Movies

Micheal Ward: ‘Everywhere I go it’s good vibes’


A few hours before I’m due to meet Micheal Ward, I get a text from his publicist. The photoshoot for this interview has finished more than an hour early – could I come a bit sooner? I race to a café in Blackheath, plush south London. When I arrive, Ward has already finished lunch. These shoots normally overrun, I say. How come this one was over so quickly? “I tried to warn them I was a model,” he smirks. “I know what I’m doing.”

He certainly seems to. A year ago, Ward was entirely unknown as an actor. He was working for the e-commerce sites of brands like JD Sports, modelling athleisure. (Apparently there’s still a picture of him somewhere, deep in the bowels of the JD sports website.) Now 21, he’s bagged leading roles in two of the most high-profile portrayals of British gang life in years. In the first, Netflix’s revival of Top Boy, he plays Jamie, an east London boy climbing the rungs of a Hackney drug-dealing gang while simultaneously looking after his two young brothers. And there’s the upcoming feature film Blue Story, based on the spoken word performer Rapman’s wildly popular YouTube series about south London gang violence, in which Ward plays the brother of a gang member who gets dragged into a postcode war.

Word on the street: trailer for Blue Story starring Micheal Ward

Ward is beaming about it all. He has the energy of someone who can’t quite believe what’s happening. He’s just returned from the BET Awards, in Atlanta, and he says he’s never been in a room with so many celebrities: Lil’ Kim, the rising rap star DaBaby. His excitement is infectious. When I ask him if he’s enjoying himself he bursts into laughter.

“The last two years have been the best two years of my life,” he says. “When you get a chance to travel, it’s a big blessing. Then actually doing it for work? And it’s free? I’m enjoying it, boy. Everywhere I go it’s good vibes.”

Ward talks like the characters he plays on screen. His sentences are peppered with east London idioms and tend to begin with a “yeah man” and finish with a “you know what I’m saying?” He makes scripts full of London slang feel real and genuine, overcoming a common pitfall of lesser British dramas that try too hard with the grittiness. Now, when he reads something in a script that feels forced, he’ll speak up, offer his opinion. “That’s something I’ve got better at,” he says. “I’ve started to say no. No one says ‘bruv’ and ‘fam’ in every sentence. It doesn’t make sense.”

Ward hopes Blue Story will become a timeless street movie in the vein of Boyz n the Hood, the 90s teen drama. Unlike Top Boy, which is fictional, Blue Story is drawn from real life; a number of former gang members consulted on the script and were present on set, confirming the accuracy of the actors’ portrayals. It tells the truth about south London violence, Ward says. “I come from that world. I’m not saying I’ve been involved in it, but I’ve seen stuff that happens in Top Boy and Blue Story around me.”

‘We come from Jamaica, literally from the mud’: Ward wears floral shirt by representclo.com; trousers by numeroventuno.com; gold chain by sergedenimes.com; and earring Micheal’s own.



‘We come from Jamaica, literally from the mud’: Ward wears floral shirt by
representclo.com; trousers by
numeroventuno.com; gold chain by
sergedenimes.com; and earring Micheal’s own. Photograph: David Titlow/The Observer

Ward was born in Jamaica, but he grew up in Romford, Essex, where every now and then he would watch a seemingly innocuous event escalate to dangerous levels. “I’ve seen fights happen over something so small it could have been left behind, but that’s been brought back up, because of some personal vendetta.”

Ward has never lived anything other than a law-abiding life, he says. In our conversation, he speaks of his character’s struggles, but none of his own. (I try to probe, but apart from being an Arsenal fan, which can be tough – “Arsenal bring some serious dark times to your life” – he seems entirely carefree.) But he has a sense of how easy it is to fall into crime. “People come up to me all the time, asking, ‘Wot, you got any white?’ even though I don’t sell. Imagine: I’m walking up the road and 10 people ask me that and I start to do the maths. I don’t know how much this stuff costs, but you think: you make £10 or less an hour working a job, when you could have just made that much in two footsteps. For me, the risk was never worth it. But for some people…”

Micheal Ward in Blue Story standing in a puffa jacket and cap outside high rise flats



‘Some artists from Jamaica have been hitting me up’: in
Blue Story. Photograph: Nick Wall

Ward recognises he has become an unlikely spokesperson for a section of society you rarely hear from. “I’m representing the hood,” he says, “even though I’m not from the hood. But it feels good at the same time. You feel like you’re something bigger than yourself. Because there are really people living this life and you’re showing that and you want to be able to help them. It’s a lot of pressure. You’re speaking for a whole culture. But also you’ve got to be careful. If I were to say something stupid to you today, people from this world might come for me. That’s not going to be good. You’ve got to be careful.”

