urges caution in thinking that it’s job done. ‘There’s definitely forward momentum but you also have to be careful when people just try to push Asians into visibility. You can’t just be like “Oh, we need an Asian in this show, throw them in”. As much as I think colour-blind casting can be very positive, it also has the risk of disrespecting someone’s culture because sometimes you throw in someone from a certain cultural background and the storyline that you put them in makes no sense. So there are dangers of that, where you’re trying to be inclusive and you’re trying to be diverse, but just need to be careful that in doing so, you don’t disrespect someone’s culture or roots. Yes, visibility has definitely gone forward and that is definitely a positive thing, it’s just that the devil is in the detail. It’s like, are you putting this Asian character – or any character of colour – in there with a full life, with a full story, or are you just ticking boxes and going “We’ve filled the quota”, because that for me is not a positive move forward.’ For an actor such as Jing, this can prove to be a balancing act between wanting to increase visibility by taking on high-profile roles and ensuring that she isn’t inadvertently enabling a production’s lazy pigeonholing. ‘You just have to be really careful,’ Jing explains. ‘Everyone has different opinions about it and I respect that, but for me personally it’s like, as soon as I’m on screen you can tell that I’m Asian. There’s no mistaking that. So then I have to be very careful about the roles I pick for myself and the stories that I wish to portray. 

There are many stereotypical roles out there and there’s a reason they are stereotypes, because those characters do exist and they are walks of life that people identify with and that’s absolutely fine, but for me I would rather be more discerning. I would rather take less work and be more careful about what I’m trying to present to the world. When I was coming through in the industry, all that was available was prostitutes, takeaway workers and illegal immigrants, but my parents are academics, I studied Law, my dad is a professor, so I was like “Why aren’t we seeing the academic side?”. My parents left after the Cultural Revolution, so there was a huge influx of very successful, well read Chinese immigrants that were being killed in China. Why are we only saying that Asians, or any immigrants, come here because they’re poor, they’re refugees, etc.? What about the other side of the story? So that’s kind of I guess where I’m careful wanting to place myself in that, because there’s no disguising the fact that I’m Asian, so then it’s about whether that’s something I want to bring in or not. There are some shows where the character is written as is and you need to just have some careful discussions with the producers and be like “From you’re side, that’s probably not what you mean, but from an Asian side this could potentially be an issue”. It’s a hard thing when you’re an actor though and you’re trying to bring something up without it being seen as egotistical. For me, it’s very much a protective thing; I’m trying to protect the integrity of the show, trying to protect representation. It’s really not about me. Sometimes producers are great about that, other times they’re like “You’re an actor, stay in your box”. It’s difficult because a lot of producers at that level are still white, but I’m not trying to attack anyone, I’m really trying to protect them. I’m part of this, so it’s in my interest to protect this as well. So more often than not, it’s positive, but they’re not easy conversations to have.’

Aside from Crazy Rich Asians and her recent appearance alongside (and on FaceTime to) Rowan Atkinson in the Netflix comedy series Man vs. Bee, it’s fair to say that Jing is primarily associated with dramatic roles, something she is keen to address. Jing dipped her toe into comedic waters back in 2015 and 2017 with the Edinburgh Fringe show Immigrant Diaries, a one-woman set up that saw her performing her own 10 minute set of material. ‘I enjoyed that so much; it was terrifying. I think it’s actually harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry, because sadness and pain are quite universal, whereas making people laugh is about catching them off guard. I think it’s such an amazing skill, comedy. I have done some comedies, but there’s not enough. Man vs. Bee was great, but it’s very physical and there was a lot going on. Rowan Atkinson is an absolute comedic genius, but I didn’t really get to work with him much; he was pretty much on his own with a bee. When I was offered that though, to work with a childhood hero, that was a dream. I was recently in LA having some meetings with studios and they were like “You’re really funny! We don’t get to see that!”. It’s not really reflected in my roles. I don’t think there’s too much of an opportunity for Asians to be funny in this country. We’re not seeing them in comedy, we’re seeing them in very straight, down the line dramatic roles, but we definitely need to bring that out because we’re very funny people.”

