Ashley Walters seems to have lived his life on fast-forward. Before he turned 21 he had already had a No 1 hit, performed on TV and the West End stage, become a father and served seven months in prison. He has had another lifetime’s worth of incident since – including seven more children – but at the ripe old age of 44, enough water has passed under the bridge for Walters to have some perspective on his youth.
Not that all that living appears to have left a mark: when we meet in London, he’s the picture of health, his face unwrinkled, eyes twinkling, hair cut in a crisp lineup. Back in the early 2000s, he fit a certain stereotype of Black British youth as Asher D, the rapper from deprived and supposedly crime-ridden Peckham, who rolled with the street-tough So Solid Crew, got into beefs with east London rivals such as Dizzee Rascal, was demonised by the tabloids and called a “boasting macho idiot rapper” by the then culture minister Kim Howells. So Solid Crew were trailblazing in terms of British hip-hop, but Walters’ view of those times is far from rose-tinted.
Asher D was never really him, he says. Because a lot of our success was underpinned with street stuff: you can’t go to that area because you might get shot; you can’t do this because that person has had beef with this person; and it was, like, all this politics.” He’d got in with the wrong crowd, he suggests, “and it took me down the road of just not giving a shit any more … but the realisation came to me when that door was shut in the prison cell. And I was like: ‘Hold on.
How the f– did I get here?’” We’re talking about his prison days because Walters is now revisiting them, from the other side of the door. He has just directed his first film, Animol, which is set in a young offender institution. It is by no means autobiographical (it was written by Nick Love, of Football Factory fame), but he says that a lot of it is based on his own experience and memories of being locked up.
Animol meets many of them. The tension winds up from the first scene, when the story’s 15-year-old protagonist, Troy (Tut Nyuot), is coerced into smuggling in a phone. But the film also defies those expectations in surprising ways, not least with a queer romantic element that’s sensitively and sensuously handled.
In that sense, it’s as much Moonlight as Scum – “slightly elevated,” as Walters puts it. I was brought up with those rules and those regulations.” Troubled young men, masculinity, fathers and sons – one way or another, these have become recurring themes in Walters’ career. There’s a continuity, I suggest, between Animol and his recent role in the highly acclaimed Netflix drama Adolescence.
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