Bad boy Joe set to join the gang of top TV stars
‘Life is not all just luck, you have to carve out your own fate’
YOU might recognise Joe Cole from Peaky Blinders ,in which he starred alongside Cillian Murphy as the latter’s little brother.
Or maybe as a Manc, from the Hang the DJ episode of Black Mirror which imagined love as approved by computers. But his latest outing, as the son of Colm Meaney’s gangster boss in Sky’s big budget
Gangs of London might soon be the thing Cole is best known for.
The 31-year-old Londoner lights up the screen in a performance that he says was inspired by boxing promoter Eddie Hearn.
“My character is the privately educated son who has to prove himself and there was a similarity with Eddie in that regard. There’s a slight chip on the shoulder and an extra added pressure when you come from that background.”
Background is important to Cole. His mother recently told him that his great grandfather was Irish, a fact that was unknown to him.
“I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t told me!” he says. “I said do you know how many auditions I might have had an edge in when I had to do an Irish accent. I think it’s one generation too far back for a passport. Which is a pity.”
Growing up in Kingstonupon-Thames, the oldest brother of five, the importance of a university education was drilled into him.
“I felt very sorry for myself and I was quite hard on myself,” he recalls. “I thought that to be a success in life you had to go to university and that wasn’t the path I wanted to take.
“I thought if there was any point in doing that you had to go to a top university with top grades and by the time I got to sixth form I was just middle of the pack. There were no actors in the family so I didn’t think of that as a viable career path.”
In his teens he says he felt directionless but it was the intervention of an Irish drama teacher — a Miss O’Shea — that gave him belief that he could make something of himself: “She was the person who made acting seem like it could be fun.”
After school he went to the National Youth Theatre but even there he struggled with self belief.
“I’d had trouble at home and a break-up and things weren’t going well and there was someone at the National Youth Theatre and he told me: it’s never crowded on the extra mile. And what that meant was just there is always something extra you could be doing.”
This advice inspired him to write his own TV show and send it to Matt Lucas, and while the show never got commissioned, Cole struck up a friendship with the Little Britain star.
“I did a day on Come Fly with Me and then I met Matt and we stayed in touch. It showed me that where you end up is not all just luck, you have to carve out your own fate.”
His cherubic looks might not mark him out as a natural gangster but many of Cole’s early roles were rough hewn bad boys — he was in Offender, a film about the London riots, and Slap, where he played a crossdressing boxer.
Then, of course, there was John Shelby in Peaky Blinders, who was viciously killed off at the beginning of series five.
Cole says that it was his decision to leave the show. “I wanted a bit of variety in my career, that was the reason I left,” he says, and that same imperative meant that he was hesitant when the Gangs of London script ended up on his desk.
“When I saw the title of this show, my immediate reaction was, no thank you. But when I saw (programme creator) Gareth Evans was involved that really changed my mind and I also read the first couple of scripts which were real page turners, that helped.”
Meaney, he says is “great craic”, and “sort of holds the whole series together, because his character’s shadow is cast across it”.
Lockdown, or a selfimposed version of it, is nothing new for Cole.
While he’s currently holed up with two of his brothers in London — and the three of them keep each other amused — he spent years living on his own and, after a while, the solitude got to him.
“I’d start relying on work just for a reason to leave the house. I wanted to pick roles for the right reasons, because they were satisfying or because they moved my career along and with that amount of isolation I was just putting pressure on myself to take things for the wrong reasons.”
Now, while the rest of the world is feeling the stultifying effects of lockdown, Cole says he is actually in a better place and the company at home helps him keep the career fires burning.
“It’s helped me reconnect with the thing I love and my acting and I’m grateful for that.”
All episodes of ‘Gangs Of London’ will be available on Thursday on Sky Atlantic and NowTV