In addition to an extremely hush-hush six part TV thriller series – a role she intriguingly describes as the one she has been waiting for since she became an actress – Jing has two major films due for release this year, both action thrillers. Based on the yet to be released novel of the same name by Elly Conway, who also co-wrote the script alongside Jason Fuchs, Argylle is directed by Matthew Vaughn and features Henry Cavill in the title role, whilst Heart of Stone is directed by Tom Harper and stars Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan. Filmed last year, Jing describes Heart of Stone as one of the most amazing film experiences she has ever had. It also proved to be the right project at the right time. ‘The big budget helped - very different to Crazy Rich Asians. It also came at a time in my life when I just needed to have fun and let loose a little bit. I was taking myself very seriously; Covid had just happened, so I think I was reassessing and I needed a break. Before Covid, I was burnt out, working back to back, thinking that’s what I wanted, that it’s an actor’s dream to just keep working, but it wasn’t. So Covid was a reset and when we came out of that, I was being very careful of my roles. Then Heart of Stone came along and I’m so glad I did it because it was exactly what I needed, to do an action movie and get out of my head, the seriousness of the world and the intensity of drama. To work with Gal, to work with Jamie, to travel round the world – there were a lot of locations – just kicking ass, I was like “Yes, absolutely”. It’s very ambitious, everyone worked so hard and they were amazing to work with. I’m very excited for the world to see it.’

Heart of Stone is on Netflix now.

Where are you from?
Guildford, a little town outside London.

Who or what first drove you to become an actor?
Shah Rukh Khan!

What do people tend to misunderstand about the acting profession?
Actors are just people, I guess.

Which of your projects or roles are you most proud of?
I’m proud of most of the roles I’ve got to play so far, they’re completely different experiences each time so feel grateful for them all.

What would your dream role or co-star be?
I just finished Paris has Fallen and it was INCREDIBLE, so being in that.

The most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given?
You are not your emotions.

Do you have a creative/cinematic hero?
Shah Rukh Kahn is my hero forever.

Where will we see you next?
As Zara in Paris has Fallen, it’s going to be a really big thing on Amazon (hopefully). And series four of The Umbrella Academy is out now too on Netflix.

Is there anything else we should know about you?
I have a dog called Douglas , he’s my best friend and is currently wearing a Santa outfit.

Photography Perry Curties
Styling Steph Kelly
Hair - Keiichirro Hirano
Makeup - Michael Gray

We first talk at the annual British Society of Cinematographers expo in Battersea, South London following Davis’s Q&A (for a rapt audience of 200) about his work on Martin McDonagh’s multi-award-winning The Banshees of Inisherin. It’s a clear winter’s day of sunshine, blue skies and monster (grip) trucks in the car park with the kind of million-pound modifications essential for transforming the scrappy contours of real life into epic on-screen tales. Inside, there’s kit, cameras and lenses for navigating every subtle shift in the weather, light or mood; a cine-voyeurs superstore. All of it represents Davis, in technical terms at least, who is famous, amongst other things, for fuelling opposing ends of the cinematic spectrum – both the “popcorn” blockbusters of Dr. Strange, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Guardians of the Galaxy, Eternals, Kick-Ass and Kraven the Hunter (coming October 2023) and the feted, soulful, frequently sad storytelling of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Seven Psychopaths and the aforementioned ‘Banshees’. Plus, projects including Tim Burton’s lavish live-action Dumbo and John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. No job too big or too indie. 

The glue that binds is Davis’s appetite and talent for spotlighting the truth of the human condition within the meticulous, easily overwhelming business of world-building: “Getting to design worlds [for Marvel] and considering everything from what a toothbrush looks like to where a light source would come from on a fictional planet is incredible, but what I hook into most deeply with any film is the characters themselves and their personal narratives. It’s why I like origins stories so much.” He cites the scene in Dr. Strange where Benedict Cumberbatch in the megalomaniacal title role awakes in hospital to discover his peerless surgeon’s hands incurably mangled: “The shots are constructed to be almost too close to his face, so the audience feels the prevailing sense of discomfort to the point of almost wanting to escape; but not quite.” The same palpable unease appears in ‘Banshees’, an eerie breakup movie of sorts, which is set on a small island off Ireland’s west coast during the 1920’s. Sat in a confessional, Brendon Gleeson’s character Colm displays a first flicker of contrition: “At points we move in so close that you can see his deepest despair, showing the pain connected to this late-life crisis he’s entrenched in. Not fully showing the eyes, just the side of the face, can also be hugely emotional.” 

