Something is clearly wrong, I realize, as Anson Boon drinks mint tea in a cafe full of herbs in East London, enjoying one of the last moments of calm before his career explodes. The 22-year-old actor will soon be seen playing punk icon Johnny Rotten in Pistol, the new six-part biographical film of Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols at Disney +. It’s the kind of paper that will define how you’ll see it over the next few years: threatening, volatile, a little dangerous. And yet, how to put that? It’s so cute! A little punk pleasure to be here. The kind of kid my mom would love, all “Yeah, mate!” and “I love my pubs!” and “I’m moving in the world” (referring to the fact that your tea comes in a real pot).
“Sometimes I feel a bit like Hannah Montana,” she says, referring to the Disney Channel sitcom in which Miley Cyrus played a normal school girl with a pop star alter ego. “Like, I can do these cool things and go to photo shoots and fly to LA and stuff like that, and that’s when I’m Hannah … Then I go home to Peterborough and I go back with my classmates I’ve been to. ‘school and they’re all builders and plumbers and all that and I love it. “
Which isn’t a comparison I can see if the young man is endearing to Lydon, who has done his best to keep the biographical film from happening, including taking his former bandmates to court (and losing) and complaining that Disney has created a “middle ground.” class fairy tale ”. But Boon, as it turns out, is a long way from your typical middle-class actor, and there’s something impressively stubborn about the way he’s become one of the most popular young English actors in the world.
“My parents used to say, ‘Are you sure you want to make it so hard for your audition?’ Photo: Nick Thompson / The Observer
No one in his family or circle has ever done anything like acting, he says. He wears Comme des Garçons sneakers, a green military jacket and a Japanese hip T-shirt that his father bought him (“I have a really cool dad”), along with his grandfather’s seal ring and his father’s chain. nana. Family is clearly important to him. His mother was one of four siblings whose entire family lived in a single room in a Tottenham home until they were moved to a town house in Peterborough in the 1960s. “They were what you call an overflowing family. You can follow the M1 and A10 in north London and all the cities along the way are centers of old working class Londoners who went to start a new family in their new The other side is ranching. a small garage sales company, which also employs a number of aunts and uncles.Bonon’s main off-stage passions are Tottenham Hotspur FC and “shit pubs”, in particular Antwerp Arms in near the Spurs’ camp. “It’s literally five doors down from the house with that bedroom where my mother grew up. The Spurs bought shares of that pub to keep it afloat. This is our club! “
What made you want to be an actor? “Honestly, I have no idea, mate!” He thinks he might have been watching Tom Hanks at Forrest Gump. O Dirty Dancing. But he knows that’s what he’s always wanted to do: he’s always made people laugh by making stupid impressions. Her mother has a picture of the Hollywood poster she drew when she was six years old. When I ask him who his heroes are now, he rolls with Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy and Matthew McConnaughey. But when he left his elementary school at 16 he had no connection in the world of acting or really a single clue to what he was doing.
He, however, had the internet. He entered the industry watching explanatory videos that several casting agents had posted on YouTube. “I asked for a suitable camera to audition for Christmas when I was 17 and I bought a blue wallpaper because they say blue is conducive to personal tapes,” he says. “I didn’t go to theater school, so I had in mind that if I wanted people to take me seriously and if I wanted people to take me to serious auditions, I had to commit to taking it seriously.”
Rotten to the core: (from left) Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious and Anson Boon as John Lyndon in the Danny Boyle Pistol mini-series. Photography: Rebecca Brenneman
I tell them that after interviewing a few things up close about the boarding school’s challenges and the burdens of having parents who are also actors, it’s all refreshing. “Actually, the head of my mother’s Apple TV,” he jokes. “No, it’s not that vibe! I mean I had a really nice childhood and my parents are very old and supportive. But I’m definitely aware of what it’s like not to grow up with these things.”
