‘The blood and bruises are real’
‘Peaky Blinders’ star Joe Cole tells Guy Kelly about the punishing shoot of his new boxing movie, set – and filmed – in a Thai prison
There are some actors whose early, pre-fame occupations come as a surprise. Christopher Walken was a lion tamer. Hugh Grant was an assistant groundsman at Fulham FC. Danny Devito used to cut the hair of corpses. But in Joe Cole’s case, you can entirely believe he used to be a shop-floor salesman. He’s just got the gift of the gab.
“Oh, I could sell water to a well, mate,” he laughs, Estuary twang only slightly exaggerated for the idiom. Thanks to his long-running turn as John Shelby on the BBC’S star-strewn
Peaky Blinders and an episode of Black Mirror last year, for which he received a Bafta nomination, Cole is fast becoming one of the brightest young British actors around. And unlike the thespian generation ahead of him – the lot with names like boarding houses (Redmayne, Hiddleston, Cumberbatch) – he is as believable playing tough as he is tender. In that, if he recalls anyone, it’s Tom Hardy, his Peaky Blinders costar.
Before all this, though, he hawked carpets in shops in South London. So then, is he still into flooring? He spins on his chair, squinting at the thin teal layer below our feet. “Yeah. I’ve had a good analysis of this one here and… looks like deep-pile, yep, 18 by 20. Not bad…”
A lot has happened to Cole between the carpet years and now, but his knack for promotion certainly hasn’t deserted him. We meet in a stifling, windowless studio in the capital, where the 29-yearold is very enthusiastically selling his new project: the immersive, intensely violent drama A Prayer Before Dawn
(see Robbie Collin’s review, below). An adaptation of the 2011 memoir by Billy Moore (played by Cole, who befriended the real Billy), the film tells the winceinducing true tale of a young British drug addict sent to prison in Bangkok. In order to survive, he eventually turns to Muay Thai boxing – an ancient Thai combat sport like Western boxing but for those who don’t find that quite violent enough; kicking, kneeing and clinching techniques are allowed alongside punches. The film looks authentic in every gruesome way, and that’s because it was.
“This was a real prison, with real prisoners. It was dirty, it was sweaty, and the blood and bruises are real,” Cole says.
Shooting primarily in a recently-closed prison near Bangkok in 2016, Cole was surrounded by recent inmates, rather than trained actors, as well as champion boxers.
“I was going to learn Thai, but the director [Frenchman Jean-stéphane Sauvaire] thought it would be more interesting if all the communications had to be facial expressions and body language. And it was.”
The result is pure clammy claustrophobia, as Billy’s inability to be understood means he either talks with his fists (or feet, or knees, or in one particularly grisly scene, teeth) or watches in terrified silence as the brutality of the cell hierarchy becomes clear.
The real Moore, a Liverpudlian, was a boxer and drug dealer in Thailand before being put away for three years in two notorious Thai prisons between 2007 and 2010. “If there is a Hell, this must be what it looks like,” he wrote of his first cell, at Chiang Mai Central. He slept the first night wedged next to a corpse and surrounded by rats. Only by learning Muay Thai and competing for the jail against fighters from other institutions did he earn enough credit to strike a deal and be able to serve the last months of his sentence in Wandsworth prison. Now 45, he enjoyed several years of freedom and sobriety – including seeing his story made for the big screen and even cameoing in it – before relapsing and being jailed again in February for robbery.
“A lot of the improvisation was just going into a room with these guys and seeing what would happen. We had a rough narrative, but no lines. I wasn’t going to walk in there like Jason Statham, hard as nails, nor was I going to do the opposite and be humiliated. It was quite an interesting balance, and quite scary at points,” Cole says.
Cole’s face today is unmarked and cherubic, but in Thailand he invited co-stars to hit him whenever they wanted. Which they did. A lot. One scene saw him in a ring with the South East Asian boxing champion who had served seven years inside. “We had rough choreography but we weren’t sticking to it. He got me with this uppercut that sent me to the moon and back. I just had to grab him and squeeze the life out of him,” he says.
It’s all far from his suburban beginnings; growing up as the oldest of five brothers in Kingston-upon-thames (3/5ths of whom now act), with a primary-schoolteacher mother and a sailing-instructor father, he knew no actors but enjoyed drama.
After losing focus when he got to sixth form (“I was messing about, getting in to nonsense, and really at a loose end, so I was held back at college while all my friends were at university. I was feeling very sorry for myself ”), he took jobs in bars, clothes shops, and sold those carpets in John
Lewis, before applying to the National Youth Theatre (NYT). There, a director told him to ignore parental pressure to go to university and concentrate on acting. So he did that, and learned the ropes, as well as becoming involved in the organisation’s outreach work.
“It needs more investment, but we’d visit pupil referral units, then do a drama workshop with them and get them to talk what they’ve seen – maybe about knives,” he recalls. “I try to remember we’re in an industry where it’s very easy to get obsessed with yourself and your career, and more important is using your success and the power you’ve gained to help.” From NYT, Cole won a part in a one-off play in a small venue in Central London, which no one would normally go and see, but he’s a salesman, so...
“I invited a load of agents down, emailing them and selling it like it was this epic play they had to come and witness,” he remembers. They came, and one signed him up, getting him parts as a gunman on Holby City and a rapist on The Bill. That led to Skins, and eventually Peaky Blinders, where he joined a cast that included many of his heroes – among them Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Helen Mccrory.
Cole’s character left Peaky Blinders in a very peaky condition indeed, riddled with bullets in series four. But he was ready to depart, and A Prayer
Before Dawn seemed the right vehicle to graduate with. Prison dramas have a decent track-record of launching brooding male actors.
“Unconsciously I suppose I was looking for a film like this, because I’d seen [Tom Hardy in] Bronson, I’d seen Hunger [Michael Fassbender’s breakout performance as IRA prisoner Bobby Sands] – those are the most immersive, real films I’ve seen,” Cole says. “And it gives you the freedom to do other stuff.”
By “other stuff ”, he might mean writing screenplays – among them a comedy series – which he’s done for almost as long as he’s been acting, but I suspect he’s referring to parts that don’t include him punching someone to death. His delicate, effective portrayal of a man trapped inside a Tinder-like algorithm in Hang the
DJ – an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Emmy-winning sci-fi anthology Black
Mirror – was a definite step away from type, as will be a role as a recovering pornography addict in Pure, a forthcoming Channel 4 drama.
“It doesn’t happen so much in the US, where I think they’re more open-minded, but in England if you do something well, people think ‘he beats people up, he’s a thug’ – but that’s not me. I’m much more like the
Black Mirror guy,” he says, with some frustration.
That time will come, but first, he needs to keep selling a film in which he certainly does beat people up – and very well too.
“Really, we’ve not made a prison or fighting film,” he says. “It’s about a man trying to figure out his own emotion. It’s the absolute pinnacle for an actor. It’s an achievement.”
All right, I’m sold.
A Prayer Before Dawn is in cinemas now