‘I’m not really a freedom fighter’: actor David Jonsson on Tinseltown and making it on home turf
The trip David Jonsson took to Los Angeles last month was his first to Tinseltown. And though it was only fleeting, the British actor was busy. “It was a lot,” Jonsson says with a broad smile at a London restaurant a few days after returning. “Everyone was plying me with presents: there were sports tickets, gift baskets, drinks, dinners.” A sheepish giggle. “It was all quite unexpected, to say the least.”
Except, of course, it was perfectly predictable. Jonsson had arrived in LA fresh from the Sundance Film Festival, where Rye Lane, a new Disney romcom in which he stars, was one of the festival’s big successes. He’d already garnered attention with a chunky role in two seasons of HBO’s Industry. (There is a third season to come.) In LA, he was hot property.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t fun,” he wants to be clear, “a nice experience. But honestly? There’s something about LA that didn’t sit right.” In meeting after meeting, Jonsson struggled to be excited by the glitz, and he remained unimpressed by the brightly lit career paths various agents pitched. You’d think a young actor breaking through would revel in all of this recognition. But for all the flattery and fine-dining, Jonsson couldn’t wait to get back to London. “It wasn’t my cup of tea at all,” he says. Far more enticing is the prospect of playing parts in UK productions – he has a deep desire to make it on home turf. “Maybe I’m too young to be 100% confident,” says the 28-year-old, “but I can see what’s possible here now that hasn’t always been.”
It’s no secret that for too long many Black British actors have felt heading stateside was their only option to land a wide variety of roles. “It shouldn’t be about exclusivity,” he says, “here or there. But in the past it has had to be. You had to go over there to make it work. And they were right, of course. Black actors couldn’t do it here. But my generation stands on the shoulders of giants. People have spoken up. Strived. Forced a space here wide open to make sure that, just maybe, I won’t need to leave to make it. That I can find that fulfilment at home.”
Early signs certainly suggest he’s making tracks. In Industry, Jonsson plays Gus, an “incredibly entitled, bornto-rule” Old Etonian, gay, Oxford grad fighting for a permanent job at a fictional London investment bank, having landed himself a place on a competitive graduate scheme. It makes for anxietyinducing viewing: sex, drugs, treachery, tragedy. Rye Laneis set a few miles down the road, in Peckham, but in story and style it’s worlds apart. We first meet Dom – Rye Lane’s leading man – blubbering over his ex-girlfriend in an art gallery loo. “Being able to go from Gus straight into playing a guy from Peckham who likes football, who cares about his girlfriend but gets it wrong… Someone vulnerable? It’s so far from Industry, which is what I was desperate to do.” Soon, he’ll play Chris Eubank in a silver screen biopic. “Again, hardly your archetypal British black man, is he? Eubank is his own lane. I want to keep changing it up.”
Young Black men, Jonsson believes, are often presented on screen as having a singular experience in Britain. “I’m very much an optimist,” Jonsson says, “but straight up we’re only really seen one way in the media. That we have an armour on us. Chin up, shoulders back, be strong. Our white counterparts have all these different presentations: from Harry Styles to Tom Hardy. But we don’t really have so many variations. Yes, the world does that to us. But the culture we create collectively can also perpetuate it.”
He goes on: “The last thing I’m trying to do is disparage or diminish what we do so well.” He is referring to powerful, purposeful, hard-hitting Black British dramas, “stories written from a point of truth, which are important and need telling. But they’re often the only ones that we watch, engage and associate with. I really believe there’s space for other stories to be told here, stories already being lived out, but left unseen.” Stories like his own. Jonsson says all this with a smile – he is charmingly self-effacing. But there’s no doubting his determination to achieve professionally something also profoundly personal.
raised in Newham, the youngest of four siblings. His dad worked as an IT engineer at Heathrow. His mum was a Metropolitan police officer in Islington. “I actually grew up in Custom House,” he clarifies, “right in the Docklands. Back then it was really underdeveloped. We were out on the fringes.” It was both inner-city and detached from the rest of the capital. Home was full of music, art and culture. “I loved poetry,” he says, “we had James Baldwin, John Keats, Langston Hughes and Shakespeare. On Saturdays, Dad and I would wake up early and go to one of the cinemas in Leicester Square, just the two of us. We’d watch a movie, then get a KFC.” He’s beaming. “Man, they were the best.”