Sometimes, less is so much more. He describes a lakeside scene, also in ‘Banshees’, between the characters Dominic and Siobhán where cross-shooting (where both actors’ faces are shot direct on, in order to alternate between each in the editing process) was the devastatingly simple photographic direction. He recalls it as a point of such raw tenderness and pathos (it presages of one of the film’s saddest sub-narratives), “that it exemplifies why I make movies. It was the last day of shooting, which is always a strange mix of triumph and sadness on any film, and it was just this very special moment to witness.”

Davis’s own narrative makes for an interesting discussion, especially amidst the current furore about ‘nepo babies’. His father, Mike Davis, was also a cinematographer and camera operator and while having a photo lab in the attic is hardly par for most peoples’ course, it was far from a gilded highway to Hollywood. He grew up in Ladbroke Grove, west London, “in a very bohemian house of artists, writers and creatives where heated debate was really important, the kind of cultural discussion that so often isn’t tolerated now in the time of social media,” but also describes his childhood as, “a bit of a mess”. A talented skateboarder (he was sponsored as a teen), he would get dressed in his school uniform and then change downstairs, at one stage bunking off for three months straight until the discovery of forged letters sparked a formal expulsion. “Then there was punk rock, girls, smoking drugs… it was a difficult time.” From age 15, he worked on building sites and as a painter and decorator, briefly travelling to the US to work as trainee on a film with his father. At 19, he returned to “acquire some qualifications; I was ready to learn” and managed to get a job at the National Film School as a clapper loader. After working with several legendary directors of photography including Billy Williams, Doug Slocombe, Roger Deakins and Harvey Harrison, he moved into commercials – just when UK advertising was at the peak of its creative prestige – cementing his love for the art of lighting. “Film genuinely saved me. Of course, my dad’s support helped to get me an interview, but I did the rest and the graft was very real. From then on, I was always learning and shooting; I’d work on anything I could, regardless of budget.”

His first feature film was Miranda (2002), followed by the better-known Layer Cake (2003) directed by Matthew Vaughan and featuring a pre–Bond Daniel Craig. But it’s McDonagh that is Davis’s most notable repeat collaborator, a director for whom he clearly feels enormous personal and professional affection (“despite the dark material, Martin is very charming and affable and he always wants his sets to be places of joy and creativity – it’s not what people necessarily expect”) and who consistently sparks creative gold. He describes how on ‘Banshees’, he, McDonagh, production designer Mark Tildesley and costume creator Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh would each bring their visual references to the table to create what sounds like a cinephiles dream. In the end, says Davis, “it was a sort of bible of our collective thinking”, the result of a hive mind’s reciprocal influencing. 

Westerns were a major theme, perhaps unsurprisingly; it’s not the first of McDonagh’s films to be called a gothic revenge western – ‘Three Billboards’ similarly marries the vast open spaces of classic cowboy movies with the macabre overtones of gothic art. Charles Laughton’s moody The Night of the Hunter (1955) (“Martin has a thing for this film, particularly the animals”), Walter Hill’s The Long Riders (1980) and John Ford’s story of suffering and survival The Searchers (1965) all feed heavily into the adversarial vibe. Gleeson’s character relentlessly strides across hills or up dirt tracks trailing a long black wool overcoat and hat with an oversized crown, in contrast to opposite number Colin Farrell’s put-upon (until a point) Pádraic who is clothed in comparatively boyish caps and knitwear. It’s a masterclass in how visual direction – the 360 manipulation of atmospherics – demands full creative synergy. The process also meant scouting other films with lighting from oil lamps and candles (Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon included), as well as introducing paintings by the Dutch Masters to illustrate the power of glossy dark interiors lit by a single flame, with clustered people often looked in on. “We wanted to emphasise the claustrophobic nature of the social settings, the pubs and houses, which is also why it was so important to have those sweeping landscape shots – they temper but also accentuate the insular psychology of island life.”

Colour also differentiates those forever confined to island life from those whom McDonagh affords an escape hatch, namely the worldlier sister Siobhán. A key reference was the iconic book of Nostalgic Ireland postcards from the John Hinde Archive; a tongue-in-cheek nod to the clichés of rural island idylls in super-saturated colourways, it riffs on McDonagh’s love of blending grotesquely black storylines with the curveballs of slightly daft humour. Siobhán’s red coat is the first hint she’s destined for life elsewhere; the later appearance of another in yellow confirms she’s definitely off. 

