Ashley Walters: ‘Stephen Graham saved my life’

You might think Ashley Walters had it sussed. 

The star of Top Boy, who recently featured in A Thousand Blows and gained an Emmy nomination for the staggering Adolescence, seems like a natural on screen. 

Think again. ‘It just takes a lot for me to step in front of the camera, and to be watched and criticised and judged…sixty people just watching you all day,’ he shudders.

‘The anxiety that I have acting was really getting to an unbearable place…how it affected my family, my home life, and just me and my mental health. It’s been really hard to cope with.’

It’s a candid admission from the Peckham-born former rapper, who – under the moniker Asher D – was part of UK garage outfit So Solid Crew. In the early 2000s, he turned to acting – even winning a British Independent Film Award for most promising newcomer for the superb movie Bullet Boy.

‘For context’, he adds, ‘I was an addict. I was an alcoholic for 15 to 20 years. The last six years, I’ve been sober. That’s when my anxiety has been the biggest. I traded off my addiction to get that my feelings back, and that’s what I was left with. So it’s like learning to deal with a new normal now and trying to navigate that.’

While most would probably curl up in a ball, faced with such anxiety-inducing sobriety, Walters has channelled that energy elsewhere. A father to eight children – he’s been married to actress Danielle Isaie (now Walters) since 2013 – the 44-year-old is the perfect example of someone who has overcome life’s boobytraps to come out the other side.

How did he do it? By finding his niche behind the camera. Directing 2021 short Boys led to helming episodes of TV show Ackley Bridge and A Thousand Blows. ‘I just felt calm in that space,’ he says. ‘It changed my life.’

Now he’s delivering his first feature, Animol – a raw jailtime drama that may lean on Scum, the daddy of all prison flicks, but still feels box-fresh. Inspired on some level by his own troubled past – in 2002, he was sentenced to 18 months in a young offenders institution for possession of a firearm – it casts Tut Nyuot (from Cillian Murphy drama Steve) as Troy.

Being held in a juvenile detention centre for conspiracy to commit murder, Troy is thrown into this lion’s den, forced to survive by any means possible – which includes smuggling in contraband for unstable inmate Dion (Sekou Diaby).

To do his due diligence, Walters went to prisons and young offenders institutions across the country, speaking to inmates. ‘They knew who I was, but that made it even worse,’ he admits. When he told them he’d been locked up for possession of a firearm, they all started laughing.

‘I was sitting in front of people doing life for murders and they’re looking at me like, “You haven’t got a clue what we’re going through” and I realised I didn’t.’ With this fresh in his mind, he knew he needed to get it right. ‘I had to honour those people.’

Scripted by Nick Love, who Walters worked with on Bulletproof, what Animol shows well is what happens when you hook up with the wrong crowd.

‘You see in this film, loyalty seems to kill,’ he says, ‘and that’s been my experience with it. I was loyal to a fault to some people that really didn’t care about me, and it led me to all sorts of crazy places. [It’s disastrous] when you don’t have a solid foundation, a solid figure, essentially a male role model…especially for the young boys, you’re really learning as you go along. You’re learning and making those decisions.’

Walters grew up without his father being around. ‘My mum was a single parent, and I was desperately looking for male role models in every walk of my life. And unfortunately, they became the wrong people. So my loyalty to their influence led me to young offenders institutes, and I made some really silly decisions, and I’m pretty aware of that now. I’ve done a lot of soul searching and stuff since then, but I’ve made it my life’s work without shouting about it… kids I see that are going through the same thing as me, I want to help them. This film is an extension of that.’

Intriguingly, Walters casts Stephen Graham in Animol as the prison welfare officer, following their work together on A Thousand Blows and Adolescence. 

‘I love him,’ says Walters. ‘He saved my life. I’ve saved his life. Not physically… but we’ve supported each other through a lot of stuff over the years, and we’ve come through some of the same experiences, and that has kept us as kindred spirits.’ 

They go way back – to 2004 sitcom Top Buzzer – where Walters also met wife Danielle. ‘I’ve seen him at his lowest, and I’m now seeing him at his highest, and he’s seen me at my lowest and my highest, and we just stuck with it.’

He starts to look emotional. ‘He’s a genuine, down-to-earth human being, and you just rarely find that in this game.’

Together, he and Graham were able to enjoy all the plaudits that rightly came to Adolescence – the four-part Netflix procedural which saw each episode filmed in one take. It was a rare chance for Walters, who played a Detective Inspector, to enjoy acting. ‘Celebrating Adolescence and seeing what it’s done – the success of it and how well it’s translated – is amazing, and so I live for that. I live for these moments. I don’t mind the pain that often, going through it.’

For the record, he still loves going in front of the camera. Featuring in the upcoming second season of Dune: Prophecy, he’s next up in Remain, the new psychological thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, alongside Jake Gyllenhaal. ‘I don’t ever want to stop acting. That’s not what I’m saying…I still want to work!’ he laughs. ‘But I now understand what triggers me, what makes me feel a certain way or not. And I do really [want to] indulge in the beauty of directing.’

Animol is in cinemas now.

Comment now

Comments

Add Metro as a Preferred Source on Google

Add as preferred source