"It needs more investment, but we'd visit pupil referral units, then do a drama workshop with them and get them to talk what they've seen - maybe about knives," he recalls. (Although God does chasten his children when the sin in various ways. Second, God did not make your loved one sick, neither did he kill him as a direct act. Fate and predestination are both false doctrines of Calvinism. So he did that, and learned the ropes, as well as becoming involved in the organisation's outreach work. Life on earth is not predestined where God chose before the earth was created who would live, and when and how they would die.
There, a director told him to ignore parental pressure to go to university and concentrate on acting.
I was feeling very sorry for myself"), he took jobs in bars, clothes shops, and sold those carpets in John Lewis, before applying to the National Youth Theatre (NYT). It's all far from his suburban beginnings growing up as the oldest of five brothers in Kingston-upon-Thames (3/5ths of whom now act), with a primary-schoolteacher mother and a sailing-instructor father, he knew no actors but enjoyed drama.Īfter losing focus when he got to sixth form ("I was messing about, getting in to nonsense, and really at a loose end, so I was held back at college while all my friends were at university. I've had a good analysis of this one here and. So then, is he still into flooring? He spins on his chair, squinting at the thin teal layer below our feet. In that, if he recalls anyone, it's Tom Hardy, his Peaky Blinders co-star.īefore all this, though, he hawked carpets in shops in South London. Thanks to his long-running turn as John Shelby on the BBC's star-strewn Peaky Blinders and an episode of Black Mirror last year, for which he received a Bafta nomination, Cole is fast becoming one of the brightest young British actors around.Īnd unlike the thespian generation ahead of him - the lot with names like boarding houses (Redmayne, Hiddleston, Cumberbatch) - he is as believable playing tough as he is tender. "Oh, I could sell water to a well, mate," he laughs, Estuary twang only slightly exaggerated for the idiom. But in Joe Cole's case, you can entirely believe he used to be a shop-floor salesman. Danny DeVito used to cut the hair of corpses. It was dirty, it was sweaty, and the blood and bruises are real,' Cole says. 'This was a real prison, with real prisoners. Hugh Grant was an assistant groundsman at Fulham FC. The film looks authentic in every gruesome way, and that's because it was. There are some actors whose early, pre-fame occupations come as a surprise. The Peaky Blinders star tells Guy Kelly about the punishing shoot of his new boxing movie, set - and filmed - in a Thai prison