By When Joe Cole was a teenager he would go to his best friend's house to see the films he wasn't allowed to watch at home. In the Cole home, he and his four brothers would normally rent Jackie Chan films from the video shop to watch together, so seeing Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas and The Godfather for the first time felt like going from black and white to colour. It was around this time that Cole bought a box-set of films by Shane Meadows, the cult independent filmmaker whose hyper-realistic dramas set in post-industrial Britain conjure the intensity of Scorsese.
"I remember thinking, ‘This is what I want to do’," Cole says. "They’re such dark Northern stories but I just felt so inspired and immersed in them."
If the moment Cole had his mind blown by watching This Is England and Dead Man's Shoes was the inception of his acting career, then it's not hard to find glimpses of how these gritty dramas laid the foundation for the roles he would later take on.
Cole is best known for playing John Shelby on Peaky Blinders, the BBC drama which follows the criminal exploits and nefarious connections of the Shelby family in interwar Birmingham. Since leaving the show in 2017, the 31-year-old has played incarcerated boxer Billy Moore in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's meticulously crafted film A Prayer Before Dawn, as well as appearing in series such as Black Mirror and Channel 4's Pure.
His next role sees him play the lead in Sky Atlantic and HBO's new tentpole series Gangs of London, a slick and violent drama about a sprawling criminal family in present-day London, and the channel’s biggest series since Game of Thrones. Just don't call it the next Peaky Blinders.
It is early March and Joe Cole is standing in front of a studio in East London having his photograph taken. We are three weeks away from a nationwide lockdown due to Coronavirus and the phrase 'social distancing' still sounds like a brainwave post-it on the desk of Charlie Brooker. The rain, which has been hammering against the windows all afternoon, has politely paused and at one point Cole takes his phone out of his pocket to snap a photo of the camera in playful retaliation.
Cole has a sense of humour that keeps you on the back-foot; making jokes with a deadpan expression and then cracking up at your reaction, as he does when saying sombrely that he was sad not to get the call up for Fifty Shades of Grey. He seems grounded, too, aware of the work that it took to get where he is but OK with the fact it could all go away tomorrow.
Cole grew up in Kingston, south-west London in a busy, happy home, the eldest of five boys, three of whom have gone on to become professional actors. "Obviously there’s something in the water in the Cole house," he laughs. "But we really weren't an all-singing, all-dancing household like it sounds."
He attended Hollyfield School in Surbiton where his drama teacher, Miss O'Shea, would put on productions which were, "better than they should have been because we had no money", and which showed him how fun drama could be. Cole made lifelong friends while putting on productions like Bugsy Malone – his younger brother Harley playing Bugsy while he was Dandy Dan – but there was no acting dynasty in his family to give him any indication this could be a real career.
In any case, his early taste for performing was derailed as Cole himself went slightly off the rails, missing his university grades and, at one point, getting himself arrested. Cole was working selling carpets when he decided to go back to school to retake his exams, returning to Hollyfield, now in his younger brother's year. It was then that a friend told him to audition for National Youth Theatre and under the guidance of director Rikki Beadle-Blair, he completed the course and decided to put everything into acting.
When he started going up for parts, still juggling a daytime job selling coffee at the Rose Theatre, he promised himself he'd never miss an audition. If he was unsuccessful, which he very often was, he remembered advice he'd learned at the National Youth Theatre: "You don’t think about the mistakes you made or things you could have done differently, you just think ‘and next’".
Perhaps it's because Cole can identify with feeling lost and angry that he is so capable of playing troubled men who are grappling with something dark. "I used to feel quite angry and sorry for myself," he tells me. "I can definitely get to a very dark place if I need to. I don't know where that comes from, but I don’t really want to analyse it because it might go away tomorrow."
One of his first roles was playing a man who unjustly ends up in a juvenile detention centre in 2012 prison drama Offender. Later, he led Bafta-nominated short Slap as a teenage boxer struggling with the urge to cross-dress. As Billy Moore, he showed the rock bottom of drug addiction and the raw violence of Thai prisons, scenes for which were shot on location with former prisoners as cast members.
In Gangs Of London, he plays Sean Wallace, the son of a drug kingpin who is trying to cope with his father's death and reckon with his legacy. Cole did research into gangs, but found the most compelling way into his character was looking at men with powerful fathers. "I was quite interested in Barry Hearn’s son Eddie," Cole says. "They’re not gangsters but you get a definite sense of him trying to step out of his father’s shadow and I find those kind of people fascinating. In most storytelling in the gangster genre the son grows up to be his father, and that’s the case in [Gangs of London] but I think Sean is conflicted."
