Arsher Ali

March 2015

THE mystery surrounding Doctor Who is legendary. Cast and crew are sworn to secrecy in order to ensure storylines for future series are never leaked.
“It’s the first thing you sign; even before you sign your contract,” says Arsher Ali, of the confidentiality agreement with the makers of Britain’s long-running sci-fi series.
The Nottingham-born actor has already filmed his two episodes for the next series which is likely to hit the small screen in late summer.
“I can say it’s a two-parter and my general view of Doctor Who but no more than that,” says the 30-year-old, whose acting breakthrough came five years ago in the comedy film Four Lions.
He has since appeared in Silent Witness, Beaver Falls, The Guilty, Complicit, The Missing and, most recently, Arthur & George opposite Martin Clunes.
About Doctor Who, he says: “I am a fan of the show although it was a shame that the first Doctor for me when I was growing up was Sylvester McCoy.
“You could see that the show was dying so I didn’t really appreciate it until they brought it back with Christopher Eccleston,” says Arsher, who lives in the city centre with Emmerdale actress Roxy Shahidi. “He is up there on my favourite actors’ list so I started watching it again.
“I don’t like the sillier elements of Doctor Who; when it’s really camp and everyone is running around. That’s why I like Peter Capaldi,” he says of the current Doctor.
“The show should be dark and mysterious, and shouldn’t pull any punches in terms of being scary. When we were kids it’s what we all wanted.”
He adds: “Peter Davison was an underrated Doctor; he had a kind of vulnerability. And Tom Baker was silly but he could be serious as well. He was just mad, like The Joker.”
Doctor Who is just the latest in a string of TV series and films that Arsher has been busy filming over recent months.

At the end of last year he was in hit BBC drama The Missing opposite James Nesbitt, then in March in Arthur & George, a three-part ITV drama adapted from Julian Barnes’ acclaimed novel about the true story of The Great Wyrley Outrages.
In 1906, George Edalji, a young Anglo-Indian solicitor, was imprisoned for mutilating animals and writing obscene letters. He served three years before being released, after which he set out to clear his name in order for him to return to practising law.
Helping him in his quest was Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
“I can’t believe it’s real; it’s like someone getting done for terror charges and Russell Brand leaping to their defence,” says Arsher, who played Edalji opposite Clunes as Conan Doyle.
“You think you know him from Men Behaving Badly, that he’s a kind of oafish, comical guy but he’s not at all,” he says of his co-star.
“He’s super smart, super sophisticated, very witty and super posh. And he was so good in it.”
The three-parter pulled in up to six million viewers.
“The actual case, and the achieving of the pardon was quite an historic event. A lot of laws and regulations were changed from that first case. So it is an important landmark case in terms of law now.
“I’d read the book when I left drama school. Then the Nottingham Playhouse did a co-production of it and that landed at my door. But I thought ‘no’ because they don’t do catering,” he jokes.
The theatre’s artistic director, Giles Croft, is a neighbour and has often asked Arsher to appear in various productions there but he’s always been too busy.
“I’d love to work at the Playhouse; it’s where I saw my first theatre really.”
That was when he was at Bilborough College.
“It would be great to work with Giles. My missus has. She did The Importance of Being Earnest with Anjli Mohindra,” he adds, of the Nottingham actress who played his wife in The Missing.
After Bilborough College, Arsher went to East 15 Acting School at the University of Essex, then graduated to roles with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
There will be two more films featuring Arsher out this year; one with This Is England actor Stephen Graham with the working title A Patch of Fog.

“It’s about stalkers and Stephen’s really good in it; very creepy. And he has a menacing persona which he plays on, just for a laugh. Some of the cast members who’d not met him before didn’t know how to take him.
“It was fun. I don’t do a lot of film because I get offered a lot of good TV stuff.”
He had complained that due to his looks, he’d been repeatedly offered roles as a terrorist.
“If you see anything that has a kind of terrorist plot at its heart, be sure it landed at my door,” he laughs.
“It’s getting better though.”
Arsher, who’ll be in another film due out this year called Remainder, based on the cult novel by Tom McCarthy, is writing a screenplay about heavy metal music in Iraq.
“I’m very excited about that, because it’s mad,” he says.
“It’s from an article I came across and I optioned it. We’re on the third draft of the script now.”
He adds: “I’ve always fancied writing. I read so many scripts, why wait around for that perfect thing to land at your door? Why not do it yourself?”
When he’s not working, Arsher’s free time is dominated by sport. His first choice of career was sports journalism and he’s sort of achieved that with regular columns in the Nottingham Post about his beloved Nottingham Forest.
“I’ll travel everywhere to watch them. And if I can’t make it I’ll ring home and get my mum or my missus to put the phone to the radio so I can listen to the commentary on Radio Nottingham.”
He played football for his school team but was “too lazy” to make a go of it.
Arsher, the son of a Raleigh welder, now retired, is also often to be seen at Trent Bridge during the cricket season.
“You can just walk around there and everyone is so friendly. You can get friendly with the players; they are always more wordly than footballers, so you have a proper conversation with them.”
He adds: “I started a cricket team when I was at Haywood School in Sherwood.