But despite being a quiet, artsy kid, by 14 Jonsson found himself in trouble. Fights were breaking out at school. Too often, Jonsson was central to the scraps. “Now,” Jonsson says, “a decade later, I can see I was just going through my feelings. But I didn’t know how to deal with them, so I just started fighting, and got expelled.” He was sent to a local Pupil Referral Unit, where he would spend at least a month before potentially returning to mainstream education. “Being there shook me up,” he says. “At first it felt pretty small. You have to remember, at this point in time, a lot of my mates were in actual trouble, not schoolboy stuff: stabbings, gangs, real crime. Unplanned pregnancies. But being there, it dawned on me how serious this might be. It was a real wake-up call.”
Mum, meanwhile, was diplomatic. “We have this narrative in this country about Black parents,” he suggests, “that they’re strict and unbending. That’s not my parents at all. When all that kicked off, she asked what I wanted to do. From nowhere, really, I said acting. Until then I was the kid at school who would laugh at the drama lot. I was too shy and self-conscious. But there was something in language and performance that spoke to me. Her response was just get on with it. Don’t talk about it, do it.”
Hoping for a fresh start, Jonsson found a new school where he allowed himself a reinvention. “I left my old school mates behind, and some of my attitudes, too,” he says. “Inadvertently, I’d been holding back to fit in. To impress this girl; playing to the boys. Upholding expectations.” In Hammersmith, on the other side of the city, Jonsson had space to try something new. His acting chops were immediately apparent. After turns in school productions of Richard II and Cabaret, he found the work of British playwright Sarah Kane. “We did a lot of her shows at school for some reason,” he recalls, “which is quite intense, with her constant barrages of wrist-cutting.” Still, a teenage Jonsson was hooked on her confrontational explorations of desire, death and pain. That Christmas, his parents got him Kane’s full back catalogue. “I was like ‘yes’,” he says, still squealing in excitement. “I went through everything. Blasted, Cleansed. Skin. Drama could be real. Be felt. I fell in love with it all.”
By 15, Jonsson had almost lived two adolescences. “It’s why I’m so keen now, I think, on doing different things in my work. In showing alternative characters; a variety of young black British experiences. Because I needed to know there were these different options early on, but they were nowhere to be seen.” The following year, Jonsson was offered a full scholarship to study art and drama at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It marked the start of a third teenage chapter. He’d never been to the United States before, let alone on a solo trip. “It was crazy,” he says of the time, “I felt a real responsibility to make the most of it given my parents let me go. I saw so much cinema, so much theatre. But it was fucking New York, man. Most of my friends were older, so I was snuck into bars and clubs…” He checks himself, aware Mum and Dad might be reading. “When I came back I was totally focused. Let’s just say I got a lot out of my system in that time.”
Returning to England at 18, he worked in retail and joined the National Youth Theatre, where he was cast in an adaptation of Stephen Kelman’s Booker-prize-winning novel Pigeon English. “I played the lead,” he says. “Harrison Opoku – an 11-year-old Ghanaian boy living on a rough estate in London.” Based loosely on the killing of Damilola Taylor, it was a heartbreaking part to play. “He was this bright-eyed boy; everything was amazing to him,” says Jonsson, “then he came to Peckham, where everyone was cynical by 12. He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. He was a totally different kind of young Black man to those we so often see depicted.” It was devastating, but Jonsson embraced the opportunity to tell this complex story on stage.
He was accepted at Rada on his first attempt, securing another scholarship. He left the course a little early when he bagged a part in Mary Stewart, directed by Robert Ike at the Almeida. “I was sharing a stage with Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson,” he says, still not quite believing it. “These fucking powerhouses who taught me so much.” There was a coin toss every night to see who would play the lead. “There were two totally different shows: I snogged Lia Williams if she was queen; if it was Juliet Stevenson, she’d beat the shit out of me. Either way I was thrilled.” Soon he was in the West End, opposite David Tennant in Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho. Then came his first TV role, in a Fox espionage thriller series, Deep State. “We were shooting guns in the desert and driving Defenders,” Jonsson says, “it was wicked. And then Industry came through shortly after.” Since then, the work has come thick and fast.
