'She's nauuughty!' Micheal Ward grins knowingly and leans back into his seat. He’s talking about Olivia Colman, his co-star in the Oscar-tipped Empire of Light. In the film, they play workers at a Brighton cinema who form an unlikely relationship. While promoting it, Colman and Ward appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden, where she shared a story about a costume malfunction that led to her ‘pissing all down the back of my skirt’. ‘Please tell me that wasn’t when...’ Ward responded. ‘That was when I straddled you,’ she quipped. ‘She has such a playful sense of humour,’ Ward says now. ‘She really is naughty.’
Ward was drawn to the film for several reasons. Of course, there was the opportunity to star in a Sam Mendes-directed blockbuster opposite Colman– but he had other motives, too. ‘You very rarely get to see someone who is Black represented in a way that just exudes love,’ he says. Stephen, played by Ward, is the victim of repeated racist abuse in the film, set in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Colman’s character Hilary suffers from complicated mental health issues. They are gulfs apart in age, race and lived experience, but their shifting relationship proves beautiful and trans-formative for both parties. Ward is captivating: funny and deeply empathetic, while also conveying the trauma of being a young Black man in Thatcherite Britain with painstaking vulnerability.
Having made a name for himself(and won an EE Rising Star Bafta Award) in Netflix’s Drake-backed Top Boy, his first lead film role was in Blue Story in 2019. Both centre around violent London gangs, and while they humanise their characters and expose the systemic issues that force young men into criminal underworlds, ‘It’s important for my fans to know that you don’t have to be some-one that does those things,’ he says.
Now 25, Ward grew up in Hackney with his mum and three sisters (his father died in a car crash when he was two), before moving to Romford. He developed a taste for acting at school after realising academic subjects weren’t for him. ‘I can’t learn by sitting down! I liked PE and I liked drama. I didn’t enjoy anything else so I went for it,’ he says. ‘There was nobody around me who wanted to be an actor. When I went to [Epping Forest] College to study performing arts, I was the only Black guy on my course. I’d be learning ballet and my friends would watch through the window, laughing.’
Ward recalls being 15 and telling two friends he wanted to perform. One of them promised to be the first member of Ward’s fan club when he made it big. ‘He kind of saw this light in me. And because he saw it, I started to believe in it. I remember that conversation so vividly.’ After college, he landed an agent and started getting parts in music videos. He had loved the original 2011 series of Top Boy so much that, when he heard rumours it was being rebooted by Netflix, he DM’d its lead Ashley Walters on Instagram to beg for a role. As it turned out, Walters never saw the message, but Ward managed to get an audition for a small part. The casting director was so impressed he was invited back to audition as Jamie, one of the show’s leading characters.
It marked the start of a meteoric rise.In 2020, Ward caught the attention of Steve McQueen, who cast the actor in his BBC series Small Axe. Set between 1969 and 1982, the cinematic anthology brought the experiences of London’s West Indian community to the screen. Ward played the lead in Lover’s Rock, a love story that unfolds over the course of one evening, widely considered the standout episode of the series. ‘We had so much fun on set, and that was trans-lated into the final thing. I’d wanted to do a “pain story” but I realised I was apart of something that was so beautiful.’
The experience taught him a lot. ‘I used to go for every part I came across for a young Black guy. Now I get to be strategic about the stories I get to tell: I’m excited to see what that future holds.'
From a young age, Anya Chalotra realised that performing was a way that she could ‘change the moods of my family members’. Like any kid who stumbles on a foolproof way to influence their parents, she kept doing it, attending Guildhall School of Music and Drama school when she was 19. As a British-Indian youth, Bollywood influenced her, too: ‘I watched a lot of it growing up. I think that was a way for my dad to show me his culture.’
After graduating, she picked up parts in TV shows The ABC Murders and Wanderlust, but when she landed a lead-ing role in the Netflix show The Witcher, she felt radically underprepared. ‘She was someone that was outside of myself that I initially couldn’t reach,’ says Chalotra of her character, Yennefer.
It’s a big, gruelling part: a struggling young woman with a curved spine and facial paralysis, who discovers she has magic powers. Not only does Yennefer hold the show, she faces a huge physical transformation.
‘Three weeks in, I called my mentor [actor Niamh Cusack] and said, “I can’t do this, can you help me?” I’m dyslexic and I found working with cameras difficult. I was so used to being free from that on stage.’ Cusack advised Chalotra to ‘forget about everything and play the moment’ and something shifted. ‘I learned to trust my instincts,’ she says. The Witcher became an instant hit. Watched by 76 million households, it was at the time Netflix’s most-viewed first season of television. Now, with two seasons under her belt, Chalotra is revelling in her newfound confidence.
‘I learned to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. Acting changed the way I saw myself.’
After making waves in theatre with turns in Timon of Athens and Tamburlaine with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and last year playing Desdemona in the National Theatre’s Othello, 29-year-old Rosy McEwen landed her first lead role in Blue Jean – the story of a closeted PE teacher navigating queer life in 1980s Britain (out in cinemas on February 10).
