Nick Mohammed: ‘This is how you make period television now. It’s refreshing’
‘There’s nothing more fun than pretending to fly,” grins Nick Mohammed, who plays a bumbling magical spirit called Billy Blind in Sally Wainwright’s swashbuckling new adventure series, Rene-gade Nell. As the tiny winged character who grants sup-er-natural powers to the show’s fearless highwaywoman (played by Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland), he’s often shown buzzing around the heroine’s ear, like a jaunty northern bumblebee.
“Although there are just a bunch of guys hoicking you up on wires with pulleys,” he says, “and the harness is pulling in all sorts of awkward places – when you’re 30ft up on a rig and swooping down through the air, it really does feel like you’re living every childhood dream. Magical, thrilling… full of wonder.”
“Wonder” is a word to which the sweetly boyish 43-year-old actor/comedian/writer keeps returning in the hour we spend huddled in his trailer on the rainy, south London film set of the crime caper Deep Cover. He uses it to describe his child-hood love of magic tricks, the music of John Williams (“so many flying themes!”) and his wide-eyed delight at ascending to roles that mean his trailer is parked beside those of co-stars Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom. That ascent has largely been down to his celebrated performance as kitman-turned-coach Nate Shelley in the sitcom Ted Lasso – two of the show’s 61 Emmy nominations were for Mohammed.
Born in Leeds in 1980 – his mother a Cyprus-born GP and his father an Indo-Trinidadian legal professional – Mohammed was a shy, clever boy. He spent time alone at home refining card tricks and practising the violin. “Magic was definitely a defence mechanism for me,” he reflects. “A way of surviving the school playground. You saw the school bully coming towards you? You got out a deck of cards and distracted him. I always had cards and coins in my bag.”
He recalls the precise moment when he learnt to turn this one-on-one art into a show. “For GCSE Design and Technology, I was in a class with quite a lot of – hmm, how to put this? – let’s say ‘brash’ kids. It was a tough environment for me. But one lesson where our teacher, Mr Pike, said: ‘We’ve got 20 minutes left over. Nick? Get your cards out!’ I did card tricks for 20 minutes and I remember noticing that these kids, who would not normally give me the time of day, were doing every-thing I needed them to do in order for the tricks to work. They went back to being children. It was just really nice.” He shakes his head and smiles. “I remember thinking: this is my superpower.”
Mohammed went on to study geophysics at Durham University (where he failed to get into the Durham Revue), before starting a PhD in seismology at Cambridge, where he found his feet in the Footlights – eventually abandoning academia for the comedy circuit. Although he never appeared as himself, always tucked safely behind his clown-like character, Mr Swallow, a nervy teacher-type persona who performs quite astonishing feats of memory and escapology, often while roller-skating chaotically around tilted stages.
Mohammed wasn’t comfortable with the “sneering, arrogant” face of both the magic and comedy he saw in the 1990s and early 2000s. “There was a sense that those on stage were looking down on you. They knew something you didn’t.” He wanted to warm the mood in theatres the way he’d done in that GCSE class. “When I do a trick, I don’t want people to feel they’ve been fooled, I want them to feel that sense of innocent wonder.”
While building his career, Moh-am-med took a job in an investment bank, where he’d occasionally raise eyebrows with props such as rubber chickens poking out of his bag. Gradually, he inched his way into the British comedy establishment, with small roles in TV comedies like Mir-anda, grad-u-ating to walk-ons in films such as Bridget Jones’s Baby and Ab Fab: The Movie (both 2016). He credits the support of his tea-cher wife, Becka, for “allowing me to do what I love” and for “steering the ship at home”.
When he’s not work-ing, he can be found playing music with his fam-ily – he and Becka have three children, aged eight, six and one. He’s just treated them to a piano: “It’s our favourite possession. It’s just a secondhand Yamaha upright, but it’s the first proper piano we’ve owned, and Becka is a -concert-level pianist. My older two play the violin and the cello. I play violin and Becka viola, so we’re a quartet. When our little one is old enough, we’ll get her a clarinet.”
Mainstream success for Mohammed came by way of the sitcom he wrote about inept GCHQ agents – Intelligence, in which he co-stars with David Schwimmer – and then Ted Lasso. He says you can track the shift in TV comedy trends between the two. “A show like Intelligence follows the format of comedies I loved growing up, like Some -Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, in which the hero starts a new job each week, then is terrible at it. Rinse and repeat.” He thinks that format has fallen from fashion “in favour of longform -comedy dramas with evolving characters, like Ted Lasso”.
As Ted Lasso (which began airing in 2020) was launched during the pandemic, Mohammed says he felt quite “sheltered” from its success at first. “It’s on Apple TV+, which wasn’t so popular in the UK back then, so I was quite removed from its success in America. Lockdown meant I couldn’t fly over for press junkets. I did Zoom interviews with the LA Times from home with piles of laundry behind me. I’d never even visited America before I went over for the Emmys.” So fame came as a shock. “Oh my God, yes.”
But he’s hungry for more: “Ambition can be used like an ugly word. But it shouldn’t be. You need to be ambitious in this industry.” He’s particularly proud of Renegade Nell because it’s “a family adventure that doesn’t patronise older kids, but isn’t too violent for the younger ones”. He wanted to be involved as soon as he knew Wainwright had written it. “Although it’s a bit of a departure for her – being set in the 18th century and having these super-natural elements – it’s also got themes that run all the way through her work. There’s this extraordinary, complex, powerful female lead; and a plot that deals with social justice and class warfare.”
The heroine, Nell, is a publican’s daughter who’s forced into a life of musket-wielding crime when the local lord of the manor throws her family out of their home. There’s a giddy delight to watching her turn the tables by turfing toffs from their carr-i-ages and flouncing off in their silky skirts, before rel-eas-ing innocent peasants from prison. Mohammed says he sees Billy Blind as Wainwright’s incarnation on screen, “bringing herself into the action, acting as the story’s conscience. A bit like a 21st-century Jiminy Cricket.”
He’s also delighted that Renegade Nell’s cast is so diverse. “It’s not what we grew up watching. I think we have to thank Bridgerton for that, for making the big statement that this is how you make period tele-vision now. There’s nothing wrong with sticking to the exact period, of course, there will always be a place for that. But this is refreshing.”
And, of course, there’s all that flying. “I know! Whenever I’ve been asked to choose what superpower I’d like, it’s always flight. I still love watching flying scenes in films and TV. Suspending reality and suspending gravity…” He sighs and looks out at the grey sky. “Honestly, put me on a wire and I could stay up there all day. Wonderful.”
Renegade Nell is on Disney+ from March 29