Still, Jonsson is trying to be selective. “I don’t think I’m a regular actor,” he says, “nine out of 10 scripts that I look at I say I’m wrong for; count myself out.” His agent hasn’t always appreciated this approach. “But it’s important to me to focus on finding ways to show parts of our culture that aren’t really spoken about. People who aren’t the mainstream. Right now, all I have is the power to say yes or no.” It’s time for his photoshoot round the corner. “Anyway,” he adds, all smiles again, “I’m really not a freedom fighter. I’m just an actor. I’m still getting used to all this, to be honest. And what do I know?” It’s the only thing he says all afternoon that leaves me entirely unconvinced.
others helped persuade Nasa planners to keep extending the mission. Eventually, after 12 close flybys, there was enough data for her team to present an answer. The signals suggested the presence of salty water beneath Europa’s icy surface. The currents in this water were generating their own small magnetic fields that were then interfering with Jupiter’s, producing the unexpected readings.
Additionally, images from those close flybys showed ice floes on Europa’s surface. One region in particular, called the Conamara Chaos, in honour of a rugged coastline in Ireland, became the poster child portrait of the moon. But the biggest surprise was the amount of water that the theoreticians needed to account for the signals: more than twice the amount of water found in all of Earth’s oceans. Because Europa is only a quarter of Earth’s diameter, the water must be spread around the moon in a global ocean, 25 to 95 miles deep, beneath a 10- to 15-mile-thick ice crust.
“On Earth, the ocean looks very substantial. Its deepest part is 11km [seven miles]. But compared with Europa, it’s actually a thin veneer,” says Cockell.
And it is not just Europa. Jupiter possesses three other large moons: Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Galileo data also showed that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede and maybe even Callisto have interior oceans. At Saturn, the Esa/ Nasa Cassini-Huygens mission revealed something similar for the moons Enceladus and Titan.
Meanwhile, at Mars, the search for water was going in the opposite direction. Esa’s Mars Express mission was using a radar to probe for large bodies of subsurface water but was coming up empty.
“We looked but we didn’t find anything,” says Esa’s Olivier Witasse, who was project scientist of Mars Express at the time. Now, he has shepherded Juice through the construction phase, a process that began in 2015, to its imminent launch.
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Scheduled for launch on 13 April, Juice will carry the most sophisticated set of scientific instruments yet into the outer solar system. Witasse’s excitement at the prospect is palpable. “In terms of science, this mission is just incredible,” he says.
Although Juice will visit Europa and Callisto, its main target is Ganymede. The largest moon of the solar system, if Ganymede were in orbit around the sun it would be classed as a planet because it is larger in diameter than the inner planet Mercury. Yet because Europa became such a strong focus for the Galileo probe, Ganymede remains tantalisingly mysterious – and potentially even more fascinating than Europa.
“There may be six to eight times more water on Ganymede than on Earth but we don’t know any details,” says Witasse.
It’s possible that Ganymede’s putative ocean is much deeper beneath the surface. Estimates suggest that the ocean begins 60-90 miles below the surface.
As with the study of Europa, the main investigation will be undertaken using the magnetometer instrument. The principal investigator is Michele Dougherty from Imperial College London, who was also in charge of the magnetometer on the Cassini mission that discovered the global ocean at Enceladus.
“Our readings come from the interiors of these worlds. It’s almost like being able to see inside them. So, I’m only a quarter joking when I say magnetometers are the most important instruments in the world,” says Dougherty with a cheeky smile.
Beyond Ganymede, Juice will investigate Jupiter itself. The largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter is a whopping 11 times larger than Earth at its equator, and more than five times further from the sun. Although Jupiter takes 12 years to complete an orbit, its day flies by in just under 10 hours. Known as a gas giant planet, Jupiter has no solid surface; the extensive atmosphere of hydrogen and helium simply gets denser the further down you go until it behaves more like the liquid metal mercury than rock. From this churning interior comes the strong magnetic field that revealed its moons’ oceans.
Ganymede is the only moon in the solar system that generates its own magnetic field. This makes it fascinating in its own right but severely complicates the task of disentangling the magnetic interference that will provide data on the ocean’s characteristics, such as depth, extent and even salinity.
“It is terrifying what we are trying to do,” says Dougherty. “Detecting those tiny signals is what keeps me awake at 2am. It’s like finding needles in a haystack.”
The closer the spacecraft can get to Ganymede, the stronger those elusive signals will become, and so the easier the job will be. That is why there is a plan for Juice to enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034. This will be the first time a spacecraft has ever held an orbit around a moon other than our own.
If all goes to plan it will orbit at an altitude of 310 miles for at least a year, with a further plan to extend the mission and take the spacecraft into a 125mile orbit. This would certainly help when interpreting the data but requires there to be spare fuel left on the spacecraft.
