By Moonah Ellison
Images by Lee Strickland
“… I love the work that respects the audience, and allows them to be drawn into the storytelling and formulate their own opinions. That’s always the way. If you can leave a film or a TV show and you’re fiercely locked in a hot debate with your friends or family that have just sat through and watched it. And two people have got two different meanings from it and that’s always the great thing, because that’s what life’s about, isn’t it?… ”
Not one minute into my conversation with actor Daniel Mays and I find myself giving him an open invitation to stay with me in the Hudson Valley whenever he returns to New York. You’re welcome to come and stay. I guess you say stuff like that after hearing someone has only been to New York just once…for a long weekend.
But for now, Mays is in East Finchley, north London, currently in the middle of a house extension. Builders in and out of his house for three months. Mays and family were debating whether to move a bit further out of London, but decided to stay because it’s a great area. Kids get older. They like the city (his son just turned 19; his daughter is 11).
Being that one of my favorite guilty pleasure films is The Bank Job (the 2008 heist film starring Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, and yes, of course, Mays), I was hyped to interview the BAFTA-nominated actor.
“Oh, you and every London taxi driver it seems,” laughs Mays, who attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts before becoming a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). “I get into a black cab in London, they would all go, ‘Oh my God, it’s you out of The Bank Job.’ I’d be like, ‘Don’t worry, I’m back from the dead.’ They didn’t sandblast my foot off. It’s a gruesome death in that movie, isn’t it?”
He’s a recognizable face for sure. Think Pearl Harbor (2001); Rehab (2005); Shifty, Red Riding (2008); Made in Dagenham, Ashes to Ashes (2010); Outcasts (2011); Mrs Biggs, Byzantium (2012); Line of Duty, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016); and Des and White Lines (2020). In addition to a BAFTA nomination for the BBC Two TV series Line of Duty in 2017, Mays was nominated this year for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance in Guys and Dolls at the Bridge Theatre.
Mays is versatile, meaning, there’s no role he won’t commit to playing. He takes every role with a fresh look. “I’m a classic person in that I don’t rest on our laurels. I try not to look back on the films that I’ve been in, and so I put my feet up and say, ‘God, I’ve done so much work,’ because I feel like the exposition of acting and where it can take you, you’re always learning, and there’s always a character around the corner that you’ve never played before.
“Not long back I worked with the brilliant Michael Douglas on the Apple series Franklin. And that was to kind of explore that, put that costume on you, shoot out there in Paris for six months. And I love the endeavor of investigating characters and bringing different periods to life. I love the work that allows the audience, gives them a semblance of intelligence, allows them to be drawn into the storytelling and formulate their own opinions. That’s always the way. If you can leave a film or a TV show and you’re fiercely locked in a hot debate with your friends or family that have just sat through and watched it. And two people have got two different meanings from it and that’s always the great thing, because that’s what life’s about, isn’t it?”
Coming up for Mays is A Thousand Blows opposite former Moves profile Stephen Graham. (Hint. Graham is a very good mate of Mays and even introduced him to his now wife.) It’s a British boxing drama scheduled to land on Disney+ in 2025 and is written by Stephen Knight, the man behind Peaky Blinders. He’s done the first couple of scripts and it’s all set in Victorian London. It’s about two Jamaican boys that come over and enter the world of bare knuckle boxing.
“I play a character called William Punch Louis. I mean, these characters existed. He’s the big ringmaster in the middle of these boxing bouts. And what’s great about it, there’s this vaudevillian quality to this character. So, I happened to be playing Nathan Detroit (Guys and Dolls) at the same time. So I was playing in Guys and Dolls in the evening, crazily shooting A Thousand Blows in the day.
“But both those characters are very outwardly going and a lot of Nathan Detroit, I think, bled into A Thousand Blows. But Stephen did say to me, ‘Go and give them the old razzle dazzle, Danny.’ And I said that’s all you’ve got to tell me. So I did a lot of improvisation with the crowd. There was a brilliant group of extras in around the boxing ring and the set. The set to this day is the best set I’ve ever acted on. It’s an amazingly realized show. And I can only say that I watched the first two episodes and I was just desperate to continue watching it. The characters are brilliantly drawn and it just really packs a huge emotional punch in and out of the ring.”
Like every creative person, artificial intelligence is always weighing heavy on the profession. Mays just can’t understand how any human would want to watch something computer-based over something real.
“I personally I don’t know about you, but the whole notion of sitting down, watching a computer generated performance to me feels internally, there’s just something dead. The beauty of acting is it comes from a place of human connection. Someone has learned their craft, they’ve learned the lines, they’ve interpreted the role. And, I mean, I’m always drawn to those wonderful actors, the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis and De Niro and Denzel Washington, all those people who, as a young actor starting out, Gary Oldman. You’re just amazed at how versatile these people are. That’s the beauty of acting and that’s the mystique of it. And that’s the thing that keeps bringing us back time and time again. Something that’s computer generated I just, I can’t emotionally attach myself to that.”
I keep flashing back to our panel discussion with Aasif Mandvi talking about AI, and we were talking to a specialist company that is kind of structured in the security and safety of AI, and they were saying how it’s going to be the corporations that realize the money that this is going to either take, or the money it’s going to stop making for them. So they [corporations] are the ones that are going to give it growth or they’re going to stunt the growth of it. Because they have control, and the top companies are going to control the monopoly in the industry.
But the safeguards that the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) have put in place. Guidelines of protection, which is a wonderful thing. “AI is a juggernaut that’s not going to stop. And I feel like there will be maybe two industries. There’ll be the traditional way of doing it, and there’ll be something which is AI and its own thing. I mean, I used an example of that crowd that I was working with on A Thousand Blows. Now, if you kind of recreate it, that group of people during AI then that interaction between me and them would never have existed.”
Mays is not letting AI disrupt his future projects. There’s a murder mystery show called Moonflower Murders, which is on PBS at the moment in the U.S. It’s a sequel to Magpie Murders. The premise of Moonflower is that one actor is playing two characters in two different time frames. Mays is playing two policemen in it. He just wrapped up The Thursday Murder Club, based on the book by BBC game show host and British TV presenter, Richard Osman. The star-studded cast includes Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and is being produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.
“It’s all set in old age. Pensioners, a kind of retirement home. And they are real. And every Thursday they congregate and try to crack cold cases of unsolved murders. And then, lo and behold, a real murder takes place right on their doorstep and they try to solve the crime itself. And they, in turn, step on a lot of people’s toes.”
For now, Mays is grateful, humbled for living and breathing in the profession of acting to make a living. A dream come true. He’s played a lot of angry young men, a lot of London “characters” like The Bank Job. But for Mays, if a part is brilliantly written and is nuanced and three dimensional, those elements of someone being good and bad, those lines are always blurred.
“The greatest characters are always kind of like a walking, talking contradiction. Do you know what I mean?”
Yes. Yes we do.