Joe Cole interview: 'I don't just want to be known as the guy in Peaky Blinders'

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In the 2012 indie action film Offender, Joe Cole punches a police officer in the face, then knees another in the stomach. In the gruesome horror Green Room (2015), he chokes a neo-Nazi skinhead into a state of unconsciousness. In last year’s acclaimed prison drama A Prayer Before Dawn, he takes beating after beating, and delivers his fair share too, from the confines of a Thai prison. And as the youngest of the three Shelby brothers in the BBC crime series Peaky Blinders – for which the 30-year-old is perhaps best known – he blows up a train, robs someone at gunpoint and stabs a man in the eye. “It’s been quite therapeutic playing those roles,” says Cole, “because you can be a bit of a lunatic, and people applaud you, rather than cuff you and put you behind bars.”

The southwest London actor, who stars in the new Channel 4 comedy drama Pure, has the kind of face that has been described by The Observer as “angelic”, and The Guardian as “weirdly cherubic”. So it’s strange that he’s ended up attracting parts where it so often takes a pummelling, or curls into a troubled snarl as he pummels someone else. But it is precisely this juxtaposition, the flicker of fear, trauma or indeed rage sitting just behind that veil of innocence, that makes Cole so compelling to watch.

Cole doesn’t play “baddies”, he insists from the set of Gareth Evans’s forthcoming Sky/HBO series Gangs of London. He’s just often drawn to characters with dark, aggressive tendencies. “There’s a physical element to some of those roles,” he says in his Estuary lilt. “I found it quite easy to connect to that side of me on a deeper level, and summon the emotion and the aggression. I could really feel that. You can really let yourself go.”

After roles on The Bill and Holby City, rites of passage for any British upstart, Cole’s first taste of this kind of character was as the charming reprobate Luke in a few episodes of Skins. The role felt like fate. It was while watching the British teen drama series several years earlier that Cole – having failed to do well in school – first realised he could be an actor. “I remember watching that show,” he recalls, “thinking, ‘That’s where I wanna be. I’ve got enough life experience and emotional baggage that I could bring to [these kinds of] roles.’ I found it quite inspiring, because it was quite revolutionary at the time.”

He’d lost his way before that, though. “I was getting into trouble,” he says of his teenage years, “and I wasn’t focusing on what I should have been focusing on. When you’re a teenager, you’re figuring out your place in the world, and for me, it was in my head that if I didn’t go to university, I was some sort of failure, and that I wouldn’t amount to very much in this life.”

After failing to get the grades he needed for university, he retook sixth form, where he ended up in the same year as his younger brother. Then, after a bad breakup, he found himself selling carpets. “I sort of thought, ‘I need to change this up’,” he says. So he applied to the National Youth Theatre. It was there that he finally hit his stride. “In college, I was just like, ‘We’re all the same here. How can I stand out?’ So I didn’t really do any work. I wouldn’t advise it to be honest, but I just realised I didn’t have a great passion to continue on that path. And then I found my passion; it was acting and telling stories. When I found something I was actually interested in, I was able to apply myself a lot better.”

He’s been applying himself, pretty successfully, ever since. Cole starred in four films in 2017, acting alongside major Hollywood players such as Kirsten Dunst (in psychological thriller Woodshock) and Miles Teller (in war drama Thank You for Your Service). Last year, he won Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards for A Prayer Before Dawn, and also starred in Ben Wheatley’s new film, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead. Quite deliberately, not all of those roles fitted the mould he’d begun to find himself cast in. “I don’t wanna just do those kinds of things – that’s why I did Black Mirror,” he says, referring to his surprisingly uplifting episode, Hang the DJ, of Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology series. “And that’s why I did Pure.”

Pure, the darkly funny six-part series that starts tonight, stars newcomer Charly Clive as a young woman struggling with undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder. Hers manifests in incessant, “f***ed up” sexual thoughts, so intrusive she drinks mouthwash to try and escape from them. When she moves from her isolated Scottish hometown to London, she meets Cole’s porn addict Charlie at a group therapy session. He’s been sober for a year, after depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts forced him to take a break from his job. It doesn’t sound like a laugh a minute, but the script and performances are littered with dry humour. “The last time was very badly timed,” says Charlie’s boss when he asks if he can return to work. “I’ll time my next mental breakdown more considerately,” he replies.

Charlie, says Cole, feels “a slight inadequacy, and a feeling of not being comfortable in your own body, and an insecurity that I just played subtly under the surface”. When he reunites with his ex-girlfriend, who promised they could meet once he’d been sober for a year, he tells her, “every single one of those days was for you”. But Cole sees it differently. “I think ultimately, he’s doing it for himself. Maybe at the beginning he thinks he’s doing it for her, and then as you grow and improve as a person, you realise you’re actually doing it to better yourself, and it’s for you ultimately.”

Cole often slips into the second person like this when talking about Charlie – but when I ask what personal insight he had into the character, he says simply: “I read quite a lot about it, and I’ve got friends who are addicts.” I suspect even if it were otherwise, he probably wouldn’t tell me. He seems wary of his words being taken out of context, and is both amused and irritated when I recite things he has supposedly said in the past. “Can’t believe I’ve ever used that language in an interview before,” he says at one point. Later, he insists, “They’re all paraphrased, by the way, these quotes.” Are they really? “Well… they come out a bit different to how you say them.”

He’s not afraid, though, to offer his thoughts on the effects of porn. “I don’t think it’s particularly good for society, and I don’t think it ever has been,” he says. “I think we’re seeing that with young people now, and kids, and I think problems with porn addiction are rising in young people, I don’t know the statistics, but certainly more than it was before the internet.” It certainly seems to hold a tight grip on Charlie, though the character has an innocence about him too – one that doesn’t exist in many of the other characters Cole has played.

It’s exactly the kind of role he wanted to seek out when he decided to leave Peaky Blinders in 2017, at the height of its popularity. Didn’t it feel like a risk? “No, because I’m not the lead in that show,” says Cole, betraying the depths of his ambition. “The thing that people had seen me was Peaky Blinders,” he says. With Black Mirror, and now, he hopes, Pure, “people realise you’re not just a one-trick pony”.

Clearly, Cole has no regrets about stepping away from his most famous role. “I left at the perfect time,” he says. “I don’t just want to be known as the guy in Peaky Blinders.” There doesn’t seem much danger of that.

The first episode of Pure airs on Channel 4 on 30 January at 10pm