“We only had two other teams to play against and I think we always lost those games.”
He and Shahidi will soon be moving North to be closer to Yorkshire Television, where Emmerdale is filmed.
He says with a grin: “If it was up to me we’d be in West Bridgford, but with the City Ground and Trent Bridge just down the road, she knows I’d never be home.”

Joe Dempsie

March 2015

HAD his family not moved to Nottingham when he was four months old, Joe Dempsie wouldn’t have been an actor.

“There’s no doubt about that,” says the 27-year-old, best known for his roles in teen drama Skins and epic HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones.

He was born in Liverpool but due to his parents’ work, grew up in West Bridgford.

By the age of 13, on his mother’s suggestion, he was a member of The Television Workshop, the Nottingham acting school that has produced numerous stars of TV, film and stage.

Although Dempsie wasn’t harbouring dreams of becoming an actor.

“I went because it was a laugh” he admits, talking to Confetti students as part of their ninth annual Industry Week, a series of events over five days and nights designed to inspire students of film, TV, music and games.

“It wasn’t something I’d considered before joining the Workshop. It wasn’t something I considered the first few years of being a member of the Workshop either.

“I just enjoyed messing around there twice a week. Every now again you’d go for an audition for a part in a TV show or a film but that was just a bonus.

“It was only when I’d been told by the guys who ran the Workshop that it was maybe something I could do, that I started to take it seriously.”

After finishing A-levels at West Bridgford School, where he admits to being “a frustrating student to teach”, Dempsie took a year off to “mull over” the idea of becoming an actor.

“I got a job at Cineworld in the Cornerhouse, thinking I’d be watching loads of films but at the end of a ten-hour shift the last thing you wanted to do was to spend another two hours there.

“By the end of that gap year not a lot was really happening auditions-wise so I applied to do history at university in Birmingham.”

But then he got the part in Skins, the E4 series about partying teenagers in which he played loveable hedonist Chris Miles.

“Skins was nuts,” says Dempsie, who was a regular at Media and Stealth nightclubs as a teenager.

“We shot series one and had no idea what would happen. It was a low-budget show for E4. But then the ad campaign for it started. The trailer seemed to be on every ad break on Channel 4, there were posters on buses, on the Tube... so the build-up for it was huge.

“When people talk about things changing overnight, that’s what happened for us. The night after it was shown, life was different. It was a bit like being in One Direction, I imagine.”

Dempsie, who recalls his first acting role as the ox in a school nativity play (“crouched with a Cornflakes box on my head”), was in the series for two years before being killed off.

“I think the success of it was that out of this motley crew of friends there was one that everyone could identify with.”

As a result of Skins he was being recognised in the street wherever he went.

“Skins started informing some of my career decisions; I didn’t really know if that level of attention was for me.”

He turned down a lot of Skins-style parts offered to him and took on small roles in Doctor Who, Merlin, Shane Meadows’ This Is England ‘86 and The Damned United, before his next major success came along: big budget US fantasy series Game of Thrones.

“I felt like I’d reclaimed my anonymity but then I had to readjust again when Game of Thrones came along,” he says.

“But it doesn’t affect my day to day in the same way that Skins did.”

Since 2011, he’s been playing Gendry in the internationally successful series based on the novels of George R R Martin.

A movie has been rumoured but he doesn’t know if it will happen.

“I think it’s a really good idea but I think the proposal is to do a couple more seasons and then a series of three films, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I hope it does happen, as long as I’m in it,” he laughs.

Other TV hits he’s appeared in include The Fades, Moving On, Accused, Southcliffe, New Worlds and Murder: Joint Enterprise, a one-off drama set in Nottingham that won a BAFTA.

“I don’t get back to Nottingham as much as I’d like,” says Dempsie, who lives in South London.

“My parents are still based here but they’ve been in Surrey for the past five months helping my younger sister, who has cerebral palsy, settle into her new house.

“We’ve got to get a care team in place, which is quite a long process.”

He adds: “When I do get back here it’ll be to see Forest or catch up with friends, although most of them are either engaged or have babies, so no-one wants to go into town anymore.”

Dempsie, who is single, stays in touch with numerous Workshoppers, including Mr Selfridge actress Aisling Loftus and recent BAFTA winner Jack O’Connell, plus Perry Fitzpatrick, his co-star in This Is England 90.