He’s heard, for example, that real-life gang members aren’t thrilled about the way films about British gangs reveal tricks of the trade, such as ways of concealing drugs and avoiding being caught in possession. “It’s not that it grasses them up,” he says, “but it’s basically a spoiler.” And Top Boy viewers have struggled to identify the line between him and his character. He’s had contact from fans hoping he might be a good crime connection in London. “Some artists from Jamaica have been hitting me up because they think I’m Jamie,” he says. “You know what I’m saying? They think I’ve got things locked down over here.”

And then there’s the fame. He admits it’s recently become harder for him to wander the streets without being recognised. The whole family has been sharing in the moment. His eldest sister, who is still at college, says her teachers all want to know what it’s like living with a film star. His aunt and uncle, who run a restaurant, have reported that customers are leaving things for Ward to autograph so they can pick them up on their next visit. The other day, he was out driving with his mum, with whom he still lives, when a group of school kids came over, screaming, asking for pictures. I ask if his mum was annoyed, but he says no, she was “mad happy”. “We’re not used to that kind of life,” Ward says. “We come from Jamaica, literally from the mud. I don’t know anyone else who’s made it out. We’ve come a long way.”

Drake, Ashley Walters, Micheal Ward and Little Simz attending the UK premiere of Top Boy at the Hackney Picturehouse in London




Top Boy team: with Drake, Ashley Walters and Little Simz. Photograph: Ian West/PA

For Ward, securing his role in Top Boy was more than just a boost to his career. In 2013, when he was still at school and the second series of Top Boy was about to start, then on Channel 4, he tweeted: “Can’t wait for Topboy, gna be sick :D.” He followed the tweet with a direct message to the show’s star, Ashley Walters, asking for an audition. It was something he wanted to be a part of before he’d even realised what it meant to be an actor.

It’s not just that Top Boy tweet that is still online. Ward has never bothered to delete anything from his social media accounts, so you can see every moan about school (“actually finding maths difficult now, this is the shit that annoys me”) and every excited spasm about upcoming events (“might be having a party if bare people can come”).

‘The last two years have been the best two years of my life. I’m enjoying it, boy’: Ward wears a Marilyn Monroe shirt by loewe.com.



‘The last two years have been the best two years of my life. I’m enjoying it, boy’: Ward wears a Marilyn Monroe shirt by
loewe.com. Photograph: David Titlow/The Observer

There’s a moment I’m particularly interested in: in January 2013 he tweeted: “In drama – some dead lesson #leaveit.” But by March the following year he’d changed his mind. “Practising drama script,” he tweeted, and then, a few weeks later, “Happy about my drama mark.” By the following year he seems fully invested: “Drama performance today #letsgetit.”

What changed? He explains that after he moved to Romford, when he was four, he played football non-stop. He was earmarked by coaches as a potential star of the future and he thought football was going to be his ticket to greater things. He didn’t want drama to take over. “You’re just thinking: this is stopping me from progressing in what I actually want to do so bun drama,” he says. “I was hustling the dream, basically.”

As Jamie, wearing an open puffa jacket, in Top Boy.



On the rise: as Jamie in
Top Boy. Photograph: Chris Harris/Netflix

But, slowly, acting took over anyway. Drama class became less of a chore and more something to look forward to. Once he’d decided to go all in, he signed up to a performing arts college. One of his teachers took a shine to him and when she left the school to work for an acting agency, she signed Ward up and began booking him small roles in music videos. He dropped everything to audition for Top Boy, initially for Jamie’s younger brother: a carefree, bookish character he felt he was similar to. But the producers asked him to come back and read for Jamie. He doesn’t know what they saw in him. “I haven’t trained,” he says. “For me to even get an agent without any training or experience – what did any of them see in me? It’s just a weird situation.”

In any case, working on these projects has given Ward a taste for these kinds of heavily researched dramas. Those are the projects he wants to do more of. He’s mooted for star turns in big-hitting films next year, but he’s hesitant to say more. “Sure, I’d love to do some Marvel or Star Wars stuff,” he says. “But I want to tell important stories. Ones that help people understand different walks of life.”

Blue Story is in cinemas nationwide from 22 November

Fashion editor Helen Seamons



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