Breaking Baz: ‘Boys From The Blackstuff’s Barry Sloane Talks Acting Opposite Steve Coogan’s “The Dog” In Netflix Smash ‘The Sandman’ & His Upcoming Portrayal Of John Lennon
EXCLUSIVE: Barry Sloane (Revenge, Passenger) is currently appearing nightly on the London stage as Yosser Hughes, a proud, skilled laborer who has become mentally unstable due to lack of a job, in James Graham’s powerful adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s seminal 1980s TV drama Boys From the Blackstuff. During the day, he’s on set playing The Prodigal for the second season of Netflix cosmic horror series The Sandman.
So who is The Prodigal? Millions of keen Sandman followers know the answer. But for the rest, here we go: In Neil Gaiman’s expansive The Sandman graphic novel universe, upon which the Netflix series is based, The Prodigal is one of the “Endless Family” of spooky siblings.
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The Sandman is Tom Sturridge aka Dream. The others are Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium.
As we’ve ascertained from the first season, each of The Endless has a realm in which they are sovereign.
“The Prodigal is Destruction,” Sloane says, noting that he’s referred to as The Prodigal “because in the first season he has abandoned his post and left. Now he’s returned.”
Because The Endless are omnipotent, he adds that “they are the yin and the yang. They are Destruction and Creation. It’s kind of like, he can blow things up, but also wants to paint,” Sloane remarks helpfully.
Laughing, he adds: ”And Steve Coogan plays Barnabus, my dog. So it’s me and Steve having these, just talking to a dog, kind of conversations.”
They’re still filming episodes 11 and 12, and it’s likely Season 2 of the hit will be released in two parts – the first segment probably in 2025, unlikely to be earlier, the second a while afterwards. Sturridge and Gwendoline Christie return to lead an ensemble cast. In the first season Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Donna Preston and Mason Alexander Park played Death, Despair and Desire, respectively. For the new season the other Endless siblings, along with Sloane, are being played by Esmé Creed-Miles as Delirium and Adrian Lester as Destiny. Filming started in June last year but the shoot was halted due to the SAG dispute.
A healthy moustache
Sloane boasts a healthy moustache for his role as Yosser in Boys from The Blackstuff, which started at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, with Kate Wasserberg, artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, as director, before moving down south to the National Theatre from where Bill Kenwright Ltd transferred it to the Garrick Theatre in the West End. Its limited run ends there on August 3.
“On days I play The Prodigal the hair and makeup team stick on a beard and link it up with the moustache,” he reveals, but he’ll snip the bushy bristles off when Boys From The Blackstuff closes.
The Bleasdale-Graham show has been an important role for Sloane because it’s set in his native Liverpool.
He describes his devastating portrait of Yosser as being like “a scream from the soul,” and it’s a searing role that, certainly in Sloane’s hands, holds our attention.
The late Bernard Hill superbly originated the part on television and his “Gizza job” howl became a rallying cry in the 1980s – it’s entered popular parlance now – for hard workers deprived of a job with no money to fend for their families.
Sloane was a babe in arms when Boys from The Blackstuff was first broadcast on BBC TV in 1982. He was born in a terraced house in Garston, a district on the eastern shore of the Mersey referred to, Sloane says, as Garston under the Bridge, opposite the docks.
Sloane describes it as a “rough area” that’s “all broken down now, sadly, but then it was very much a dock side community.”
His parents worked a number of jobs including at the local Bryant and May match factory until it was taken over by a Swedish match company, which “also made lighters, funnily enough,” he chortles.
“I knew a lot of the characters from this. I was born in 1981, so that was the Liverpool that I was born into and fortunately my childhood was great. So I never felt like it looks on Boys From The Blackstuff. But when I look at it, when I see pictures, I go, ‘Oh, okay.’ I can see it now. But it certainly didn’t feel that way, and I’m thankful to my parents for that,” he says appreciatively.
His grandfather was a painter and decorator from the Merseyside suburb of Speke, bordered by Garston. “They’re like rival places right next to each other,” Sloane notes.
“So my mom was from Garston and my dad was from Speke. It’s akin to being Catholic or Protestant or Liverpool or Everton [soccer teams],” he explains. Or, Romeo and Juliet.
“But they got together and so it was a mishmash,” he adds.
He’d visit each set of grandparents in the competing towns “and never the twine shall meet.”
Sloane’s the eldest of three siblings and he’s the first in the immediate generation of his family to go into acting though he believes that if he dug into family scrapbooks he’d find something “because it’s usually there in the blood.“
Everyone sang and performed at family get-togethers, he says. “Nobody did it professionally, but everyone would get up at parties and have a great voice and sing.”
Shaking his head, Sloane reconsiders. “There were a lot of performers in my family, they just weren’t getting paid for it.”
But as Sloane grew older he knew that he had to “escape.”
Back then he wasn’t able to articulate why but “I just knew that I was going to do something else. I was in bands from when I was 14, my friends and I used to play the pubs and clubs all around Liverpool,” and he was doing “plays at school and everybody was saying I could do it. It was the first time I’d been told that I was good at something.”
