Actor Ashley Walters admitted he thought about quitting acting before landing a lead role in a huge new role in an upcoming Netflix drama.
The Top Boy star, 42, played drug dealer Dushane in the critically-acclaimed Channel 4 drama from 2011 to 2023, when the series finally came to a close. Ashley, who shot to fame as part of the rap collective So Solid Crew in the late 1990s, confessed he was so fed up of being linked to Top Boy, fearing he would only be offered similar roles, that he considered quitting acting.
Ashley candidly revealed he wanted to move behind the camera because he wasn’t happy with the roles he was being offered after Top Boy. “I was in the mindset of ending my career]in] acting and going more into producing and directing, because it was like, ‘ Am I getting roles I’m enjoying? ‘” he explained.
“As much as I love Top Boy and the other stuff I’ve done, once you’ve played a role for so long, people find it hard to see you as anything else”, Ashley added to Radio Times,. However, his mind was made up once he was offered the role of DI Luke Bascombe in Stephen Graham’s crime drama Adolescence on Netflix, and he agreed to star alongside the award-winning actor without even reading the script. “This revived a part of me that was dying a bit. It’s taken a real friend of mine, Stephen, to see me outside of the box”, he confessed.
The series focuses on the murder investigation, led by DI Bascombe, after a 13-year-old boy is arrested for the killing of a teenage schoolfriend. Adolescence, which was filmed in one continuous shot, was also co-created by Peaky Blinders star Stephen, and debuts on the streaming service on 13 March.
Ashley has been busy promoting the new show, and in a new interview with Jonathan Ross – set to air on Saturday night on ITV – he opened up on the candid admission he made in his new autobiography, Always Winning. “I drank too much alcohol”, he simply stated, adding that his drinking “took its toll” on his family life, and it was a conversation with his daughter that prompted him to quit the booze five years ago.
Adolescence isn’t the first time he’s worked with his longtime pal Stephen, as the two collaborated on the Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows. The former rapper directed three episodes of the historical drama series, which focuses on the world of illegal boxing in Victorian London, and they’re set to team up again on Ashley’s feature film directorial debut, Animol.
He spoke to NME about his “imposter syndrome”, and said he spoke to Line of Duty star Stephen about it on the set of their new Netflix drama. “We talk about it every day. It’s me going, ‘ Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m meant to be here. Sometimes I don’t feel I’m good enough to have it. ‘ It’s something a lot of us suffer with and it’s a double whammy for me because I’m Black… Feeling like people don’t want you there or they’re waiting for you to fail, I use that as fuel. It hasn’t broken me yet”, he told NME.
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Source: Mirror
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