By Alex Ritman | Variety
Ashley Walters and Stephen Graham often end up crying when they talk on the phone.
Close friends for more than two decades after meeting on the long-forgotten British MTV sitcom “Top Buzzer” (about cannabis dealers in London), the two have shared numerous personal journeys with each other since then.
“We’ve been there when we’ve lost loved ones,” notes Walters. “We’ve had highs and lows through life, inside and outside of work.”
Of late, however, the tears have been ones of joy, as a call last week underlined.
“I said to him, ‘Steve, five years ago there was absolutely no chance that I was going to be in this position,” Walters explains. “So then he starts crying. Then I start going. My wife’s next to me and she starts going.”
He laughs.
“But it’s just a beautiful thing.”
The position Walters is currently in is one of wholly unexpected fast-tracked, steep crescendoed success. It’s a dramatic shift in fortunes that the 43-year-old south Londoner — who has been acting since the age of 10 (a small role in “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”) — freely acknowledges would have been practically unthinkable up until very recently.
Walters is speaking to Variety from Rhode Island, where he’s been shooting M. Night Shyamalan’s supernatural romantic thriller “Remain” alongside Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s his first major role in a U.S. movie.
“Sometimes it’s borderline surreal. You’re in-between takes having a quick chat with Jake or shooting the breeze with M. Night and you do have to slightly pretend like it’s all normal, pinching yourself to make sure you’re not going to wake up,” he says. “But it’s been a long time coming for me to have the opportunity to film in this capacity, in this space.”
Walters is also now an Emmy nominee thanks to “Adolescence,” the one-shot Netflix phenomenon in which he starred as Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe in two of the four critically acclaimed episodes (one alongside Graham, who also produced and co-wrote the show and is a fellow Emmy nominee). It’s his first brush with a major awards ceremony and the sort of industry recognition he says he’s simply not used to.
“I’ve been doing this for so, so long, but I’ve never really felt like an awards sort of person,” he says with a smile. “My name’s not usually thrown in the hat. So I never thought in a million years I’d be getting an Emmy nomination. It’s crazy, it’s nuts, it’s surreal. Man, this boy from Peckham!”
“Adolescence” has touched and transformed the careers of pretty much all those involved in the limited series, but few more so than Walters. And that’s even despite his status in the U.K. as an early trailblazer for Black working class actors (Daniel Kaluuya has previously said that seeing Walters on the cover of a magazine in the mid-2000s was a major inspiration for him).
“If I’m honest, it’s literally been overnight,” Walters says, clearly still trying to come to terms with everything that’s happened in the four months since the show launched.
In the “Adolescence” aftermath, he says he had “Steven Spielberg’s office calling… ‘We’d love to speak to Ashley,’” while Shyamalan’s “Remain” came his way as a direct result of the limited series’ success. Another major TV role is soon to be announced, one that he was approached for while in LA promoting “Adolescence.” “They were like, ‘We wrote this part for you off the back of your character’,” he recalls. After telling Shyamalan on set about the upcoming show he just booked, the director started shaking his head, telling him, “Don’t do more TV, you’re a movie star now.”
But five years ago, as he reflected on emotionally with Graham over the phone, Walters simply could not have been a movie star shooting a film on Rhode Island or promoting a hit show in LA. And he certainly wouldn’t have been able to attend the Emmys. Travel to the U.S. was entirely off the cards.
“I was basically banned from the country,” he says. “There were visa issues. I had a criminal record.”
In 2002, Walters — then just 19 — was sentenced to 18 months in a young offenders institution for possession of an illegal firearm. Despite having already amassed a number of TV roles (including a run on the BBC’s classic children’s school drama “Grange Hill”) at the time of his arrest he was better known by his stage-name Asher D, one of the highest profile rappers in pioneering London garage and hip hop collective So Solid Crew.
Walters only served 7 months of his sentence and left vowing to focus on his acting. But the damage, at least in terms of any hopes of making it in the U.S., appeared to have been done. He grew to accept his fate.
“After a few years of not being able to get a visa, I said to myself, ‘Well, it’s not going to happen for me, I’ve got to make do with what I’ve got and fulfil my career and my destiny here in the U.K.,’” he says. “So I kind of stopped worrying about it.”