At music college a lecturer informed him that there are better musicians in his year “but there’s only one who’s going to make it on stage.” For a long time he resented the artful comment, but he’s reconsidered that view now.
“At the time I was like, f**k you. But now I completely understand what he was doing, technically proficient, whatever. But I was jumping around like Kurt Cobain and smashing guitars and screaming at people.”
He played music at a mate’s house where there were instruments. Told one day that he’d be the bass player, he recalls that he didn’t “have a clue what that was, so I just hit the top string of an acoustic guitar.”
Later he took guitar lessons and his father purchased him his first bass guitar when he was 14.
When he was 18 his parents drove him to an open casting call for an NBC TV movie called In His Life: The John Lennon Story. “And I didn’t get John, but I got to be a part of this Beatles film.”
Musician Philip McQuillan landed the title role while Sloane got to play Lennon’s boyhood friend, Ivan Vaughan, and later a schoolmate of Paul McCartney’s. It was Vaughan who introduced the two future rock icons to each other at a community fete.
The Beatles connection has sort of come, as he puts it, “full circle,” because he’s co-written a play called Two Of Us with Mark Stanfield and Richard Short in which he’ll portray the ‘Imagine’ singer. I’ll return to this in a moment.
Sloane acknowledges In His Life: The John Lennon Story was a pretty awful but says that it was “great” for him – an opportunity that pointed the way forward.
“Also with this business, you need luck as much as talent. Things need to align and if that all happens then you can go from here to there,” he says, as he stretches his arms wide sipping iced soft drinks at my regular haunt, The Union Club in London’s Soho.
Sloane wasn’t instantly able to handpick jobs. He was almost echoing Yosser’s “Gizza job?!” cry.
Turning to his parents for money wasn’t in his DNA. “I would never ask them, so I would just go from job to job” in between the little acting or music work he could secure in those early struggling years, he says.
And some jobs were more dangerous than others. For a while he was employed at two post office venues in Liverpool that turned out to be “the most robbed post offices” in the city, and were even featured in BBC TV Crimewatch bulletins. “We had a methadone clinic next to one and the sub postmaster at the time was attacked by robbers with samurai swords. So that was kind of exciting,” he says with evident glee.
Much like those portrayed in Blackstuff, it wasn’t in his blood to be a slacker. “I’d do anything. My father has worked many, many jobs, so I kind of watched his work ethic and that’s something that’s kind of stayed with me in my career.”
He stands for “being a great person to work with, working hard, being prepared, being on time. And the longer I’ve gone into my career, you realize that at a certain level everyone’s got talent. Everyone’s talented, but not everybody wants to work with everybody and that’s key. You need to be a gentleman along with everything else.”
I say that because that runner you were nice or ‘pooey’ to a few years back will be in a director’s chair one day, and they will remember if you were an ass or not.
“One hundred per cent,” he nods.
“The best actors I’ve worked with, and I’ll put Mark [Rylance] at the top of that tree. If you can be Mark Rylance and have zero ego in this game, and I mean that whenever I work with him, he’s been the most generous, humble man and have that much talent and not require it [an ego], then no one gets away with it with me at all. I’m like, if I’ve seen that man not have it, you don’t get to do it,” he says adamantly while also fondly recalling working with the Oscar winner on Jez Butterworth’s acclaimed stage play Jerusalem, directed by Ian Rickson.
Sloane played Troy Whitworth, a nasty piece of work.
During the London runs at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square and at the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue, Rylance’s dressing room became the center for fun with an annex set up for games, he explains. On Broadway, pool tables were installed. All the guys shared dressing room quarters. “Like, we’d be told Al Pacino is coming to see Mark in the shared dressing room, so I got to meet some nice people by proxy,” he recalls with warmth.
Looking at the trajectory of his career, it seems clear that the Jerusalem’s phenomenal success helped catapult his own career, as it did others in the company.
For instance, Aimeé-Fion Edwards, who originally played Phaedra in London and NYC, was propelled into major TV dramas including Peaky Blinders as Esme Shelby, and she’s currently to be seen as trigger-happy espionage agent Shirley Dander in the brilliant AppleTV+ series Slow Horses opposite the great Gary Oldman.
And it’s true, as Michael Crawford shared with me after he opened as the The Phantom of the Opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, produced by Cameron Mackintosh, on Broadway, “that you’ve really made it if you can make it on Broadway, and then you can make it anywhere.”
Sloane understood that Jerusalem represented a sublime shop window for his talents. “I made it count. I got there and I was like, ‘I need to get representation. I need to get people in to see this. I want to be visible here now.’.”
Rylance had pushed for Sloane’s wife and young child to be in NYC with him “for which the company paid for and put them up,” he adds full of gratitude.
He realized just how successful Jerusalem had become when one day he met Tom Hanks “and he was like, ‘You’re amazing in this,’ and he knew who I was. And then it twigged. I was like, this is big.”
