Ashley Walters is talking to a beautiful, pregnant woman, about Arsenal, clothes, music, the works. We're at the Bethnal Green working men's club in east London, and getting towards the end of a photoshoot. It's obvious that he can't get enough of her, so it seems unfair to separate them. Does she want to join us for the interview? "This is Danielle," Walters says. Hi Danielle, I say, how do you know each other? "We're married," she says.
It's a lovely spring day, so we head to the park. I ask Danielle Isaie, who is also an actor, what would be the toughest question I could ask Walters. She ums and ahs, and winces her way to an answer. "What's the role you've most enjoyed doing?"
Walters cracks up. "That is shit! I get asked that all the time."
Danielle sounds offended. "I don't know what the answer is. What is it, then?"
"Probably Dushane," Walters says.
Dushane is the terse drug dealer at the centre of Top Boy, Britain's Hackney-based version of The Wire. Top Boy has just finished a second series, and rightly received rave reviews, but Danielle is surprised.
"Really?" she says. "Because I thought you thought he was quite…" She searches for the right word. "Plain."
Ah, that's the challenge, Walters says: making somebody interesting who doesn't give much away.
"I would have thought he'd say somebody like Charon in The Musketeers, because he got to dress up and ride horses." She looks at Walters. "I thought that would have been exciting for you!"
He shakes his head. "No! Maybe Sugarhouse." In Sugarhouse, Walters played D, a gun-dealing crack addict.
"Cos you got to play a crackhead?" Danielle asks. Now it's her turn to shake her head.
She prefers his more recent roles. In his latest, a short television drama called Nightshift, Walters plays a police officer driving around London with fellow cop Daniel Mays, setting the world to rights, discussing everything from The Godfather to favourite recipes to who's the bigger babe magnet. It is slight and sweetly observed, with a nod to Quentin Tarantino's dialogue and a wink at Mike Leigh's improvisational technique.
It's good to see Ashley moving away from the cliches, Danielle says. Which are?
"Stereotypical gangster roles."
Walters stares at her, open-mouthed.
"How many of my things have you seen?"
I'm beginning to feel bad. I don't want to get involved in an argument, I say.
Walters bursts out laughing. "You're creating it!"
But he does agree he's been stereotyped, and he knows why. Walters, 31, used to be better known as Asher D, a founding member of the garage/hip-hop collective So Solid Crew. Their lyrics bragged about guns, crime and street violence – "T to the H, U to the G, Thuggin and we'll be till we DIE." By the time Walters was 19, So Solid Crew had a number one with their single 21 Seconds. A year later, he had been sentenced to 18 months for gun possession. In court, he explained he had regularly been attacked and robbed because of his celebrity. On one occasion, a gun was held to his head. It was after this that he bought a gun, for £1,300 from a man he met in a nightclub, and kept it in a knotted sports sock.
The press at the time suggested there was an inevitability to his prison sentence, but Walters says this wasn't true. He loved school, worked hard, left with 10 GCSEs, and from the age of six had attended the Sylvia Young theatre school at weekends. He spent much of his time with privileged children, the sort who lived in four-storey London town houses and had their own games room. If anything, he had been prepared for a life of arty-farty posturing. And yet at the same time, he admits, there was a certain predictablility about his fall.
Walters was an only child, brought up by his mother, Pamela Case, a self-starter who ended up as head of human resources at Croydon council before running her own company. His grandmother had worked for the police; his aunt is a barrister. So he was raised by strong women in Peckham, who did everything to ensure he had a good future. When it came to secondary school, his mother got him a place at Pimlico school to ensure he didn't mess up. Many other aspiring parents had the same idea, but it didn't work: the boys joined forces and found ways of getting into trouble.
As for his father, Walters says he was a feckless loser. He had six children with six women, and took no responsibility for any of them. Once every six months he might make an appearance. And yet, Walters says, there was a glamour attached to him. For many years, his mother was with a lovely, quiet man who called him son and treated him tenderly – but it was his birth father who continued to fascinate him. "My dad had a real big reputation as being the hard man, street fighter, the gangster. My stepdad was quite timid, and I wanted a bit of the gangster in my life."
Well, you certainly got it, I say. "Yeah, I did, but I had to find it myself, didn't I?"
A couple of years ago I met Walters at an awards ceremony – a celebration of London's youth. Walters, who was presenting an award, sat next to me. He looked nervous. He kept disappearing, and barely said a word. He couldn't be more different today. I remind him of the evening. He grins and says, yes, that's what he's like. He's hopeless in social situations. Is he shy? "Yes. People sometimes take it as rude or that I'm closed. But Dan will tell you, I don't like going to events. I put it off as much as possible. I find it hard to network and I have an issue about what people are going to think of me. I think I'm stuck in the So Solid era, where I automatically expect people will look at me as if I'm a gangster. Well, I'm not. I get quite concerned about that. So when I go somewhere I try to be as polite as possible to show people I'm a non-threat."