While Davis is emphatic that the director is always commander-in-chief (when working with other directors, he often brings a selection of 30 images to see what they respond to), there are times when the cinematographer’s viewpoint influences directorial decisions. He describes a moment in the filming of ‘Three Billboards’ where Mildred Hayes, played by Frances McDormand, is putting flowers in a pot below when she’s startled by a beautiful fawn in the field beyond and begins talking to it about her murdered daughter. “It was scripted to be shot at twilight but there was some anxiety about that because it leaves a small window of time to do an extremely emotional scene, which can be especially hard late in the day. But I pushed for the timing and that twilight focus is now a reference point in other films – including ‘Banshees’ – to signal a moment of deep despondency (see Pádraic’s despair at the death of his beloved donkey).” Sad films bring challenging emotions and, notably, it’s not only the actors for whom the work can take a mental toll: “I think people often don’t realise how the entire crew have an emotional stake in the movie and how immersive the experience can be. ‘Banshees’ really took it out of me by the last two weeks. The fact that we largely shot it in chronological order meant that the sense of devastation kept building.” 

What films or scenes (not of his making) does he feel represent cinematographic excellence? In Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) he cites both the night robbery at the beginning of the film and the scene where, when photographing the deceased James, a close-up of the camera lens shows the prostrate body inverted (“so brilliant, because you’re never really aware of the artifice”), while in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather II (1974) it’s the scene where Robert de Niro’s Vito Corleone is seen running across the rooftops of Little Italy, New York before murdering the dandified Don Fanucci amid the feast of San Rocco that gets his eyes flashing (“it’s just so beautifully constructed; I think it’s perfection”). He also flags a sublime montage in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967) which seamlessly segues between Dustin Hoffman’s disillusioned student Benjamin Braddock at home with his parents and in a hotel room with lover Mrs Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft (“I get so much more joy from a perfectly sequenced series of scenes; I really appreciate that skill”) and Woody Allen’s infamous film ode to the travails of dating in Manhattan (1979) for its confounding of visual expectations – unusually for a comedy, its shot completely in black and white and some scenes feature characters talking to others out of shot, or silhouetted way back, shrouded in the depths of the frame. 

A cinematographer for many moods, what does Davis prize the most? “Good art should be about ambiguity and I never want to feel like I’m being over-manipulated. You should never see the cinematography, only feel its impact.” 

Shot at the Everyman Cinema, 
Egham, Surrey

Interview Philip Goodfellow
Photography Perry Curties
Hair & Makeup Rachael Thomas

Joanna Vanderham
‘I do genuinely love auditions. I want to hear what the director thinks of a role; I really appreciate getting notes and the challenge of actioning them. Self-tapes are trickier because you’re not getting any feedback, but if you tell me you want something done differently, I can do that.

This is super embarrassing... I was auditioning for a comedy film (which shall remain nameless) and in the scene, my character *ahem* makes herself feel good using her chair... and so, we read the scene and I do this scripted action, only to look up and see all these wide-eyed faces staring at me. The casting director squeaks out “Oh... you didn’t need to read that far.” 

Can you imagine? I wanted the ground to swallow me up!

The day before an audition, I’ll be finishing work on the character, rereading the script and researching the people I’m meeting the next day. The night before, I put together what I’m going to wear and check the lines one last time (lesson learned). The hour before, I debate whether to have a coffee or do a meditation, depending on how adrenalised I am. I’ve learned a few things from bad auditions – always double-check your phone is off, don’t try to use eyeliner to turn a pimple into a beauty spot and learn the lines!’

Ényì Okoronkwo
‘It’s a mixed bag, but generally when you get enough time and enough information about the character and the world, it’s a lot easier to approach auditions with the commitment and creativity needed for the growth that comes, regardless of whether or not you get the job.

The only auditions I’ve almost hated are the ones where you aren’t given any time (less so information). When you respect the craft so much, it’s difficult to produce when you feel you aren’t being respected as a worker or an artist.I found myself in a group recall for a very dance-heavy West End show and I can’t follow steps for my life. It was my first professional audition and I’d got through the singing and acting round just fine, but... I decided to stay and it was humiliating or humbling or hilarious, depending on which mood I am in when I look back on it. Honestly, I attempted a double pirouette and saw God. I often think that if I could survive the hour I was in that room, I can pretty much survive it all when it comes to auditions.I once auditioned for a project where I knew that I would be much better in a different part and luckily had time enough to learn both the part I was given and the part I thought I’d be good for. First thing I said when I came in was that I have learned this other part that I felt more connected to and the director laughed... but let me do my thing. I got the part. I know this isn’t an audition method that is always repeatable but it made me realise a principle; with the time and the resources, we have to first do auditions for ourselves and in the way we connect to the work, as opposed to getting caught up in guessing what is wanted from us.’