Later he booked TV movie pilot Gotham that starred Megan Ketch and Brian Cox. It wasn’t picked up for series. “However, if it had gone on and been a success, we probably mightn’t have had Brian Cox in Succession,” he airily muses.
Shows that did go his way incudes: Revenge, Longmire, Litvinenko, The Bay, Passeneger, the Navy Seal drama Six, while he features as SAS officer Captain John Price in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game series. So far three have been made and plans for a fourth are being drawn up.
“Of course there’s huge finances at the top pumping money into it,” he says of making Call of Duty:Modern Warfare.” But the people who are making it love what they’re doing and it’s so collaborative. They’re creative and it’s playful and it’s very much like theater and that the only thing you have is the actor’s eyes…you’re basically in a leotard with a hat on,” he says referring to the contraption he has to sport for motion capture sessions.
Not playing “scousers”
Earlier on in his career he made an explicit point of not playing “scousers” as Liverpudlians are often called.
“I’ve kind of made a clear point of not being a scouser purposely, but also because I just think, right, if you are known as a scouser actor, you very often are not offered much outside that. And so early on I was like, I want to do roles that don’t have a scouse accent in them so that I can move. But you come back and play one of these scousers and it is kind of like a box ticked.”
During Jerusalem’s Broadway run he became friends with fellow cast member Richard Short (The Tragedy of Macbeth, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan) and they have written the Two Of Us play together.
Sloane was involved in all of Jerusalem’s iterations from its world premiere at the Royal Court in July 2009 to seasons in the West End and Broadway followed by another run in London. Then, after a 12 year absence, it returned to the Apollo in 2022.
“That was the trick. Coming back and doing that, that was fascinating. To come back in and play a character 12 years later, you know, with everything that happened in my life alongside it. I wasn’t even a father.”
Smiling, he clarifies that he was “almost” a father. ”Well, Katie [his designer wife] was pregnant during the first run of Jerusalem,” he adds, with their first child, daughter Gracie.
“So it was unbelievable to kind of approach that and what it did to Mark’s performance, and Mackenzie Crook’s performance…It kind of added a sadness to it that wasn’t there before.”
There’s sadness too associated with The Boys from The Blackstuff because the themes it explores are still relevant.
“I see that in the faces of the people who come and see me afterwards, who are so affected by it still and not just from a political standpoint,” he reflects thoughtfully.
“But there’s a broken masculinity that’s in Yosser. I’ve had so many people come up in tears and say that it was an element of their father who never exorcized that demon or that never had the voice or the power that Yosser manages to summon.”
The fragility of masculinity, the male mental health aspect of the play was one of the things that attracted him to it. “Something I’ve tried to get behind as much as possible,” his voice dropping as he reveals that “I lost a family member to suicide that way and so getting people to speak and trying to be that voice whenever I can get the chance to do it. And that was something about Yosser. It was like a man in 1982 really didn’t have anywhere to turn, anyone to speak to.”
John Lennon play
During Jerusalem’s Broadway run he became friends with fellow cast member Richard Short (The Tragedy of Macbeth, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan) and now they’ve collaborated on the aforementioned Two Of Us play together. Short’s not available to portray Paul McCartney opposite Sloane’s John Lennon because he’ll be busy in the Broadway production of Jez Butterworth’s new play, The Hills of California, which Sam Mendes will direct this fall. Following a holiday break with his family, Sloane will begin rehearsals to portray Liverpool’s famous son, with a premiere at the Watford Palace Theatre, north of London, on September 13 until September 21. It then transfers further north to Manchester’s HOME Theatre from September 26 through September 28.
Sloane and Short had the idea for the play after listening to a podcast of McCartney talking about “his biggest regret [being] not telling John Lennon that he loved him when they last met” in Manhattan in April, 1976.
“Men just men couldn’t say that to each other then, it was impossible,” Sloane says recounting the podcast, returning to that masculinity theme. “And McCartney just wishes that had held him and told him that. So we thought that was a great basis for a play and what we’ve written ruminates on what may have happened behind closed doors on that day.”
It’s also based on a TV movie shown in 2000, also called Two of Us, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and written by Mark Stanfield.
Sloane and Short worked with Stanfield and Paramount Pictures “to get this adapted,” hence Stanfield’s name in the writing credits.
Scot Williams, the show’s director, also has connections with Fab Four lore. He portrayed Pete Best, the drummer for the Beatles before they became famous, in director Ian Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat.
Ian Hart played Lennon and Stephen Dorfman was Stuart Sutcliffe. I remember meeting them all on set. The Two Of Us play creative team includes designer Amy Jane Cook, sound designer Adrienne Quartly, lighting designer Katy Morison and audio and visuals by DMLK.
Sloane explains that “while it’s two males on stage, leading it behind the scenes is Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono who push these two men back into a room and lock it to make sure that they can get through this existential funk and kind of move forward with their life. Sadly, we know what happened with John, but yeah, it’s a labor of love. It’s been a long time getting it put together.”
The long and winding road of Barry Sloane’s career has led right back to his Merseyside front door.
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