text David Jays
photographs Richard Ansett
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SCOTT AND GLENN ARE LAUGHING. They do a lot of that: laughing and chirping. They’re mates, they’re actors, and hell, they’re 17-year-old stars about to happen. In Beautiful Thing, the film adaptation of Jonathan Harvey’s smash hit stage play, Ste and Jamie edge towards each other’s arms. Although every soap writer knows that teenage romance will probably end in misery, abortion or violence, Harvey rolls out the love-hearts and lets two young things find happiness.
Scott Neal and Glen Berry have reason to laugh. They’ve known each other for ages, usually cast as thugs in the same TV dramas. Now they’re in a successful film. They joke, they finish each other’s sentences, they cap each other’s stories. They even order the same burgers for lunch. They’re sunny side up: you look hard and can’t spot a shadow.
Confident teenage boys chatting, bantering, ribbing. I remember this. The things you can say, the things you don’t dare. Scott is the more talkative, leaping in to answer, his dark eyes sharp. He’s the one who tells me about the filming, who kick-starts the anecdotes, while Glen keeps up a chortling accompaniment. They both know how each story ends, they laugh together, loud and happy. Their characters in the film have less to smile about. Jamie is picked on at school, Ste is slapped about by his drunk, punch-drunk father and bully brother. Their own midnight joys have to be kept down: the walls are paper-thin on their south London estate.
Glen and Scott are terrific in Beautiful Thing. Glen-as-Jamie is a little podgy, a lot uncertain. As the other lads play footie or splash about in the lake, he watches on the sidelines. In raucous male company, he’s like an ungainly water animal, a grounded seal out of his element. He only swims when he’s at home, watching old movies, cheeking his mum, falling in love. Of course, I know that actors are, well, acting. I know that they pretend to be someone else. Oh, there are no flies on me. But I assumed that Glen-as-Jamie was so convincing because Glen was really like that. In the flesh, though, he’s more solid than soft, awkwardness replaced by a roll and strut. I ask what qualities he and Jamie share. "Nothing," Glen says. "I think Jamie is totally opposite to what I am, in everything." Glen was never the class scapegoat: "Not that I bullied people at school, but it weren’t like that for me. He’s more of an outsider."
How about Scott-as-Ste, everybody’s friend, but a punchbag for his family? Scott thinks. "The only thing I can relate to is being quite outgoing. That’s what Ste is, he’s well-liked. But I’m not saying I’m well-liked, you’ll have to ask other people about that one." And Glen sniggers; you can imagine them joshing each other for years to come, until they end up as buddy-buddy cops or sitcom flatmates.
It’s a jokey sort of day. London is sunny, the lads are doing their first photo-shoot, their first interview-over-lunch. They look to the nice publicity man who’s chaperoning them ("They’re already calling me Mother") to see what they can order. Glen kids he’s choosing the priciest dish on the menu, and then he apologises. It’s all new, they’re finding out the form. Banter slides down with the ketchup, and emotional outpourings aren’t on the cards. Even Oprah has trouble easing open the shells where adolescent boys lock their hearts, and she has Californians to work with. So it’s no surprise when Scott says the hardest thing about the film was "Trying to be sincere and sensitive all the time. I’ve never done that sensitive part before. Normally I’m the top character, the thug or the drug dealer."
"In Prime Suspect I was knocking you down the hill," Glen butts in.
"And now everyone’s doing their crying bit and all that."
And all that. ‘All that’ is looking, touching, kissing. ‘All that’ is parting your lips to say the forbidden, to taste the taboo. Did they have rehearsals for ‘all that’? "No," says Scott, "Hettie [Macdonald, the director] wanted the spontaneity, so the minute we were ready to do it, that’d be it." How did they know they were ready to do it? Better not ask - you’ll embarrass the lads. You’ll embarrass yourself.
Scott had been up for a part in one of the earlier stage productions, so he knew the form, but the kissing came out of the blue to Glen, expecting to audition for another young tearaway. "While I was waiting," he remembers, "the lady at the reception goes, ‘Do you know what this film’s about? Well, it’s about two young lads who build up a relationship,’ she goes. ‘Kissing and that.’ No-one had told me this, I was quite shocked."
