CANNES DISPATCH
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER
‘It’s a bit of heaven here,’ says Anthony Boyle as looks around the craggy coastline of the Cap Antibes, at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, a few miles away from Cannes. The Belfast actor is in town for his first Cannes Film Festival with Clio Barnard’s latest, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Based on the book by Keiran Goddard, the film traces the fortunes of a group of five working-class Birmingham friends as they try to gain a foothold on adulthood as they turn 30. Like the social housing constantly being razed around them, late-stage capitalism has brought their individual dreams crashing down. Anthony plays Patrick, a father and food delivery driver whose marriage to Shiv is tested, his Socialism ideals seemingly a pipe dream in a financially polarised world where opportunity doesn’t knock. ‘It’s about austerity. It’s a bit like a Ken Loach or a Mike Leigh film. Clio directs in this way where she looks at the working class in England, and gives a voice to the voiceless. It’s the kind of film that I would have watched on Film 4 late at night, like a Quadrophenia or This Is England, when I was a kid going, ‘I want to be in that. That looks like a world that I recognise.’ I never wanted to be a movie star or in one of these big Marvel films. It was this kind of social realism that I always looked at, and thought, ‘God, I’d love to be a part of those films’. I’m just so buzzed to be in it.’
To achieve the Brummie accent, Anthony embedded in the Midlands before shooting started and can still swap his Irish lilt when I ask him. ‘I was working with a dialect coach, and I couldn’t really get it down. I Googled the place in Birmingham where it was from, and I found a video of this guy going, ‘I’m Fucking Ginge from Brum.’ And I was like, ‘I need to find this guy.’ So I get him on Instagram, and I message him; ‘Lad, I’m an actor. I’m trying to get your accent. If I fly to Birmingham, can we go for a pint?’.’ Ginge agreed and Boyle went for a ‘wee pint’ at the local boozer, got drunk and ended up hanging out with him for a couple of days. ‘He gets his mates down – graffiti artists, bareknuckle boxers – and I get embedded into the community. That’s how I got the accent. I just stayed in that community. And that bar, The Crown, we ended up using that as our production office. We based our whole film out of that bar. And we get the people in the bar in the film.’
As someone who’s nailed accents for Masters of the Air, Manhunt and The House of Guinness, Anthony finds the process of living the role before he films helpful. ‘I go to wherever we’re filming, and I try to get there a couple of weeks early and just find people. People on the street. Bars are good. Football matches. Wherever you go, just strike up a conversation. It’s funny, when you go into places, people are really open and willing to talk if you show an interest in their story. If I come in there with care, and I usually do have a lot of care, and I show the people off in a good light – they’re usually really open.’
The irony is not lost on him that he’s talking about social realism while looking out at a bay filled with super-yachts. He laughs. ‘There is a beautiful thing about premiering this movie in Cannes to this audience in this bourgeois and moneyed place. People are going to see it. We’ve already had people from France and Italy say, ‘Oh, this area of Birmingham feels like a place in Greece. It feels like a place in France. It can be somewhere in America.’ So I’m really happy to be premiering it here.’
He has his eye on the water and decides to go for a swim. But in the suit he’s wearing. He clambers up to the diving platform jutting out of the cliff and removes his jacket and shoes, sits on the edge looking down. ‘We’ll get naked afterwards, Greg!’ he jokes, before standing and jumping into the sea. He returns to the surface, gasping. As he treads water I ask about his producing career and what he’s currently producing. ‘I’m producing hypothermia right now,’ he laughs. ‘I produced a TV show called Close to Home, written by Michael Magee, a lad that used to sit beside my brother at school. It’s about Belfast, and this young guy who goes off to Liverpool uni. He comes back to Belfast. He was promised that something would be different for him, and it’s not. It’s all the same old shit. It’s my favourite novel. I’m so buzzing that we got to make it. I called the writer, and was like, ‘Lad, I’ll give you £50 if you let me play you in your movie’. He said, ‘We’ve got a picture of you up on the wall. We want it to be you’. It’s just one of those serendipity fate moments, you know?’
He’s just finished shooting The Altruists with Julie Garner, an eight-part drama for Netflix about real-like Crypto dealers Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, who were accused of stealing $8 billion. Anthony plays Bankman-Fried and found common ground as both of them are dyslexic. As usual, Anthony approached the role by spending time marinating in the world he’d be playing in. ‘He was doing something really interesting. He was transferring funds on his PlayStation while also playing World of Warcraft. So he would be more upset at his XP points dropping in his game than he was losing $500 million. We were emailing each other while he was in jail. He was in the same cell block as P Diddy. What I thought was really interesting is, like, even through the emails, I felt just how intelligent he was. I felt like he was almost profiling me. The things that he was giving me, the examples he was giving me, were so intelligent and so clever. I was really taken by him.’
He clambers out of the sea, his suit pooling water at his feet and a happy expression on his face. ‘That was heaven,’ he says again as he grabs a towel to dry off. Luckily he has another suit for his premiere…
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival
The Altruists will be on Netflix tba