As another crime family drama, and another one with Joe Cole in it, the series will likely draw comparisons to the one he only recently left, and so I ask what made this one different enough to entice him. "I steer clear of these kind of things because obviously having done Peaky Blinders and A Prayer Before Dawn there’s interest for certain roles," he says. "But I read the first episode and I was really in. Peaky is from the perspective of a kid looking at this world and watching the story unfold, whereas Gangs is like a superhero movie in a really heightened world."
Cole describes it as "non-stop high-octane" and the bar is high from the beginning, with the series opening with a man hanging upside down from the top of a building while the rope he is suspended by slowly burns. Gangs of London feels faster and more unmannered than Peaky Blinders, likely the influence of director Gareth Evans, who was at the helm of choreographed action films like The Raid.
It's not that he doesn't want to talk about Peaky Blinders, it's more that he's wary of saying the wrong thing. Last week, news stories exclaimed that he left because it's "Cillian's show" – a fact that hardly needs debating, given that Murphy plays the lead character. But still, a throwaway line became a headline. He's similarly careful when I float the obligatory question that the culmination of all these complicated antiheroes is, surely, playing James Bond. Cole recounts a time when he responded to being asked about playing a Bond villain by joking he'd be 007 himself. The headline read, 'Joe Cole: "I'll be Bond."'
Everything changed after the third season of Peaky Blinders aired, he says, "That’s when I really noticed people coming up to me in the street." The show's now iconic skin-fade haircut was everywhere and ratings were going up and up. Cole wanted to move on and do something different and decided himself to leave the show in season four, his departure involving a shooting that closed the door on him returning. "I’ve done so many things that people have never seen so it’s lovely so many people have seen it," he says, his voice diplomatic but genuine.
Cole has grown up as the entertainment industry, particularly television, has undergone a radical shift. He started out with appearances on British dramas like The Bill and Holby City before graduating to E4 teen dramas when he was cast as a drug dealer Luke in the third generation of Skins. "When I was starting out it was before Netflix and Amazon Prime so you were either getting in Skins or Misfits or nobody knew who you were," he says. "Now there is so much more work there’s almost too much to watch."
After leaving Peaky Blinders Cole ticked off another major British TV series by appearing in a chapter of techno-paranoid series Black Mirror. He plays softly spoken Mancunian Frank in 'Hang the DJ', an episode featuring a dating app which can inform users when their relationships will expire from the moment that couples meet. It's a surprisingly poignant exploration of how technology has turned dating into a weird sexual supermarket, exploring how destiny has been put into the hands of an algorithm.
"You’re operating from this safe space of your bedroom so nobody has to face the fear of rejection anymore," Cole says, when debating whether dating apps have killed romance. "The other side of that is that if someone approaches someone on the street and tries to chat to them people think they're weird."
'Hang the DJ' showed Charlie Brooker's virtuoso talent at imagining worlds that are both terrifying and terrifyingly close, but Cole believes one of Brooker's most underrated talents is writing truly great characters. It's a skill he too is trying to hone, having penned a comedy series with Little Britain creator Matt Lucas. "There’s something cathartic thing about writing which can’t be matched by sitting in a trailer waiting to be called to set," he says, wishing he had more time for it.
He couldn't have known quite how much time he would have a month later when we speak again, the entertainment world having ground to a halt. He is happy to be writing every day, and calm, or at least until his younger brother barges into the room. He tries to fend him off, laughing as he says, "I can't get any peace in this house and there's only two of us."
There were plans for a big London Underground campaign to market Gangs of London but now the tubes are running almost empty. Still, Cole feels he's "one of the lucky ones", since the series will be able to air as planned. He’s hoping it can give people something compelling to watch while they're shut indoors.
Later, I remember something he said the first time we met, when he was thinking back to how lost he felt as a teenager, how he wasn't sure where his life was going. He said he would have told himself to have a plan every day and keep busy, advice that now feels as worthy for your future self as your younger self.
"Can you enjoy your life with no work?" he had said. "If you can then you’re alright because a lot of being an actor is not working."
'Gangs of London' is on Sky Atlantic from April 23
Styling: James Sleaford | Photography by Jesse Laitinen
Casting: Tom Macklin | Art direction: Lisa Barlow