Mecia Simson
‘I love getting auditions because for me, I see them as opportunities to be able to further myself in a career that I really love. We audition for so many different things and the competition is very high, so the reality is we’re going to have more noes than yeses. The decision is completely out of our control, but what you can control is how you approach your auditions and how much work you put into them. The best advice I’ve heard and kept with me is “What is meant for you will not pass you by”. I strongly believe that. As long as I’m putting auditions/work out there that I feel great about, then the rest will follow.

Auditioning for The Witcher made a huge impact on my life and career because of the doors it opened up for me. Sophie Holland and Faye Timby were so supportive during the whole audition process that I felt like I was able to let go and create in the space. It opened my eyes to see that the audition process and coming face-to-face with a casting director isn’t a scary thing, because they are always rooting for you and also want to do the best job they can and cast the right people for their projects. I feel like it helped me to drop any kind of mental barrier that I may have had and allowed me to focus on the job at hand rather than focusing on anxieties.

Usually if I get sent the script, I will have a good read through to get a sense of the character and story. If I have enough time, I’ll do a bit of research on the character based on the information I’ve found in the script. I will usually go down a rabbit hole of researching real people on YouTube and get a sense of the type of person that is coming up for me; the research is one of my favourite parts. I usually find if I learn my lines before bed, they stick to me like glue the 

Photography Perry Curties
Interview Philip Goodfellow
Hair & Makeup Rachael Thomas

Where are you from?
I’m from London, I live in London and will probably always live in London.

Who or what first drove you to become an actor?
Well, my mumma says I came out of the womb with jazz hands. I was always obsessed with musicals.

What do people tend to misunderstand about the acting profession?
Some young actors are considered ‘overnight stars’, but the majority have 10-plus years of acting under their belts before they get their ‘big break’.

Which of your projects or roles are you most proud of?
Shiro’s Story, a three-part YouTube series which was a surprise success; and Catherine Called Birdy – the calibre of the people behind and in front of the camera really was amazing and the film has such an important message for young people.

The most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given?
Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.

Do you have a creative/cinematic hero?
When I was younger I saw Kathryn Hunter in Kafka’s Monkey and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more amazing performance.

Where will we see you next?
In The Power on Amazon Prime, The Machine directed by Peter Atencio and, from February to the end of March, I will be appearing in Trouble in Butetown at the Donmar Warehouse, written by Diana Nneka Atuona and directed by Tinuke Craig.

Photography Perry Curties
Styling Steph Kelly
Hair - Keiichirro Hirano
Makeup - Michael Gray

Where are you from?
London born. I moved to LA in January 2020, moved back to London when I was cast in We Are Lady Parts. All my stuff is in storage in LA.

What first drove you to become an actor?
When I was 13, I saw Janet McTeer playing Petruchio in Taming of The Shrew at the Globe. She was so masterful and funny and sexy, I thought ‘Oh, I gotta do this for a living!’.

Which of your projects or roles are you most proud of?
Love Again with Priyanka Chopra, Sam Heughan and Celine Dion, because it’s a dream come true playing a comedic role in a big rom com. I’m super proud of having co-written a TV show with Isla van Tricht, something I never thought I could do. I’m also proud of myself every time I get on stage to do stand-up.

What would your dream role or co-star be?
Stanley Tucci because…he’s Stanley Tucci. Role, Lara Croft? Can I be in the next Tomb Raider movie with Le Tucci?

The most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given?
Do all the work and prep you need to and be super specific about it but when you go on stage, forget about it. Literally throw it all away.

Where will we see you next?
In Love Again, Ted Lasso and The Spiderverse.