Do people see you as threat? "I don't think they all do, I think it's more about my insecurity. My mum tells me: you need to let go, you've done so much, you've come out of prison, people's perceptions have changed now, so move on."
Is he more relaxed with friends? "I don't have friends, to be honest," he says baldly. Really, I say, flummoxed. "No, it's not something I've sat down and thought about. I suppose if you want to dig deep, it's about being betrayed by people, not letting people get close enough."
Maybe it's because Danielle is here but I've rarely met somebody so open, so willing to explore their own issues. Walters sits in the sun, perfectly relaxed, analysing why he's turned his back on friendship. "I've had some eye-opening experiences, like going to prison. I realised a lot of people I dedicated my life to, who I'd do anything for, wouldn't do the same for me. I find it really, really, really hard to have relationships with other men. That's one of my biggest problems. Women I seem to get on with quite well."
For a long time he was acting out the role of a man. "What people saw of me in So Solid, especially in the early days, was a persona. It wasn't exactly me. I went to Sylvia Young, I did tap, I did ballet, I enjoyed life growing up with women. My aunt, my gran, my mum were the main people in my life. So I suppose I do embrace my feminine side. I'm not really into the whole boisterous, loud thing, I like to be the guy in the corner who's quiet and humble. I don't want to be the loudest person in the room. That's more Dan. We have issues about things like that, cos Dan loves attention. So when we go out, she likes the red carpet and the paps, and embraces it, but I'm cowering behind her."
She nods. "I'm the optimist, Ashley's the realist."
His problems began before his So Solid days. Even at secondary school, he was mixing it: taking drugs, selling drugs, appearing to embrace a macho culture to which he never felt he belonged. "I dabbled in it all, man. I'm not going to lie. But my excuse for doing it was not to make money – it was because I was trying to fit in with everyone else."
He was desperate for some of his father's swagger, even if he couldn't stand him. "I always used to hate the guy, I ain't going to lie. He went to jail, I think, 17 times. He was never there, to be honest, but I always had this huge passion to know him, to be around him. It was exciting to me." He searched for a substitute, nearly always in the wrong places. "That's part of the reason why I made some really crap decisions. Because I did look for a male role model outside my house, and those people became So Solid. I was looking for a father figure. So I followed some people thinking, ah, that's what a man's meant to be. And it turned out it wasn't."
In 2004 Walters' father developed lung cancer. When he told his son, Walters didn't believe him. "I told him he was lying. I told him to stay away from me. But when he was on his last legs, he came to me and wanted forgiveness and wanted to reconcile. It took me a long time."
In the end, he says, his father did prove a role model of sorts. "I realised he set me one of the best examples because I knew the effect he had on me and my life, I would never let that happen to my children. It was a shining example of what not to do as a dad, and he understood that. He knew that and he also explained why he did what he did." There was a kind of reconciliation. His father told him about his life – how he'd been in care, gone from borstal to borstal – and Walters began to understand why he had turned out as he had. "I realised I couldn't have expected him to be anything else. If he had been any different, he would have been a very rare case."
As Walters talks, I notice a huge scar running across the back of his neck. How did he get that? "This was me trying to be a big man and probably trying to emulate what people said my father was. I was 14, 15, and I got rude and threatened people I shouldn't have, and I paid the price for it. This was 52 stitches." Jesus, was it painful? "At the time, it wasn't. I was full of adrenaline, in the middle of a fight, so I didn't feel it." He was stabbed with a broken bottle. Had it been a knife, you probably wouldn't be here, I say. "I nearly wasn't. It was quite close to hitting a vein."
Walters has said that as a young man he was almost destroyed by ego. What did he mean? "Being in a gang. The whole thing with the gun was born out of fear, out of believing there was a threat around me. And I look back at it now, and think maybe it wasn't there, maybe I was paranoid. After a while I think anybody who is put in a position of power may abuse it, and I felt quite powerful at that time. I became the bully because I'd been bullied so much. These guys offered me that safety, which is basically what a gang offers to kids on the street. For a while it was really cool to be able to go, don't fuck with me, you know what I mean, I've got my boys. But my own boys turned on me. Things went wrong."
It was prison that made him aware of how much he was messing up his life. "As soon as I stepped through those gates, I thought, what am I doing here? I waited for a good two months for people to open the door and say, 'We made a mistake.' At the same time, because you're watching the people you grew up with going through prison, there is a part of you that feels it is a rite of passage; something you have to go through to get respect from your peers. But I was frightened, man. I was very scared."