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The spacecraft’s main power source comes from its solar panels. The array of panels is the largest ever used on an interplanetary mission, which is necessary since the sunlight that reaches Jupiter is just 4% of that found at Earth. While sufficient for running the instruments and communicating with Earth, it cannot generate enough power to move the spacecraft. For that, Juice relies on engines and thrusters that require fuel. Once this fuel is exhausted, the mission is effectively over – and how much fuel the spacecraft will have to spare depends on when they launch in April.
Launch delays because of lastminute technical issues are frequent. In the case of Juice, the timing is critical because Jupiter is a moving target. Each day of delay after the launch window opens means that more fuel will have to be expended to reach the target. The more fuel it takes to get to Jupiter, the less likely they are to get really close to Ganymede.
The difficulty means that no one should expect quick results. “We’re not going to solve this on our first flyby of Ganymede,” says Dougherty. “Only at the end of the mission will we have enough data to separate everything out.” She also stresses that it will be a combination of magnetic and other data from the spacecraft that will inform the interpretation of the results.
But the mission is worthwhile because the challenge of understanding Jupiter and its icy moons goes beyond the understanding of our own solar system. It will also help us to assess the habitability of the wider galaxy.
Around the same time that Nasa’s Galileo was painstakingly collecting its data about Europa, astronomers around the world were discovering the first planets around other stars. What started as a trickle of discoveries has turned into a flood. Now, more than 5,300 exoplanets are known to exist around other stars. Of these, around 1,600 belong to a new class of planet that is entirely absent from our own solar system.
Called super-earths, they have between two and 15 times the mass of the Earth.
“We think that some of these super-earths might have interiors that are similar to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn,” says Giovanna Tinetti of University College London.
This is because in some cases astronomers, when measuring the bulk density of these large planets, have discovered intermediate densities, meaning they can’t be solid rock or completely gaseous. Instead they have densities that suggest a large quantity of ice – or water – in their interiors.
“We speculate that some of these super-earths might have an interior composition more similar to the moons of the giant planets. So basically, layers of ices, rocky material and also maybe oceans, both at the surface or in their interiors,” says Tinetti.
She is currently overseeing the construction of the Ariel (Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey) mission for Esa. This space telescope will target superearths for more detailed study upon its launch in 2029. So, the more information that Juice can return about the interiors of Jupiter’s icy moons, the more clues we may have to the interiors of these distant worlds, and whether or not they may be capable of supporting life.
“It is important that with the objects we can reach, we go there and study them,” says Tinetti. “Because we can then use that information to connect to other worlds that we cannot visit anytime soon.”
Nasa’s sister mission
Juice was originally envisioned as a joint mission with Nasa. Soon after the Galileo mission ended in 2003, scientists in the US and Europe began working on a follow-up mission to further explore Jupiter’s remarkable icy moons. Named Laplace, the mission was worked on for several years before political breakdown forced the teams to go their separate ways.
Nasa claimed Europa as the main focus for its mission, leaving the other icy moons for Esa to investigate. Juice is the first to make it to the launch pad but Nasa is not far behind.
Nasa’s Europa Clipper is scheduled for launch late next year, yet it will arrive at Jupiter in 2030, one year before Juice. Because Europa is deeper in Jupiter’s magnetic field than Ganymede, the radiation environment is much more dangerous to spacecraft electronics. So instead of orbiting Europa, Clipper will dart in and out, making 44 close flybys during a three-and-a-halfyear mission. Some of the flybys will be as low as 15 miles above Europa’s surface.
Together Juice and Clipper will explore the icy moons. While they are technically separate missions, the collegiate spirit that blossomed between the scientists in the early days continues today.
“We have a very good relationship with our colleagues at Nasa,” says Olivier Witasse, Esa’s project scientist for the Juice mission.
A joint steering committee for the two missions has already highlighted many opportunities for the two spacecraft to work together once they are both in orbit. For example, one of Juice’s flybys of Europa will be followed a few hours later by a similar manoeuvre by Clipper. This will allow the teams to compare their data and calibrate their instruments, bringing their overall datasets more in line with each other.
“We have already a great collaboration, and a lot of opportunities to do science together,” says Witasse.
• This article was amended on 5 March 2023. The photograph of Juice in Toulouse, France, is at an ESA facility, not its headquarters as an earlier version said.
There may be six to eight times more water on Ganymede than on Earth
Olivier Witasse