An Hour With… Anson Boon

To get a kombucha in this place, Anson Boon explains, you actually have to go out of the bar and round the corner, and then into the café bit (which is about to close), get it from there and bring it back. We are in the kind of hotel that exists exclusively for journalists to talk to actors about their new projects – to get to the actor, you walk past a lobby of creatives all wearing AirPods and £300 jumpers and staring mutely at Zoom – but you still have to go on a sherpa trek to get your own kombucha. We decide against this. And the interview has begun.

Boon is newly 26, and feeling it, too. “If this was last year, I would have absolutely had a beer with you,” he says, in the off-duty actor uniform of a really nice embroidered shirt, a luxurious chore jacket, smooth box-fresh loafers and a tasteful amount of yeah-the-last-couple-of-years-have-gone-alright jewellery. “But like, I’m trying to look after myself, otherwise I’m going to burn myself out.”

It’s weird he hasn’t already: after marching through 2019’s 1917 and roaring through Danny Boyle’s Disney+ Sex Pistols biopic Pistol, he turned in an ooh-he’s-good performance opposite the ludicrous trio of Dame Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy in last year’s Paramount+ Guy Ritchie megahit, MobLand. Today is his only day off this week before filming series two tomorrow with the actor he simply calls “Helen” – “I know, crazy,” he says, in response to me being gobsmacked he’s even allowed to call her that – and he wants to keep a clear head.

Which is a shame, because Boon loves the pub. “I like all kinds of pub,” he says, before listing off a ream of names of places he asks me to take off the record, because he doesn’t want them to get too popular, the sign of a true and honest pubsman. “Posh pubs, gastropubs, football pubs… I love them all. I like old-school pubs where you step in and you’ve got such an eclectic mix of people you could be in any time period, yeah.” He lists off more pubs. “Everybody who knows me will read this and think, ‘Oh: he’s talking about the pub’,” he says, with a roll of his eyes. “I’m obsessed. They’re the best thing about this country. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your walk of life is, everyone comes together in a pub. I don’t want to write – I’m an actor, I feel really strongly about that; I love acting, right? – but if I were ever to make my own film, it would be about a pub.”

Speaking of acting, he does a lot of it in Good Boy, Jan Komasa’s psychological thriller where a wig-and-murderer-glasses-wearing Stephen Graham (playing, and this will surprise you, “slightly sinister and really intense”) kidnaps Boon’s 19-year-old Tommy and chains him up in his country house, shared with a ghostly Andrea Riseborough and their 10-year-old son, Kit Rakusen’s Jonathan.

What follows is, well, weird: a locked house where the bulging logic of the place starts to make a strange sort of sense and, an hour into the runtime, you see a neutered Tommy sitting calmly on the family sofa, chain around his neck, to watch classic films with everyone tucked under a blanket, and think: yeah, seems normal.

It’s a notable performance from the young actor, made even more remarkable by the fact he didn’t go to drama school: Boon dropped out of college halfway through his course, sent 200 emails to agents in London, and hustled his way in from there. “I tell everyone I went to the Drama School of Kate Winslet, because I did a film with her [2019’s Blackbird] when I was 18,” he says, and I add it to the list titled Another One of Anson Boon’s Insane Sentences. “Kate Winslet taught me everything in terms of the toolbox I take to work every day. She’s amazing with young actors.”

Sharing the screen with two of Britain’s finest actors in Good Boy never seems to faze Boon, probably because he spends most of his time on set getting in the absolute way of everyone. “As soon as you’re not filming, you become an inconvenience. Fifty people come into the room and they’re redressing everything: you are such a menace. But I just love the environment, so I’ll pitch up a chair and sit next to the director of photography and hope I’m not winding him up. I love watching everyone do what they do.” You can’t imagine anyone getting mad at him: Boon has the gregarious effect of a just-turned-one puppy, or one of those Olympians you sometimes get who has enough charisma to host actual TV. There’s no smugness: he just has the bearing of someone who lives an incredibly charmed life.

For someone so interested in the mechanical reality of production (and such a voracious film guy: his tastes currently lean “artful European”, but he’s working his way through a big list of classics, too), I tell Boon I’m surprised he doesn’t have any way-down-the-line ambitions to make films of his own. “I just enjoy going to work with someone like Jan – this cool, experimental, European director – then going to work with someone like Guy Ritchie, whose bread and butter is old-school crime pub drama. Then you go to work with Danny Boyle, who’s one of the most obsessed-with-rock-music people I’ve ever met. I’m learning from that.” Well, yeah. If you can drop those sorts of names and call a Dame “Helen”, you really don’t need to spend any time arguing with a DOP.

We leave and shake hands as the first golden fronds of spring sunshine melt behind the horizon, and I ask what he’s up to with the rest of his day. “A stroll, probably.” The next day off is going to be spent looking for furnishings for his new flat – “Trying to figure out my candles right now” – and, I suspect, floating joyously into literally any kind of pub.

Good Boy is in cinemas now

Picture credit: BFA/Magnolia Pictures