Did he feel he'd betrayed his mother? "Oh, most definitely. It was an embarrassment. I'd stopped speaking to my mum a year before I went to prison. I just distanced myself from her because I knew she would not accept a lot of the things I was getting up to. And I had a huge love for music. Don't forget that. I wanted to be Jay Z. I wanted to be part of the glitz and the glamour. I knew that the moment my mum knew I was being shot at because of it, because I wanted it, or rolling around with people who were dealing drugs or whatever, she'd pull me straight out of that crap."
When his first child was born, he moved into a flat with his then partner Natalie Williams. (Williams also pleaded guilty to gun possession in 2002, and was given a community service sentence.) "But it ended up with me, as usual, running back with my tail between my legs after being caught with a loaded firearm saying, 'Mum, I'm scared.' When I was on bail I moved back in with my mum and my gran." Was she forgiving? "Oh, my mum's always forgiving." He smiles. "I'm her only child."
Before he went to prison he had already established himself as an actor, with parts in Grange Hill and The Bill. It was obvious even then that Walters had considerable talent – unobtrusive, naturalistic, soulful. His most impressive early role was in Lennie James's moving television drama Storm Damage, playing a boy in care drawn into a life of petty crime.
After he came out of prison, the gangster parts came thick and fast, starting with Bullet Boy – a film about a young man just out of jail who gets caught up in gun crime. Walters says his history has been both a curse and a blessing. "There's a lot of other black boys who've been to prison for a lot longer than me, who have been through a lot more than me, who can probably act just as good as me, or better, but they are not getting that chance. I was front-page news." He knows exactly what casting directors are thinking when they call: "'Ashley Walters has got that edge. We're not only hiring a guy who can act, we're hiring all that other stuff as well. Other black kids respect him because of what he's been through.'"
He has been lucky, but he's also relieved that his career has gone beyond acting out his past (he was virtually unrecognisable as Michael, the nonconformist serviceman in BBC1's 2009 adaptation of Andrea Levy's Small Island). He is still recording as a solo artist, as well as writing screenplays and directing short films.
It was through directing that he started dating Danielle a couple of years ago. They had first met a decade before, on set; then Danielle heard he was making a short film. She emailed and asked if he would audition her. "I'd already cast and shot the movie, but I remembered how gorgeous she was, and I was in that place where I thought I was ready to start dating again. I said, 'Yeah come to my house and we'll talk about the role.' And when she got there I was like, 'Well, you know, I've already cast it – but do you want to go out?'"
Did she feel cheated?
"Mmmmm," Danielle says noncommittally.
"Don't lie, you did," Walters says.
He had recently separated from Williams, with whom he has three children (he has two more with another former partner); Danielle had just split with her partner, with whom she has one child. Walters didn't fancy his chances. "She never gave me the time of day. I always got the impression that this girl was too good for me." But they hit it off. At the time, he was living with his mother. "When she met Danielle, she said one thing to her: run. When I said, 'Mum, this girl is going to be my wife,' she said, 'I'm very happy for you, Ashley, and I'm very worried for you, Danielle.'" They both laugh.
For Walters, family is at the heart of life. He says he doesn't need friends because he's got his kids around him. What is he like as a father? He looks at Danielle. "Dan thinks I'm a bit too liberal. Especially with my 14-year-old. I missed out on talking about things and girls, so I'm quite comfortable talking to him – who's your girlfriend? Do you have sex? I want to have those conversations, and Dan is completely against that. She's like, 'What the hell are you doing? Don't talk to them about those types of things.' "
Actually, he says, between them they make pretty good parents. He says he's never felt more stable or content. Later today, they are going for a scan, and even though it's his sixth, he feels as if he's having his first child all over again.
There's still a bit of chaos in his life. A couple of weeks before we meet, he was fined £600 for assault at Aberdeen sheriff court. The incident involved an off-duty security guard and occurred after an incident in a McDonald's in Aberdeen. Walters looks embarrassed when I mention this. He says the CCTV footage proves he didn't hit the man, but admits he screamed at him, and that he is ashamed of his behaviour. "Since I've been to prison I've had some issues with my temper. I hate myself for doing anything like that." It was the first time he had been in trouble with the law for 12 years, since he was jailed. "It was devastating for that reason." He's got so much going for himself now – the incident brought home just how fragile everything is. "I didn't have to say anything. I could have just walked away." He shakes his head. No, he won't be doing that again.
• Ashley Walters stars in Playhouse Presents Nightshift on Sky Arts 1 at 9pm on 22 May.
