AG: How old were you then?
ATJ: I must’ve been about eighteen or nineteen.

AG: Maybe you were young enough and stupid enough…
ATJ: [laughs]

AG: … to not feel the pressure of it. Like, “Fuck it!” [laughs]
ATJ: I know what you mean, I think also at that age there’s an, “I ain’t got anything to fucking lose” mentality, because the trajectory from there is just to go all in and hope you can continue with a career. I think I had some serious fucking balls and confidence, I doubt myself far more now than I did then, I had this drive and motivation that was like a killer instinct, I had a drive that was just… disgusting. [both laugh] To be fair, Sam [who directed Nowhere Boy] is a master, she’s amazing at being able to command her set, she’s a real director in every sense of the job. She created a bubble around us and the crew, and really deflected all these people coming in with a lot of negativity who were saying, “Are you doing this? Make sure you’ve got that.” We didn’t even have rights to some of the songs that we were using, so at the end, Sam had to show Paul [McCartney] and have his blessing. He watched the movie with her and cried, and said “Yeah, you can have this.” Then she had to go and do the same with Yoko [Ono], then Yoko gave the rights to certain other songs that she had, they had a connection, and since then we’ve sort of had this ‘part of the family’ thing, we see them now and again. There was a launch for that documentary where I saw Sean [Lennon] and the whole family, it was quite bizarre – it was quite moving.

AG: That’s beautiful, man.
ATJ: For me, Boy A [2007, starring Garfield] came out and that was just extraordinary. It was the newest, freshest kind of authentic film, and your performance was just so raw and unpredictable. You were this new actor on the scene, and I remember you really were the talk of the town from then on. You stepped right onto the scene in London, in a big way. Did you go to drama school?

AG: Thanks for that man, I love that movie, it was a seminal change for me in terms of how I worked. I went to Central School of Speech and Drama in North West London, in Swiss Cottage. I was there for three years between the ages of seventeen through to twenty, my university years. Then I got out and I did a bunch of plays; I did plays at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, Soho Theatre and Sound Theatre that no longer exists in Leicester Square. Then I did a tour of a play, then I did a couple of plays at The National, it was from then that I did my first movie which was in LA and then the second film I did which was a TV film, Boy A. I think that came out before the American film I did, but that was one of my first times in front of a camera in a lead role and I was so scared. If you talk to John Crowley [director, Boy A] about that – he’s wonderful, an amazing theatre and film director, he’s so sensitive and such a great storyteller – I would work with him on anything… You talk to him and he’ll say, “Andrew was a very needy actor on that set.” Because I felt like a baby, I felt like a child that was just totally naked all the time, had no idea what the fuck I was doing, had no self-belief even though I’d done theatre or whatever. But even with that, you’re kind of winging it… even now there’s an element of me that goes, “When am I going to get found out?” I know we all share a certain element of that when we are creative people and we’re actors because it is so ephemeral, it is so hard to hold on to, but with Boy A I was at the height of my neurosis and I felt so vulnerable, so stripped-back. I was working with Peter Mullan, have you ever worked with him?
ATJ: No I haven’t, he’s a legend though, he’s phenomenal.

Bella Freud 1970 Candle £38

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