Thank you

so much for being on.

I had a Russian drama teacher at Mountview.

Brilliant guy.

He taught me how to act.

Sam Cogan.

He said to me, he knew I wasn't academic, right? He knew I left school at 15 with no academic qualifications.

like

But what is it like to work hard when you're out of work? What does

that involve, do you think? Well, when I left drama school, when I left Mountview, I would go back and study three nights a week.

with a guy called John Hughes, who was a teacher of mine.

And I would study with him.

I would study, they think, because of the spiritual psychology of acting.

And I would go into work with him, and he would also teach meditation as well, which I was really into.

It's about learning...

Fuck

Mm-hmm.

So acting for me be- was a means by which I could understand other people really, motivations and things.

And there was a brilliant Russian teacher when I was at drama school who had studied with the students of Stanislavski.

And so in a sense I, I never studied the American method acting, which is a kind of a branch off of the Stanislavski a- techniques.

I never studied that.

I studied really raw Stanislavski really.

And this man, he, he, he said a great thing to me.

Does that make sense?

Yeah

... to be with me.

And they were amazing.

They grew up, and they grew up on film sets.

They grew up on, in Culver City.

We did Ray Donovan.

They grew up around that, and they used to love the, uh, all the food, 'cause there was a load of sweet...

Yeah.

How did you get your foot in the door and get that first few, you know, auditions or agent? What were the first few steps?

Well, I was, I was dancing in a club in Hackney, um, because we used to...

Me and my friend Emmanuel, um, used to follow, uh, uh, Trevor Nelson when he was a...

Before he was on R- Radio One.

I think before he was on any radio station, really.

He used to have a sound called Mad Hatters, and he used to work in a menswear shop called P- um, Pernissi on, on Bethnal Green Road, and I worked in a menswear shop called Bennetts Menswear.

And, um, Trevor was, like, a really bright, good-looking, intelligent, doing his A-levels, really bright kid.

Very different.

Yeah.

And I was dancing in the club and with my mate Emmanuel.

And Emmanuel was, like, tall, St. Lucian, of St. Lucian descent, looked gorgeous, and he ended up being a model.

And someone asked him to be an extra in a movie, and he said, "Yeah, can I take Eddie?" And they took me, and I was there, and I saw Jamie Foreman, who became a friend of mine, do a scene on this dance floor.

We had to walk across a dance floor, and I suddenly thought, "God, I wanna be an actor.

That's what I wanna do."

Yeah

... 'cause Dash is, Dash was amazing because Dash d- has...

Not shocking, but challenging.

Challenging, yeah.

Well, I...

My perspective, from my experience of 34, 35 years now, is that most filmmakers are quite left-wing.

They're quite progressive.

And so they're very well-meaning.

They want to highlight inequality or highlight suffering.

He was describing it almost as if like this

And that's kind of maybe a bit linked up with this idea of like,

When you first go to drama school, they lay you on your back and teach you how to breathe, to be connected in order to reach the back of the theater and all this.

And my breath was very shallow.

I think it was my cortisone levels and trauma was quite high for personal reasons.

And they said to me, you're not breathing right.

Your back is always against the wall.

Your fists are always clenched.

Do you see a lot more opportunity there?

So when you get a call inviting you to become part of Mountview, to beca- to become a vice president and help other young people perhaps make some of the progress and go on some of the journeys that you've been on, it was, I suspect, something of a no-brainer.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I've got four teenagers and I know, especially because of social media, I know how hard it is for, for teenagers to find themselves and to navigate the world at the moment.

Social media is so binary that if someone has an opinion at the moment, you hate them because of that opinion.

Where years ago, we used to work with people who had different opinions from us, but we knew that they were a good husband or a good father or a good colleague, so you could see the humanity beyond the opinion.

And what drama does, and theater and film, is it allows you to sit and explore really difficult subjects within paradox and nuance.

(laughs)

They would be.

... because you just think it is so toxic.

Well, I think people confuse winning an argument with finding a solution.

You know, I don't think, for instance, I don't think the Good Friday Agreement got solved because someone won an argument.

I think it got solved because someone found a solution.

And what social media does is people confuse the two.

There's also, there's a great saying by, uh, the physicist Niels Bohr when he said, "For every great truth, the opposite is also true, and for every simple truth, the opposite is always false." And when, when you're on social media, people demand that you adhere to their simple truths, and they don't accept the paradox or the, or the nuance of, of reality.

And reality is always paradoxical.

We do have to welcome people of all different communities or, or do you think it's a different, a different time and a different scale now?