“It’s the most fun I’ve had on a set in a long, long time,” he says of the four-part drama, due to air on Channel 4 in the autumn. “Half the cast I grew up with at the Workshop,” he adds; among them were Vicky McClure, Andrew Shim, Rosamund Hanson, Michael Socha and Chanel Cresswell.

“For everyone it’s a safe environment.”

The BAFTA-winning series recently completed filming in Sheffield, with Nottingham-based director Shane Meadows, who he describes as “the master puppeteer.”

He adds: “We were reminiscing about the Workshop days.

“We’re in the golden age of Workshoppers being professional actors. When I joined it was only Samantha Morton and Chris Gascoyne, who was in Coronation Street, that we looked up to.

“Now we’re everywhere.”

Lauren Carse

January 2015

Major box office hits starring the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Reese Whitherspoon and Ben Affleck are in the running for the National Film Awards 2015... and then there’s Echo, a short film made in Nottingham.

“The director came to the Television Workshop to cast the film and liked the intimacy of the city, so decided to do it here,” says Lauren Carse, who stars as 17-year-old schoolgirl Caroline in the 15 minute film.

The 23-year-old from Wollaton, who has been training at Nottingham’s renowned acting school since she was 11, is seen taking a call on her mobile, becoming distressed at some apparent bad news about her dad being in a motorbike accident.

“It’s based on a true story,” says Lauren.

“The writer James Walker actually saw it happen.”

Echo director Lewis Arnold, who came to the city to cast the film, takes up the story:

“She was so upset by the news suddenly people were drawn to help her, giving her money and getting her en route to the hospital. About a month or so later James saw the same girl doing the exact same call again. It was a scam.”

On casting Lauren he says: “We knew how much the film relied on finding a girl who could naturally deliver the emotional stakes of the piece. Those nerves disappeared as soon as we saw Lauren Carse.”

Lauren drew on a personal experience to get into character.

“I had a similar phone call when I was younger,” says Lauren, who has also appeared in Casualty, Doctors and the Nottingham-set BBC drama Truckers.

“I was at my friend’s house and I was on the phone to my mum asking to sleep over. She was trying to tell me to come home because a member of my family wasn’t well. It took a while for me to realise it was a lot more serious than I initially thought. That was really scary and I drew on that experience.”

It’s the kind of method or truthful acting that she learned at the Television Workshop.

So convincing was her apparent distress, many people interrupted filming to check if she was OK.

“It was when the camera was on a wide shot and it wasn’t obvious we were being filmed, people came up to me and wanted to take me to the hospital or were minding my possessions that I’d thrown on the floor. That was really reassuring. Good on you Nottingham”.

Other locations include King Street, Wheeler Gate and the Old Market Square, where Lauren, is seen with her on-screen brother, played by Newark teenager Oliver Woollford, who last year had a role in ITV drama DCI Banks.

Echo was shot almost three years ago and has since been screened at festivals across the world.

Says Lauren: “It’s already won an award but that was around a year ago; we’re still getting recognition for it.”

Director Lewis Arnold went on to work on TV dramas Misfits, Humans and Russell T Davies’ Banana, which starts on E4 in January and features Lauren.

“I play an antagonist for the main character; it’s only a small role but I’m excited to be part of something that I think will be brilliant,” says the former Fernwood Comprehensive pupil.

Her mum and dad met at Boots in Nottingham. Dad, from Belfast, is retired and mum, from Bulwell, is a dental receptionist. Brother Jonathan, 25, works for Nestle.

“I always wanted to do acting,” she says.

“The first I had with the Workshop when I was 11 was a violin playing prostitute,” she laughs.

“It was in Measure For Measure at the Galleries of Justice. (Workshop director) Ian Smith phoned me up and asked ‘Do you know what a prostitute is?’ I didn’t!”

The violin playing came from joining Nottingham Music School.

“I was also doing netball, karate, athletics, guides... my mum and dad spent all their time ferrying me around,” says Lauren, who last year moved to London and is now represented by United Agents.

The National Film Awards ceremony takes place in London on March 31. And she can expect to see fellow Workshop graduate Jack O'Connell there. The star of Angelina Jolie’s hit movie Unbroken has been nominated for his role in ‘71.

“I was in a play with Jack at the National Theatre when I was 14, one of two plays I did there with the Workshop,” she says.

Dame Judi Dench will be at the awards to pick up a Lifetime Achievement Award. Nominees include Ben Affleck, Keira Knightley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Imelda Staunton,

Michael Fassbender, Reese Witherspoon and Jamie Foxx.

Winners are decided by public vote. To vote for Echo visit nationalfilmawards.co.uk/vote-now.