Once over the shock, Glen settled down to seven auditions before he and Scott were cast. At the final hurdle, they were scrutinised by Linda Henry, who plays Jamie’s sharp-tongued, big-hearted mother. "She had to say what she thought of me after I’d gone," winces Glen, as if exposed to public reckoning by his own mum. "We thought we hadn’t got it," adds Scott, "but Linda come out after us and she said, ‘You were fine.’ And that night I got a call from my agent, and I was stunned." Both are glad that the other was cast. "It would have been easier if we both didn’t get it," says Scott, and Glen agrees: "If I didn’t get the part and I saw you in magazines..." - he puffs in mock jealousy - "it would be frustrating."
The boys used to meet up at auditions, and with the wonderfully self-possessed Temeka Empson, who plays Jamie’s rude-girl neighbour, Leah, with gold in her hair and sass on her lips. They spend their spare hours at the Anna Scher Theatre in Islington. You see Anna Scher kids all the time on telly. They start off pushing and shoving in Grange Hill, ties trailing over their shoulders, crisps and pop in their hands. Then they grow up and embark on careers of petty thieving on The Bill. If they’re lucky they become persistent offenders on Prime Suspect, or even EastEnders. Producers know London is a jostling, dangerous place, and Anna Scher fills their bag with rumbustious, noisy kids: quick learners with a tube map behind their eyes.
The Anna Scher Theatre is a happy feeding ground for casting directors grubbing for authenticity, but it isn’t a proper stage school full of little Bonnie Langfords. "A lot of the people go to socialise." Says Glen, who joined a five-year waiting list to accompany one of his mates, and had forgotten all about it when the place came up. The lads chant Anna’s dicta in unison: "Star is not a word. Failure is not a word."
Glen trod the Scher career path. "In Grange Hill I was a bully, and in EastEnders I was a druggie. I found it easy: where I live, it’s a tough area, so you know what to do." While Glen dodges the Romford rumble, Scott lives near King’s Cross, London’s own little corner of hell. "You see some strange things going on," he says, "so many different things every day that I think it helps you."
If they’ve seen anything that helped with the Thamesmead boys crammed top-to-toe in Jamie’s small bedroom, they’re not saying. Glen describes Jamie’s angry, bleary confrontation with his mother as if his body had taken him by surprise. He rubs his eye with his fist to demonstrate. "You know you go like this when you’re crying? Well I did that, and I started crying. I’ve never done that before in anything I’ve done. And I watched Linda. It makes my eyes water when I see someone else cry, and straight away I said, ‘I got the tears, let’s do the shoot.’ " Scott couldn’t squeeze out real tears for fist-battered Ste and was tapped by the tear-stick every five minutes. But who knows where tears, and love, come from? Glen only says, "At first we spoke to Jonathan, the writer, and he explained his experiences."
"He gave us a little insight into it," adds Scott. "When an important scene came up, we’d all sit down and talk about it - it was a very mutual thing. We had these little diaries in rehearsal, and we had to write everything we thought about the character, and make up everything that wasn’t in the script, about where they used to live, what happened here, what happened there." Hettie Macdonald led them into The Method with rigour. "One day we didn’t come out of character," Scott continues. "Even at lunchtime, Linda actually cooked lunch for me and Tameka as Ste and Leah, like we’d just gone round to their house."
I ask if it was difficult to keep in character, and Glen looks guilty. While Jamie’s passions are old movies and femme icons, the actor is an inveterate card player. Glen hunches his shoulders, shuffles an imaginary pack, looking like a poker-school goon from Guys and Dolls. He’d be good as Harry the Horse, say, in a checkered suit and a raft of heavy rings. Now Glen is dealing an imaginary hand. "There’s me pulling out the cards all the time," is how he remembers the shoot.