Photography Perry Curties
Styling Steph Kelly
Hair - Keiichirro Hirano
Makeup - Michael Gray

Celyn Jones learned early on in life that it pays to take control of your own destiny. Growing up in Anglesey, North Wales, his mother worked as a baker whilst his father worked on the ferries as a merchant seaman. It was a job his father loved but was forced to give up due to ill health, impacting his family and threatening to derail Celyn’s hopes of a career as an actor before it had even begun. Having discovered acting at school, Celyn found it helped him communicate better whilst strengthening his confidence and sense of self, so he was understandably keen to pursue it is as a vocation. Thankfully, a grant made it possible for him to spend several summers during his late teens with the Manchester Youth Theatre, living in halls of residence and putting on plays. It was an experience that had a lasting impression on Celyn and whilst there he met various collaborators, lifelong friends and even his future wife. A scholarship to the Oxford School of Drama kept his dream on track, the head of the school having found a funding route that made it possible for him to attend. By this time, it was fully instilled in Celyn that opportunities don’t come easily and that, when they do, they should be grasped with both hands. ‘I went to drama school with a drive and a realisation, like it was my only shot, which I think helped. If you could go back in time, you’d maybe tell the younger you to relax a bit more, but I felt like I couldn’t. I had to work full-time but not tell the school, working in pubs and bars, and I couldn’t socialise as much as everyone else, that just wasn’t available to me. I had to squeeze every second out of it. The objective was to go to a good drama school, which would then give me access to the industry and launch me in a certain way.’

The plan worked and Celyn became a professional actor at the start of the new millennium, initially in theatre before moving into television. A love of language and literature meant that Celyn had always assumed his career would be in classical theatre, but an encounter with esteemed British casting director Mary Selway altered his outlook. ‘I met her early on and she told my then agent “He’s a film actor”. Then she brought me in for a few auditions and told me the same thing to my face. I never translated it as her saying “This kid’s going to be a movie star”, but I did think of it as she thought the qualities I had were more suited for film. I’d always loved film because where I grew up there were no theatres, so you went to the cinema or you went to the video shop. My love of acting came from films, then when I started taking it seriously, obviously your route in is through theatre and plays, then you go to drama school. So she kind of planted that seed and she was right. At this point, years later, my career is in film – being in them, writing them, producing them, directing them.’

As organic as it has been, Celyn’s progression from acting into writing, directing and producing all feeds back to his instinct for making the most of opportunities when they arise and, if they don’t, creating your own. Whilst working on British crime drama series Above Suspicion, director Gillies MacKinnon shared an idea that would prove to be another turning point for Celyn. ‘He essentially said “You should play Harry Secombe, we should find a Spike Milligan and a Peter Sellers and we should do the story of The Goons”. I looked into it and thought what an amazing story that was, how they got together. I really liked the idea and saw it as an opportunity, so I went for coffee with him and said ‘Are you serious?’. He said ‘Yeah. I can’t write it though; why don’t you try and write it?’ That was the first script I ever got commissioned and it came from me trying to create more opportunities as an actor, always wanting to prove that there’s more to me. We never made it - we might still, though I might be a bit too old to play Harry now; maybe I’ll direct it - but that script was the thing that kicked me off into feeling like I could actually write a screenplay.’

Momentum continued to build and, true to form, Celyn didn’t let it go to waste. Next up was a role he had felt drawn towards playing for some time, that of Welsh cultural icon Dylan Thomas. Along with collaborator Andy Goddard, Celyn sat down to write what would become the film Set Fire to the Stars, with Goddard at the helm and Elijah Wood playing American poet John Malcolm Brinnin opposite Ceryn’s Dylan Thomas. ‘I was attracted to playing this guy who’d said he had “a beast, an angel and a madman” within him, I wanted to portray him in all his glory and shadows and insecurities. As an actor, I always feel you need to find the monster in the man and the man in the monster. If there’s a theme to all my parts and all my stories, it’s that I’m trying to find the light in the darkness and the darkness in the light. That repeats throughout my career, whether as an actor or a filmmaker. I also had this sense that if I didn’t do it myself, no-one was going to give me the opportunity. That film was important for me because it was a case of really putting myself on the chopping board and saying “Can I do it? Can I contend? Can I play a part with real depth and range?”. I was so proud of it. At the time, I thought “Oh, the film did well” but, with hindsight, the film did extraordinarily well; it was a minor miracle. Made for half a million quid – we raised every penny ourselves – it opened in America, won all these awards, it was huge.’ The film would also spawn Mad As Birds, an independent production company that has come to serve as a home for Celyn’s expanding creative endeavours, it’s name taken from the Dylan Thomas poem Love in the Asylum. ‘When we made Set Fire to the Stars, we needed to name the production company, then we just decided to keep it going and see how far it could take us. I’m really proud of it because I set it up to not just be about vehicles for me and, though I’m across every film we do, it’s grown as a company in it’s own right.’ The company has since gone on to produce several notable feature films, including psychological thriller The Vanishing starring Gerard Butler, which Celyn co-wrote; comedy Poms, which features a stellar female cast led by Diane Keaton; and Six Minutes To Midnight, starring Eddie Izzard who also co-wrote the script with Celyn and Andy Goddard.