His first really decent role was in the family drama of the late Roger Michell of 2019, Blackbird, an experience that made him, Susan Sarandon, and Kate Winslet get matching tattoos (a blackbird, inside his arm). “I was like a sponge when I was 18 or 19, working with these people, taking all the best parts of their process.” They followed roles in Sam Mendes’ 1917 World War I drama and Master Harold and the Boys at the National Theater, before being invited to an audition for an “Untitled Danny Boyle Series” halfway through the first. Covid lock.
He passed the first round of general auditions before being asked to film again, this time for the role of John Lydon. He got his mother to film him recreating Lydon’s own audition for the band: an improvisation on Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen by Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and manager Malcolm McLaren at Vivienne Westwood’s store. “This scene is so fundamental because it’s like now or never, this is the opportunity,” Boon says. “My parents said, ‘Are you sure you want to do so much for your audition?’ I said, “You know what? I feel like I’ll either get it for sure or they’ll tell me shit?”
And here began the things of childhood dreams. Boon was flown out of the blockade for lengthy pub discussions with Boyle, meetings with Steve Jones, Chrissy Hynde, Vivienne Westwood and the rest, plus three months of “bandcamp.” The rehearsals took place in the old ITV studio overlooking the Houses of Parliament on the Thames, where Boon and the rest of the band had to learn the full list of Pistols almost professionally because Boyle wanted all the music was played live on set. . “I think we formed a little bit of a lifelong brotherhood,” Boon says.
The series, based on Lonely Boy, Jones’s 2016 Memoirs, seems to have the potential to launch into the career of Boyle’s 1996 classic Trainspotting, which propelled Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller to starry. Here, Toby Wallace is as magnetic as Jones, and you may recognize Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the boy from Love Actually, as manager McLaren (or “the most evil man in the world,” as Lydon called him).
The history of Sex Pistols is already one of the most fabulous in rock’n’roll: the dirt, the fury, the word C on ITV, that concert that inspired everyone in Manchester to form a band, the Silver Jubilee, the BBC ban. , Sid and Nancy, death, disorder, defiance, etc. But the focus on Jones gives Pistol a lesser-known center of gravity, emphasizing the child abuse, rejection, and crime that led to the band’s music. The script, by Baz Luhrmann’s longtime collaborator Craig Pearce, will not delight all punk fans, but on the whole it is a sincere attempt to chart the seismic impact of punk on British culture. What the director wanted to impress most in his young cast was how boring England was until the Sex Pistols appeared. “I think maybe that was the first thing he told me after they fired me,” Boon says. “It simply came to our notice then [at the time]and how outrageous this guy was with shiny orange spiky hair and a bright pink jacket with safety pins and Tic Tac caps on. “
Boon and his co-stars soon discovered that the idea that anyone can play punk is a myth. “I mean, the way John sings isn’t easy,” says Boon, who had no previous musical experience. But they all felt like they were getting somewhere when Jordan (Pamela Rooke), the model and muse credited with creating the punk look, went to the rehearsal rooms one afternoon and asked them to play with her.
Man of the Moment: Anson Boon wears black dress, white shirt, lemon blanket cardigan with bow, all from dunhill.com. Photo: Nick Thompson / The Observer
“That was like a big nerve,” Boon says. “I said, ‘What song do you want us to play?’ She told Holidays in the Sun, which is one of the hardest, so we did it and her reaction was more than we could have expected. thank you with a gift for a facial mask made of vintage fabric from Vivienne Westwood and a little performance note. “She said,” Just be sure to curl your toes a little more because John was a little of pigeons “. Rooke died earlier this year: the face mask means even more to him now.
It feels cruel to interrupt Boon’s reminiscences of what was clearly the time of his life to point out that the idea of a biopic of the Sex Pistols (which will be screened at Disney +, no less) is something that Lydon himself has taken it as a serious personal insult. . I read to Boon some of the comments Lydon has made since his failed attempt to stop the series left him in financial ruin: “Disney has stolen the past” … “Middle Class Fantasy” … ” Rewriting History “…” It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. ” What is Boon’s answer to …