So poignant was the performance that she beat Bill Nighy, Cosmo Jarvis and Sally Hawkins to win Best Lead Performance at the BIFAs last year. ‘I felt like I’d been thrown into cold water!’ she says. ‘I was so surprised – I’m so new here.’
She may be a breakout star, but McEwEn’s portrayal of a woman desperately trying to hide her sexuality is powerful and heartbreaking. ‘We want to see someone who’s human,’ she says,‘and the thing about Jean is that she’s an antihero, but she’s an antihero because she’s been forced to be that way because of the society she’s living in.’
Director Georgia Oakley collaborated with several women who lived under theConservative government’s punitive Section-28 laws. ‘There’s something about telling a real story that resonated with me in a way that I didn’t expect,’says McEwen. ‘That’s how you really get inside people’s psyche and really change things.’
Jonah Hauer-King's big break came in the form of a school play about acrooked detective, written by his friend, which they took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. ‘I loved it,’ he reminisces.‘Initially, it was less about the acting and more about being part of something. Everyday you’re flyering, you’re promoting; you become really bonded to people through theatre and creativity.’ One night, an agent happened to be watching. She met Hauer-King afterwards and signed him on the spot.
It’s a fitting fairy tale for a man who would go on to take a handful of film and TV roles before landing the big one: a role in the live-action remake of beloved Disney classic, The Little Mermaid, out this spring. In one of the year’s most highly anticipated releases, Hauer- King plays Prince Eric to Halle Bailey’s Ariel. ‘I really look up to her,’ he says of his co-star and close friend. ‘Neither of us have done anything like it before. She came from a bit more of a music back-ground. I came from acting, but neither of us have done anything on this scale.’
‘Jane Birkin, Nineties French "It" girls, circus performers and men in show business...’ 18-year-old actor Dafne Keen isn’t reeling off a list of dream roles, but the figures who influence the way she gets dressed. ‘I have a very personal style,’ she explains. ‘I thrift a lot. I buy second-hand pieces and fix them up so they fit me better.’
Costume is a gateway into character for the British-Spanish actor, who has been performing since her first role in the BBC series The Refugees when she was nine. Her big break came in Logan, where she played the adopted daughter of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
With Hollywood conquered, this year Keen enters the Star Wars universe with The Acolyte TV series, premiering this summer. Starring alongside Amandla Stenberg (‘She was so welcoming’) and Jodie Turner-Smith, she’s tight-lipped about the plot, but promises ‘it will really make people think’.
It’s not the first time she’s taken on a franchise with a cult following. In 2019, she began a three-season run as Lyra Belacqua in the much-anticipated BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. She was nominated for a Welsh Bafta for her performance, in which she starred alongside Ruth Wilson and James McAvoy. ‘I learned so much,’ she says of the pair. ‘They’re both extremely talented, but always try new things on set – that’s so refreshing.’
‘It was like a half day at school – you know, the days where you’re allowed to come in wearing your own clothes, and it’s nice outside and you get an ice-cream.’ Daryl McCormack, 30, is describing the fun of working with Emma Thompson for his starring role in last year’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the film that scored him a coveted EERising Star nomination at the Baftas. In it, he plays a young male sex worker who is booked by Thompson’s Nancy, a middle-aged widow who has never had an orgasm. The result is an honest, at times heartbreaking journey of intimacy and sexual awakening.
McCormack was born in Tipperary, Ireland, to an Irish mother; his African-American father is from Baltimore. Having mostly grown up as the only male in a household with his moth-er, grandma and sister, McCormack took on the role of entertainer from a young age. ‘That was my first stage in a way,’ he says. ‘Performing has always been the backbone of who I am.’
He studied drama in Dublin before moving to Hackney, east London, in 2017. Starting out in the West End, he began to pick up small screen roles before being cast as violent gangster Isaiah Jesus in Peaky Blinders. With a rare combination of striking talent, sensitivity, charisma– and grown-up boy-band good looks –McCormack’s profile has been steadily rising ever since. But the last year has been a standout one for the actor.
His ascent is set to continue. This year, he will play a young author in The Tutor, alongside Richard E Grant, and front The Woman in the Wall with Ruth Wilson. Then there are the whispers that McCormack will be the next Bond... Although his most treasured takeaway from his career so far remains his friendship with Thompson (‘She’s an amazing friend, but also like a guardian or something’), the Bafta nod is the icing on the cake. Previous winners have seen their careers explode post-awards. McCormack is still in disbelief. ‘I don’t really know how to take it in,’ he says. ‘I moved to London five years ago from Ireland and started waiting tables. To be nominated feels like a crazy moment.’
Filmed live on stage, 'Othello' will be available to watch in UK and Irish cinemas via National Theatre Live from February 23 and worldwide from April 27. For more details, visit ntlive.com. You can vote for Daryl McCormack at the BAFTA's EERising Star here.
