Tom Cullen and Joe Locke hadn’t worked together before Rhys Marc Jones’ haunting feature film debut Black Church Bay, but Cullen certainly was an enormous Heartstopper fan.
“I was delighted that I even got to work with Joe for the 30 minutes of the audition,” the Welsh star tells The Hollywood Reporter during a busy BFI London Film Festival. “Such a fangirl. Me and my partner,” he adds, “we just devoured it.”
It definitely suited Cullen, star of Downton Abbey, The Gold, and more recently, House of the Dragon, to pair up with Locke and return to his roots for Jones’ Wales-set thriller. He plays Barry, a closeted, 40-something-year-old schoolteacher living in a sleepy fishing village, who strikes up a sexual relationship with 18-year-old Jasper (Locke). The pair spend a romantic few days on Barry’s small yacht docked near the bay, but when Jasper suddenly goes missing while Barry sleeps, Cullen’s character is forced to confront how far he’ll go to shield his true self from those around him.
The writer-director’s parents still live in Church Bay, a settlement on the northwest coast of the island of Anglesey. “I got inspired when I was walking the same coastal path that [Barry and Jasper] walk,” says Jones, sitting next to Cullen and Locke at London’s Sea Containers hotel. “And I hadn’t really seen Wales be used for that kind of mystery, noir thriller. The island was always a bit of a true north for the project. I would always return there and it very much fed into the idea.”
It was eight years ago that Jones, a self-proclaimed fan of “scandals in films,” first had the idea for Black Church Bay. “There’s a great quote that Lars von Trier says, ‘A film should be like a pebble in your shoe,’ and I kind of agree with that,” he says. The director found himself drawn toward movies about dilemmas — ”something that felt a little problematic” — and early drafts of the script even had Barry going missing instead of Jasper. This is news to Cullen and Locke. They’re suddenly wide-eyed and thinking about what kind of film Black Church Bay would have been if Jones had stuck with that version.
Locke, also famed for roles in Agatha All Along and another LFF feature, Elsinore, was as overjoyed as his co-star to be involved in the film. The ripeness of the material was, for him, in its depiction of morality. “I think both Jasper and Barry struggle with who they are and the actions they take to hide parts of themselves,” says Locke. “I think that’s the essence of human nature, really. And Rhys’ script just so beautifully says that.”
Cullen’s recollection of boarding the project was that it “wasn’t what I expected,” he confesses. “It felt like something that I hadn’t seen be made in the U.K. before, and as a Welsh person, I really am a strong advocate for Welsh stories — especially the stories that haven’t been told,” he adds, “the smaller parts of society.” He met with Jones and, in his words, was gunning for the part. “I loved the script so much,” Cullen continues. “I had a real sense of what Barry could be, and it kind of reminded me of [Thomas] Vinterberg’s The Hunt, but an inverted version of it. It had elements of The Talented Mr. Ripley, one of my favorite films of all time, and it terrified me.” He lobbied Jones to let him audition and was soon screen-testing with Locke, which “just felt really right.”
In Cullen and Jones’ conversations about Barry, the actor was desperate to find his humanity. “I think that it would be very easy, on the page, to not go there,” Cullen says. “And I was interested [in] the challenge of wondering how far along you could bring the audience with him — is Barry a good person or a bad person? What are good and bad people? Are we just a choice away from becoming a bad person?”
His director is keen on focusing on where an actor and character meet, organically. Together, he and Cullen conjured up some of Barry’s backstory — imagining that he’d moved up to the island from South Wales, evoking a sense of mystery around what he might be running away from. Cullen says on that note: “Wherever he’s come from, he hasn’t been able to live his authentic self, and the idea that he can go somewhere else and maybe reinvent [himself] and be who Barry really is, and the fact that he was incapable of doing that again… We talked quite a lot about that.”
With Cullen’s work to understand Barry ongoing, Jones was pleased to find Locke already had a built-in affinity for Jasper after having grown up on another of the U.K.’s more remote islands, the Isle of Man. “I feel like they’re culturally very similar,” explains Locke. “That small island mentality, that shelteredness. But there’s also a rawness that comes with living on an island and therefore I feel like a lot of the queer experience of that is more secretive, which lends itself to the relationship that [Jasper] forms with Barry. That’s almost part of the norm of the queer experience in those places,” Locke thinks.
