This City Is Ours star James Nelson-Joyce: 'Just to be linked with James Bond is great'

On one of the last sunny days of the year, James Nelson-Joyce is sitting outside the famous King’s Head theatre pub in Islington, North London, when Big Issue stumbles up for our interview. We’ve barely sat down and the actor, who had a major breakthrough last year as star of This City Is Ours, dubbed the Scouse Sopranos, and a supporting role in A Thousand Blows, has set down a drink and crisps for us.

He’s in London to catch his friend, Big Issue ambassador Daniel Mays, in Golden Boy at the nearby Almeida theatre. Mays swings by for a quick hello, before heading off to join Hayley Squires and Josh O’Connor (who we also spot dashing into Ryman’s stationers).

Nelson-Joyce is making waves. He’s an actor whose imposing, charismatic presence has been turning heads since an early role in Little Boy Blue –the true-life ITV drama about the murder of Liverpool schoolboy Rhys Jones – served notice of his talent and first paired him with Stephen Graham, whose name crops up throughout our conversation. 

He then joined Graham in Jimmy McGovern’s Time and Shane Meadows’ The Virtues and appeared in hit shows The Responder, Industry and The Gold. Now, as Michael Kavanagh, he is the beating heart of This City Is Ours – balancing being the brains (and plenty of the brawn) of the drug gang initially run by Sean Bean’s Ronnie Phelan with being a sweetly devoted partner to Diana (Hannah Onslow). The semi-reluctant gangster with a romantic side and an uncanny ability to do unto others before they do unto him is a dream role for the Liverpool born-and-bred lad. 

“It’s a gift,” he says. “And working in Liverpool is a gift. Because I’m working with my people. The biggest relief I got when we were recommissioned for a second series was that everyone’s employed for the next six or seven months. These are people I love and I haven’t let them down.”

But does it come with a pressure? Representing the city you love in a show that foregrounds modern, vibrant Liverpool, such a beautiful backdrop, criminally underused in recent British TV?

“I don’t want to come across as corny, but you want to do people proud,” says Nelson-Joyce. “I live in Liverpool. I’m in my area every day of the week. The beautiful thing about this project is Liverpool’s got a character and a voice, just like New Jersey does in The Sopranos or London in Top Boy. Liverpool hasn’t always been shown to its fullest. But we’ve shown the Georgian quarter, the river, the cathedrals, the restaurants and venues. There’s a lot of care gone into it.”

When it comes to leading the cast, Nelson-Joyce knew where to look for inspiration. “I learnt from the best in Stephen Graham,” he says. “Doesn’t matter who you are, everyone’s brings something to the table. So it’s about being respectful to everyone around you, showing up on time, prepared and ready to go. 

“That was drilled into me by Stephen and Hannah [Walters]. And my parents. I started working on a building site with my dad when I was 13. The fundamentals of treating people with respect should be in every job.”

There’s an authenticity to Joyce’s performance that is hard to fake. He knows the character and place inside out. 

“Scousers are like Catalonians or people from Naples. We have an identity and a code,” he says. 

“It was a city that was dismantled in the ’80s and put through hell. And it’s had slander thrown at it from the outside. So we stick together. That’s why it’s called This City Is Ours. We’ll welcome anyone in, but respect the city.”

Read more:

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So is it time for a Scouse Bond? The speculation has been bubbling away. When it’s discussed, there’s
Nelson-Joyce, just a few places below the bookies’ favourite, at around 16-1. “I like to have fun with it. If they want me, great,” he says. “If they don’t, it’s still fun. 

“I didn’t ever think for one second I’d be linked to such an important and iconic role. I know how I look. I don’t look like Pierce Brosnan. I don’t look like Daniel Craig. These are speci-mens of men, do you know what I mean? And I’m not that. I’m an everyman. But just to be linked with James Bond is great. I wind up my sisters about it.”

Next year Nelson-Joyce takes the lead (with top-class support from Richard E Grant and Dominic West) in The Man Who Stole Portugal. Based on real-life events, it’s a film to file under truth is stranger than fiction. “I was like, surely this has been embellished. But it hasn’t,” says Nelson-Joyce. “It’s a crime that will never be done again. Artur Alves dos Reis got the producer of official banknotes, without them realising, to print loads more illegitimate banknotes. It was genius. And it was crazy.”

Despite the bonkers story, Nelson-Joyce found plenty of ways in to this maverick, Robin Hood-style fraudster. “He was a working-class man. I can relate to that. He was an outsider, another thing I can relate to. And he’s trying to create a better life for him and his family, and I can certainly relate to that. After the First World War, Portugal was on its knees. He opened four banks, created jobs, created wealth and took the working classes from the poverty line to being self-sufficient.”

Film and TV stardom, Bond speculation, a burgeoning friendship with Wayne Rooney – who has a cameo waiting for him in season three of This City Is Ours if he wants it: “He’d be a brilliant copper” – it’s all a far cry from what Nelson-Joyce grew up expecting.

He paints a picture of home. “I can see Walton Prison from my house. I didn’t think people from my background did acting. I didn’t know a single soul interested in acting. Where I was from, lads like football or boxing.

“When a teacher said, you should be an actor, there was no one I knew to ask about it. Seeing Stephen Graham in The Street, a working-class voice in working-class clothes on working-class streets, is where I got the bug for it.”

He reels off the actors he admires. It’s quite a cast list. Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Mullan, Andrea Riseborough – the ones you watch and “don’t know what they’re gonna do next”. But he returns to Graham and Walters and their influence on a generation of actors. 

“Stephen and Hannah created their own path. But they’ve always passed the ladder back down,” he says. “So there’s me, Jodie Comer, Thomas Turgoose, Owen Cooper, Jack O’Connell – we’ve all been helped. They know how hard the industry is, how it feels like there’s a glass ceiling. But somehow, they’ve shattered it and given everyone an opportunity to follow.”

This idea around working-class solidarity and equality of opportunity is one that he revisits when asked for his own current big issue. 

“We pride ourselves on Shakespeare, The Beatles. We do it better than anyone else. It’s within our culture. So why have the arts been taken off the syllabus in schools? You can’t celebrate it on one hand and take it off the next generation,” says Nelson-Joyce. “And that opportunity needs to be spread across the country. 

“When I moved to London [to study at Italia Conti performing arts academy], I realised there were so many privileges I’d never seen in the North. I just want those opportunities for everyone across the country. Surely that’s not a lot to ask?”

This City Is Ours airs on Sunday and Monday nights on BBC One and iPlayer

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