And so he started building his acting profile, now using his real name Ashley Walters, on home soil. In 2004, he won best newcomer at the British Independent Film Award for his lead performance in Saul Dibb’s “Bullet Boy” (playing a young man who had just been released from prison). Other small U.K. indies would follow, mostly crime thrillers, plus a few small roles in bigger films such as “Speed Racer” and 50 Cent’s semi-autobiographical “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” (scenes were shot in Ireland). There were plenty of decent TV parts too — including BBC drama “Hustle,” a solitary episode of “Doctor Who,” ITV’s long-running police drama “The Bill” and “Top Buzzer,” where he met Graham — plus several stage productions.
Then in 2011 came gangland drama series “Top Boy,” playing one of two main dealers overseeing the supply of drugs on a London estate. The show was a huge hit, praised for its grit and realism, but was still pulled in 2014 after two seasons on Channel 4. The Drake-backed revival on Netflix five years later would earn greater accolades, but now on a global scale. Around the same time, Walters was enjoying another sizeable TV role, this time playing a detective in Sky police procedural series “Bulletproof,” which he also co-created.
But of everything Walters has been a part of — even So Solid Crew’s hit record “21 Seconds” that topped the U.K. singles charts in 2001 — it would all “pale in significance compared to ‘Adolescence.’” The show smashed Netflix records, was recently revealed as the streamer’s most-watched TV show of 2025 so far with 145 million views and is tipped to dominate the Emmys (it has 13 nominations). And this is all aside from the seismic cultural and political impact it’s already had concerning conversations surrounding toxic masculinity and social media.
Ironically, and is so often the case in an industry where doors have a habit of opening just when it seems like they’ve been shut for good, “Adolescence” emerged when Walters was about to turn his back on his career as a performer.
“I just didn’t want to get back into acting anymore,” he says. “I felt like it wasn’t right for me and I’d make up all these reasons and excuses as to why I didn’t need to do it — like I get too anxious when I’m acting.”
Instead, he was making moves behind the camera as a director. He cut his teeth directing several episodes of school drama “Ackley Bridge” and later on Disney+’s Victorian-era boxing drama “A Thousand Blows” (produced by and starring his longtime friend Graham), directing half of season one.
But this was just building up to his directorial debut, “Animol,” a coming-of-age story set in a young offenders institution that draws from his own experiences. The film went into production in January, with a pair of newcomers — Tut Nyuot and Vladyslav Baliuk — leading the cast. Graham also has a small role (despite the recent back-to-back-to-back of “Adolescence,” “A Thousand Blows” and “Animol,” Walters says they’ve “actually hardly ever worked together” since their first encounter in 2004).
“Animol” is, Walters asserts, “such an emotional piece of cinema.”
But it’s also a piece of cinema that has had to go on a short hiatus due to the sudden reenergising of its director’s career on screen (and the chance to work with Shyalaman).
“I think everyone understood that it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss,” Walters says, adding that he’s going straight into the “Animol” edit when he finishes on “Remain,” and has a month before he starts his next acting job. “And hopefully it’s all going to help push the film when it comes out.”
The life-changing arrival of “Adolescence” at the same time Walters was planning to quit acting — and also just as he was finally able to get a U.S. visa after two decades of being rejected — he describes as “definitely a higher power moment.” But kismet aside, there’s also the sense that his efforts — which include his work off camera to warn kids of the long-term consequences of their decisions — were at last being rewarded.
“I made a pact with myself many years ago, that I was going to turn my life around and was going to push myself to be the best person that I could be on a daily basis,” he says. “And I’ve been taking those incremental steps, sometimes seemingly without any recognition or without anyone seeing it. The work that’s done in the dark has finally come to light now, and I’m proud of that.”
But for all the joy at finally being allowed inside an entertainment world where he’d always felt like an “outsider, on the periphery,” even Walters admits that actually winning the Emmy from under the nose of his “Adolescence” co-star, the teenage breakout Owen Cooper, might be a stretch. “I’d absolutely love to win it, but to be honest, he kind of should get it,” he claims, smirking as he notes that this is exactly what his publicist doesn’t want him to say. “But just being in the category with Owen and all the other people and to be talked about in that space is crazy.”
Emmy or not, there’s clearly much more on the horizon for Walters as he navigates his uncharted post-“Adolescence” waters. Alongside “Remain” and the upcoming TV show, he says he’s been offered several more directing gigs. Having only just decided that his acting career isn’t actually over yet, he’s still trying to figure it all out and “work out what the balance is.”
Walters certainly isn’t in a rush. But the journey he’s had to make to get to this point has been far longer than most and he clearly would like to seize what’s now in front of him. Just in case he does pinch himself and it’s gone.
“It’s another reason why I cherish this moment so much,” Walters says. “I want to do everything I can before someone takes away that visa on my passport.”