All three men are hoping many of these themes — school politics, growing up queer, systemic and internalized homophobia — resonate with audiences. Black Church Bay‘s BFI London Film Festival premiere took place on Saturday, though plans for a spring 2027 theatrical release are in place following Vertigo’s acquisition of the drama.
For Jones, the most prevalent conversation starter is current-day prejudices. “When I was writing it, [in] 2019… [That] feels like a very long time ago,” he says. “So many things were changing in terms of the culture wars, and I think we’re regressing with LGBT rights in this country since 2019.”
The debut filmmaker believes that schools and educational institutions remain at the forefront of the culture wars: “That’s where generations meet, in quite an interesting way.” But Barry could, in some way, be used as a vehicle through which to view that regression. “[He’s] sort of had to exploit the culture wars in a way to deflect,” continues Jones about the character’s constant mind games with colleagues, such as headmistress Mrs. Munro (Rakie Ayola) and fellow teacher Kelly (Marli Siu), as well as particular students.
Ultimately, Jones hopes the film will prompt cinemagoers to examine their own relationship with authenticity — “and why they feel the need to impede others or hide who they are and why it bothers them. Because I don’t think the film is necessarily rooted in an outwardly homophobic world. But it does touch on the kind of hypocrisies, or the inadequate set-up of institutions.”
Black Church Bay is also quite the feat of practical filmmaking, especially since part of the 27-day shoot took place on Barry’s boat. Jones’ crew were only permitted to have eight people aboard at any given time, and two had to be licensed skippers. A support vessel was stationed nearby, which sometimes carried a crane-mounted camera. As daunting as it might sound, Cullen relished it. “It’s one of my favorite weeks of filming I’ve ever had,” he declares. “It was beautiful and it was challenging, but I think any challenge on a film set brings cohesion with the crew — you become a family and everyone was relying on each other.”
Cullen was admittedly pushed even further by the fact that they weren’t able to shoot chronologically, making it difficult for him to keep tabs on Barry’s mental decline across the film. “As you can imagine, being in that headspace for that amount of time was really taxing,” he concedes. “The crew were great [and] I tried to unplug as much as I could during filming, and we had fun. There was a lot of Monopoly Deal at lunchtimes. But for me, it was just reading the script over and over and over and over. I’d go back at the end of the day and I’d read the script again, just constantly making sure that I knew where I was at every moment.” On three of the days, they were required to film seven whole pages. “It was wild. That’s the challenge of independent filmmaking,” Cullen grins.
Jones, Cullen and Locke are pleased to hear how effective the ambiguous ending to Black Church Bay is. In a bid to keep the conversation spoiler-free, we dance around Barry and Jasper’s fate, but Jones reveals that the film’s final scene was actually meant to be its penultimate sequence. It was only in the edit that he unearthed an even more gutting finale and stripped back that ending, with full support of the financiers. “The edit tells you what [the film] should be, in a way,” Jones says. “It’s a psychological character study, fundamentally. Despite the ethically dubious nature of the relationship or the lines most certainly crossed, it does feel that [Jasper] represents a lost opportunity for Barry, and I think [he] then wrestles with how much he’ll forsake his lover.”
Black Church Bay hit the Zurich and Busan Film Festivals before London. The prospect of bringing it to its native audience in the U.K. is both “so special,” says Cullen, grinning again, “and terrifying as well.”
The feature is produced by the Scotland-based Alex Polunin for Ossian International and London-based Tristan Goligher for The Bureau. Black Church Bay was developed with BBC Film, iFeatures and the Cinéfondation Résidence in Cannes. Production financing comes from BBC Film, Film Cymru Wales and Screen Scotland, alongside private financiers Lola Manzini of L.A.-based Manzini Films, U.K.-based 1C6 Films, Elephant Film and Kamila Serkebaeva, and Brazil-based Daniel Staut.