‘I’m done with playing spivs now’
An actor always in demand, Daniel Mays talks to Chris Harvey about class, his new BBC drama and his imminent wedding
Daniel Mays is proof that you can be a brilliant actor without being a household name. He memorably played DCI Jim Keats in Ashes to Ashes, Ronnie Biggs in Mrs Biggs, Imelda Staunton’s son in Vera Drake, but in the week we meet, he’d done a BBC interview for his latest role, in Mother’s Day, the BBC Two drama about the 1993 Warrington IRA bombings, and was less than impressed with his billing. “She introduced me, like, ‘you might not know his name, but you’ll definitely know his face,’ and you suddenly think, f------ hell, man, I’ve been doing this for two decades, and that was the opening shtick – what have I got to do?”
His career, he says, has been a long, hard, slow burn. “You see kids leave drama school who are drop-dead gorgeous and they just go stratospheric instantaneously,” he says, “the likes of Robert Pattinson… I’ve met him, he’s an absolute sweetheart… I guess when I started out that was frustrating to me”
Does he feel that he’s lost out on roles to less talented but more conventionally handsome actors? “I think the honest answer to that is, in reality, I perceive myself as a character actor as opposed to a lead actor, but I’m always inspired by those amazing actors that are so good at character roles that, somehow, they’re just thrust into a lead role – the likes of Joaquin Phoenix or Daniel Day-lewis, Gary Oldman, even the Tim Spalls and Jim Broad bents of this world – they’re not leading man looks, are they?”
Mays may not have Hollywood looks, but he’s strikingly tall and lean. He sometimes gets mistaken for Danny Dyer. “Once I was at a party and I was talking to this girl for about 10 minutes and at the end she said, ‘Say hello to Ray for me,’ and I went, ‘What? Ray who?’ and she went, ‘Ray Winstone.’ I said, ‘you think I’m Danny Dyer, don’t you?’”
It may be on account of his dark hair and accent. Mays grew up in Essex, began his career on Eastenders, and has played his fair share of villains and wide-boys over the years, but these days, he says, he would turn down parts like the Millwall football hooligan he played in The Firm in 2009. Does he feel he has been stereotyped? “To a degree… you wanna make your way in the industry, so you kind of get what you’re given at first. I know I can definitely tick the cockney geezer box… but now I’ve just hit 40, I’m really passionate about trying to play outside the box even more.” He gets annoyed when people say “you just play the spiv”. “You think, hold on a minute, I don’t think you’ve done your homework,” he says. “It does anger you, because I’ve fought tooth and nail to not go down that route.”
Mother’s Day is a case in point. Mays plays Colin Parry, the father of 12-yearold Tim Parry, who was gravely injured in the town-centre blast and died five days later, after his life support machine was switched off. The fact Mays’s son Mylo is the same age as Tim had been made playing the role especially hard. “How on earth would I cope with that if that was my lad?”
Mays was 14 at the time of the bombing and studying at the Italia Conti stage school, in the City of London, “going up and down on the Central Line in my blue uniform. When the Bishopsgate bomb went off [one month after Warrington], I walked up there and saw the utter devastation,” he remembers.
He grew up in Buckhurst Hill. His father is an electrician; his mother was a cashier at Midland Bank before “she jacked that in and worked for Dad”. He’s the third of four brothers and the only one to go into acting.
“My older brother’s a cricket groundsman, my other brother’s a salesman, and my younger brother’s a trader in the City.” Does he still think of himself as working class? “Yes, I think I do,” he says.
“My roots are firmly in Essex,” he notes, “there’s not many people from the industry coming to my wedding.” We meet on the day before he gets married to Louise Burton. They’ve been together for 14 years, and have two children – Mylo and five-year-old Dixie. Mays is still fretting about his speech, “everything was fine and then I’ve got to the end bit, where I’m gonna talk about Lou and it’s, like, how do you put it all into words?”
Not the marrying types, he says: “It was never really on the cards, but a big factor was that Lou lost both her parents in the space of two years. Her dad died suddenly and then her mum got cancer, so it was a double blow, and I thought now would be the perfect time, just to give her that sense of grounding, which she’d suddenly lost.”
He says there’s a good chance he’ll bust out his Michael Jackson moves at the reception. Seeing the singer in concert aged 12 set him on a course from a sports-mad kid towards an acting career. The Italia Conti school was a leap into the unknown, though. He’d done two years at a normal comprehensive, then suddenly found himself studying tap, ballet and singing.
Winning a place at Rada was even more intimidating. “I felt completely out of my depth,” he says. “I clammed up, because there were all these people that had been to university, who could talk till the cows come home about the philosophy of acting.” It was only after the first couple of terms he realised that some “weren’t as good as I thought they were, so I gradually gained confidence”.
After graduation, he didn’t get a job for six months, until he was offered the part of Kat Slater’s boyfriend in Eastenders. Then he got a bit part in the blockbuster Pearl Harbor. “I went from Albert Square to Badminton House, with all these vintage Hurricanes and Spitfires. It was literally [director] Michael Bay on the end of a crane shouting through a megaphone. It was insane. I couldn’t believe how big Ben Affleck’s trailer was. It was like a spaceship – I remember thinking, I’d live in that.”
Within a year, Mays had worked at the Royal Court, and appeared in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing. They were huge influences. “You hear horror stories where actors rehearse with Mike Leigh and they don’t end up in the film. But I was dogged. I thought, I’m going to give him everything, and I ended up having a great storyline.”
He has worked ever since. No one who saw his 12-minute interrogation scene in the third series of Line of Duty, where he played rogue firearms officer Danny Waldron, would doubt his talent. Shooting it was so draining that he and the cast “went out and got completely p----- afterwards”.
Fellow actor Eddie Marsan tweeted at the time: “How many Baftas would this kid have if he came from Eaton [sic] rather than Essex?” Is there a class pay gap to match the gender pay gap, I wonder? “God, I don’t know how much those guys are getting paid. I dread to think,” he says, “but all of those actors are friends of mine and their talent speaks for itself. I don’t want to get on the posh-bashing front because that’s not my style at all.
“It’s the people high up in these offices, or it’s the producers and the writers, that’s where the genuine working-class voices have to come through, because that will then give a platform for working-class actors to show what talent they really have. I think there’s an imbalance on that front. Where is that next generation of film-makers to make films about people from poorer backgrounds?”
Mother’s Day is on Monday Sept 3 at 9pm on BBC Two
‘Genuine working-class voices have to come through to give a platform for working-class actors’