The latest Mad As Birds project, The Almond and the Seahorse, sees Celyn wearing all of his filmmaking hats at once – producing, co-directing, co-writing and starring in. Based on the play of the same name by Kaite O’Reilly, who co-wrote the screenplay, the film tells the story of two relationships struggling to survive the trauma of serious brain injury. It can often be the case when a story that started out life as a play is transferred to film that the end result just looks and feels like a play on screen, but The Almond and the Seahorse succeeds in avoiding that pitfall, something that was wholly by design. ‘You don’t want it to feel like it never got away from the play, just like you don’t want a film to feel like it never got away from a novel. We couldn’t just put the play on film; the play is a five-hander and has a very certain structure. The film had to be stretched out, broadened, with more characters, thought out in different ways, expanded, resolved as well, generally fleshed out. Kaite was great to work with, she wasn’t precious about that; she wanted the film to be the film and the play to be the play.’ Reprising the stage role O’Reilly had originally written specifically for him, Celyn plays Joe, one of the two characters who have suffered a brain injury, and he appears opposite a triumvirate of female acting talent in Charlotte Gainsbourg, Trine Dyrholm and, in her first dramatic lead role, Rebel Wilson. If casting Rebel Wilson – who plays Joe’s partner Sarah – was a leap of faith, it is one that Celyn was excited about. ‘It was a leap of faith on both sides really. Something new for her, something new for me. I get excited about people doing new things, because I like to do new things myself; to see Elijah Wood like you’ve never seen Elijah Wood before, Eddie Izzard like you’ve never seen Eddie Izzard before, Gerard Butler like you’ve never seen Gerard Butler before, now Rebel Wilson like you’ve never seen Rebel Wilson before. I was excited about it and she was excited because she really wanted that opportunity. She wants the world to see this film, not just for her but also for everyone else involved, for her performance, for Charlotte and Trine’s performances. She is so celebratory about it, which is great.’

Unsurprisingly, Celyn has various projects in the pipeline, behind the camera as writer, director and producer on a film adaptation of Fiona McFarlane’s book The Night Guest, whilst bringing together an as yet untitled TV series he has written set in France and Wales, as well as appearing in front of the camera in two new films, competitive vegetable growing mockumentary Swede Caroline, which won the Spirit of Raindance award at this year’s Raindance film festival, and Chuck Chuck Baby, which Celyn describes as ‘a sexual awakening musical set in a chicken factory in North Wales’. All the while looking after his expanding family, doing school runs, coaching rugby on Sunday mornings and walking the dog. ‘All I know is to do. I can’t help myself. I couldn’t stop myself from doing because I can’t trust that things will last forever and I need to be in control. I’m ambitious and just as ambitious for everyone else around me. I meet new people and I think of a new idea, I meet new collaborators, I think “What story can we tell together?”. Look at what we’ve done so far. Let’s see where else we can go.’

Hair & Makeup - Margot Schifano
Celyn wears various pieces by Private White V.C.

Where are you from?
I’m from Birmingham, now living in North London.

Who or what first drove you to become an actor?
I loved going to the theatre with my mum when I was younger. That was where I fell in love with storytelling.

What do people tend to misunderstand about the acting profession?
It’s an actor’s job to breathe life into our characters but their development is the culmination of a whole host of creative input.

Which of your projects or roles are you most proud of?
Jessica in Netflix’s Half Bad: The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself. It’s rare to come across a truly unlikeable, unflinching young female character who resists the expectations placed on women to be attractive or palatable in some way.

Do you have a creative/cinematic hero?
Michaela Coel. I feel excited to be acting at a time when someone like Michaela is pushing the boundaries of our art form. I think I May Destroy You is a masterpiece, as well as her published work and MacTaggart lecture.

The most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given?
Working in this industry is a marathon, not a sprint.

Where will we see you next?
I’ll be playing Mayfair Lipp, a fiery redhead in The Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Photography Perry Curties
Styling Steph Kelly
Hair - Keiichirro Hirano
Makeup - Michael Gray

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