Ashley Walters: 'Nothing started working for me until I was clean and sober'

By Tom Whitfield

Ashley Walters has been sober for nearly six years, and he dates everything else to that fact. "The truth is, nothing started working for me until I was clean and sober," he says ahead of the UK release of Animol, his debut as a feature director, on 30 October.

The claim deserves scrutiny, and Walters' own biography supplies the test. Before he turned 21, he had a No 1 hit as Asher D of So Solid Crew, performed on the West End stage, become a father and served seven months in prison. He is now 44, with eight children and three grandchildren.

What does Animol change for Walters?

It moves him from actor to director, and it returns him to the setting of his 2002 incarceration — from the other side of the door. The film, written by Nick Love of Football Factory fame, is set in a young offender institution. It is not autobiographical, Walters says, but much of it draws on his own memories. "I wanted it to feel, look and sound the way it felt, looked and sounded to me."

The 15-year-old protagonist, Troy (Tut Nyuot), is coerced into smuggling a phone in the opening scene, and the tension builds from there. The film meets the genre's expectations — brutality, hierarchies, staff-inmate friction — but defies them too, with a queer romantic element handled with sensitivity. Walters calls the result "slightly elevated": "I didn't want it to feel grey and gloomy like the other prison-genre films." He describes it as a tender, tactile film in which men hold each other. "There's love, and I'm like that with my friends. I kiss my friends on the cheek, my stepdad will give me a kiss, I still kiss Mum, I'll kiss my kids."

Stephen Graham, his friend since the 2004 sitcom Top Buzzer, plays the welfare officer and closes the film with a talk about shame.

What does he say about So Solid Crew and prison?

His view of the early-2000s era is blunt. "Everything other than the music, it was bad, it was negative," he says. The British music was real; the Americanised style, jewellery and guns were not. The then culture minister Kim Howells called him a "boasting macho idiot rapper". Behind the scenes, he says, "I was questioning if I was doing the right thing."

The prison term, he says now, was "one of the best things that happened to me". On his first night, inmates shouted insults and threatened to kill him. "It pushed me to the thoughts I needed to have: who do I want to be?"

How did the turnaround happen?

On release, doors were shut: no agent, a stalled music career, a US travel ban. Saul Dibb's Bullet Boy restarted his acting. Top Boy, from 2011, made him globally recognisable as Dushane — a name strangers still call him in the street. "I'm a 44-year-old man," he says. "I'm not even a 'boy' any more."

Sky's Bulletproof (2018) ran three seasons with two Black leads — Walters and Noel Clarke — after years of pitches; it was cancelled in April 2021 amid allegations against Clarke. Walters says the two have not spoken since, but adds: "Everyone has got their own journey and everyone has their own story to tell."

His own reckoning came in November 2020, after an argument with his wife, Danielle. He had used alcohol and cocaine for about 15 years. "Maybe in the first year, alcohol and substances were great," he says, before conceding: "very, very quickly it stopped working, and started to hold me back." Four weeks in rehab followed; he moved out of London in 2021 and now lives on the Kent coast.

What connects it to Adolescence?

Walters anchored the second episode of the Netflix hit as the detective who is also a father failing to reach his son. He resists drawing the link himself, but concedes the shared theme is "uncovering a marginalised group of people. And in the UK one of the biggest marginalised groups is kids." His directing credits since sobriety include the short Boys (2021), Ackley Bridge and A Thousand Blows.

Every redemptive arc invites suspicion; Walters offers dates and specifics rather than sentiment. Animol, out 30 October, will show whether the director matches the actor.