Beautiful Thing was filmed in three flats on a real housing estate, and like the fictional love story, it unfolded under the eyes of all the neighbours. The film’s content only became clear during the shooting of the last, very public scene, when Ste and Jamie share a smoochy dance. "At first I thought, we’re gonna have such a bad day," Scott recalls. "Everyone was looking, and you got a few teenagers who, er... but a lot of the others were standing around and they were fine. Once they got used to it they were absolutely great. We had all the locals dancing together."
Soon the kids were coming up to chat to the cast and nick the crew’s biscuits, while Glen dealt the cards in every break. They didn’t have much problem shedding their characters when the cameras stopped rolling. "It’s not hard leaving them behind, getting into them is hardest," says Scott. "Especially these characters, anyway."
The afternoon is drifting away in Soho, London’s media-land, the lunch account patch lapped by frothy tides of cappuccino. Soho was named after a hunting cry: appropriate enough for an area full of feeders on human flesh, hungry for the next big thing. And who knows, maybe I’m sitting across the table from it. Beautiful Thing will guarantee the actors far more exposure than they’ve had before. "It’s a nervous excitement really, because you don’t know what’s coming. You’re excited because it’s something new. It’s gonna be a weird feeling, doing interviews all the time."
Glen has had a tiny taste of public recognition, after his EastEnders stint. "When I did EastEnders, I wore my new jacket. It was a Schott jacket, and I was one of the first people in my area to have one - I bet I was the only one. And I was walking back with a few friends after a club one night, a couple of weeks after it had been shown, and all of a sudden I got four blokes walking towards me. As they’re going past, one says [his voice thickens] ‘EastEnders boy, innit.' I asked, ‘How do you know?’ and he went, ‘It’s the coat, innit.’ "
"It’s what you get if you wear your own clothes on set," says Scott sagely.
"But I didn’t mind it," Glen protests.
Clothes are, after all, important, and being noted for a classy clobber is as good as winning approval for your performance. The lads have been kitted out in Diesel goodies for the day, and are clearly reluctant to give them back. Glen bought his Schott coat with his first cheque from acting: "You’re used to working part-time, getting a little bit of money, and that just goes like the wind. But this was a lot more than I had been told."
With his first dollop of dosh, Scott took the money and ran like the clappers through the clothes rack. "I was going out on a complete mad spending spree," he says, eyes gleaming, "just walking round and buying everything. There are a few things I really wish I’d never bought."
What was the most shameful fashion blunder?
"I think my worst one - but somehow I still like it - was this crushed velvet silver jacket, with a Chinese collar. It really stands out. I’ve only worn it once - it was reflecting the light." Glen is more sensible: "The clothes I buy are casual more than outstanding," he explains. "I like to look cool, but I wouldn’t wear something just to be different."
In Beautiful Thing different can be dangerous, but the film also shows us that different can be fun. And so Scott rhapsodises about his new flowered shirt. "I really like it," he beams. "It just makes me feel happy." Happy is good - a long, hot summer, with school a fading memory and all the time in the world to let sunshine into your heart; Beautiful Thing ends in a golden sunburst as the boys soft-shuffle to the glorious amplitude of the Mamas and the Papas’ Dream a Little Dream of Me, winding arms around each other, burying a cropped head in a plaid shoulder.
Gay rites-of-passage stories tend to end in true love or suicide: get laid or knot your own noose. Jonathan Harvey’s ending could be horribly sentimental as his heroes smooch, oblivious to a gawping crowd, but it isn’t, quite. Jamie’s mum is dancing with Leah to show support for her boy, but even as she shakes her tush, her eyes are wary. She knows that the world looks less friendly when the music stops, that demons are waiting. People can be cruel, friendships fade, the fiercest romance can dwindle to ashes (Harvey himself gives the relationship a year, no more). This ending is a moment, a shining moment, that stops the clocks and keeps out the world.
Still this is just a beginning for Glen and Scott - whose mobile phone rings as we get ready to leave. Out there in the sunny streets are other interviews, meetings, publicity junkets. Glen has a girlfriend, but maybe there’s a gorgeous girl for Scott ("I’m waiting by the phone for an
audition or a woman, you don’t know what’s best"). They’ve got a whole sunny afternoon before they have to give their new clothes back.
Beautiful Thing opens June 14
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