When Billy Howle was a boy, he auditioned for an all-singing, all-dancing version of Babe, the Sheep-Pig. The production was set to show at the Oxford Playhouse and when Howle got to the casting, he was met with an auditorium overrun with Stagecoach kids. “It was really quite brutal,” he recalls, wide-eyed. “All these jazz-handsy kids and their pushy parents. Needless to say, I was ejected mid-song.” At this point, Howle remembers running off-stage bawling to his mum. When their eyes met, she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. “I just remember the gritted teeth,” he says, with a slight guffaw. “And the words: ‘Don’t you dare.’” When they got home, his mum sat him down. “She said: ‘Look, Billy, if you’re going to do this, you need to grow an exoskeleton.” Howle scratches his head. “So obviously I spent the next day going: ‘What the fuck’s an exoskeleton?’”
On the surface of things, it sounds very much like a scene from Billy Elliot. “I was completely out of place,” agrees Howle. We are sitting in a west London bar, having the first of many conversations about his mother, who I’m now picturing as a no-nonsense Julie Walters type. “She’s an interesting one, my mum,” he grins. “She’s northern, very working class – her father moved around the country working for Tarmac and she mostly grew up in caravans with travelling communities. She’s the kind of person you meet and just know has lived a lot in a past life.”
Though still in his 20s, Howle himself has been described as an “old soul”. As a 2013 graduate of the Bristol Old Vic, it’s not long since he started out, but in the past few years he has gained a reputation for his ability to handle emotionally complex characters. His breakthrough role came in Jack Thorne’s E4 series Glue, but it was Richard Eyre’s Broadway adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 2014 that put him on the radars of international casting directors. In person and in his work, he has an interesting combination of qualities: intense and introspective, witty and, at times, wildly charismatic.
“There’s definitely something in me that is a bit broken and poetic,” he says. During the Ghosts run, the ease with which he could underscore tragedy with lightness seemed to take audiences by surprise: “People were laughing at parts they never expected to and I loved that. But I seem to find humour in the darkest of places,” he adds, raising an eyebrow. “I think my girlfriend is sometimes shocked.”
Howle is here to promote his first lead film role, On Chesil Beach, the long-awaited adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Booker-nominated novel. For Howle, starring in literary dramas seems to be becoming a “thing”. Before On Chesil Beach there was the book-to-film outing of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and, in the not-too-distant future, Howle will appear in a big-screen version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. It’s a happy coincidence that both new films see him play opposite Saoirse Ronan, an actor he’d never crossed paths with until a couple of years ago. “When you work with someone twice in a short space of time it sort of becomes like a dysfunctional marriage,” he says. “I mean, at one point in On Chesil Beach, we had to take it in turns to use a tent on the beach as a toilet.”
To win the role, Howle had to face out stiff competition. According to Nina Gold, the casting director, Ronan was a shoo-in, but finding the right actor to play Edward, the angrier half of a warring couple on their wedding night in the early 60s, was much more difficult. Howle thinks they saw probably hundreds of actors, and then at least 20 finalists before they picked a shortlist of five to go to New York and film a screen test with Ronan. When he was told the news, Howle was “shocked”, but it was when he eventually got on set that he had his mind blown. “For me, it was like being given a whole new set of toys to play with, like going from Duplo to Meccano. It was the first time I was playing the lead role so I was constantly going, ‘Wow! Look at this! Look what I can do!’ And, actually, I think it started to piss Saoirse off,” he laughs. “There’s me, the new kid, wanting to experiment and completely oversharing. And then on the other side of the room the other kids are going: ‘We’ve been playing Meccano for ages.’”
Growing up with liberal parents, Howle describes his childhood as “feral”. One of four sons raised by a schoolteacher mother and a music professor father, he was mostly brought up in Scarborough. Despite his birth certificate saying William Walter Douglas Howle, from a young age it was the name Billy that stuck. “My mum had me the day the Berlin Wall was pulled down, so originally she wanted something German-sounding, like Wilhelm,” Howle says, smiling. Billy seemed to suit him better: “Billies are always a bit naughty – you rarely get a Billy who’s a nasty piece of work.”
He was around 13 when he started “misbehaving. Drinking, drugs, most of the stuff you can get up to in a seaside town.” On top of that, there were minor offences like graffiting and partying in holidaymakers’ empty chalets. School was not a happy place. “I just couldn’t see how most of the stuff they taught us could be applied to anything, so I spent most of the time challenging the teachers,” he says. “In maths, they were going, 1+1=2, and I would say, ‘Well, why does it?’”
When he was done with education, he applied for every drama school going. “Every one apart from Rada”, he says. Why’s that? Howle chuckles: “Probably because it had Royal in the name. ‘I’d Rada go to Lamda’ is what we used to say.” Actually, he hated the way the school had been so long associated with the upper-middle classes. “It’s something that still bugs me about acting,” he says. “The number of auditions I go to where they ask where I went to secondary school, it’s crazy. That really gets my back up. Just because you went to Eton, it doesn’t make you a better actor.”
A couple of years ago, Howle was selected as one of the new faces of Prada, a job that saw him join Eddie Redmayne in becoming a poster boy for the brand. One journalist even noted that Howle bore an “unnerving resemblance” to the actor; in reality, the likeness is probably just handsome good looks. Still, Howle – a huge fan – was encouraged by Redmayne, and once he got going, was surprised to find it “quite fun”. Before he’d done fashion, the extent of his modelling CV was posing for life-drawing classes. “I ended up doing it for six months. It was actually quite freeing. Although there was one weird occasion where the girl I was seeing turned up. It suddenly got very hot in the room…”
He’s currently dating, though “not an actor. Actors are always at loggerheads with each other in relationships. I found that out the hard way.” It’s a relatively new romance that tends to go on between her place in London and Margate, where Howle recently bought a house. Ever since he was a teenager, he has dreamed of buying his own place by the sea: “I think it’s just a nostalgic thing. There’s a film by Werner Herzog [Encounters at the End of the World], about all these philosophers and artists who go to the Antarctic because they want to find the ends of the earth. They say: ‘I’ve thought everything there is to think in the world, so now I’ve come here.’ I’m not saying that Margate is the end of the earth, but it’s a similar thing. Like, ‘I need to find the edge of this island.’
The house, a four-bedroom Edwardian terrace, is currently in the process of being renovated. “At the moment it’s a mess,” he says, “I’ve got moodboards. My girlfriend has given me all these copies of Elle Deco so I’m tearing stuff out.” Progress is slow, mostly because he’s never there. When we meet, Howle is prepping for MotherFatherSon, an eight-part TV drama in which he’ll star as the son of a media tycoon played by Richard Gere. “It’s all about adverse circumstances that alter their relationship,” he explains, “and there’s someone quite exciting that they’re trying to sign off to play the mum.” It’s his second TV production this year: in the autumn, he’ll appear in Outlaw King, an epic Netflix film that sees him and Chris Pine go head-to-head as rival kings of Scotland.
On Chesil Beach is going to change things, I say. Howle nods. “It kind of already has,” he admits, explaining that the pay cheque he received for the film pretty much funded Margate. As for fame, he hasn’t really thought about it. What will he do if a legion of fans suddenly announces itself? At the rate he’s going, there’s every chance a fan site will open up and he’ll have an equivalent of the Redmayniacs and Cumberbitches. For the first time, Howle looks puzzled. “The Howlers,” he says, trying it out for size. “It sounds like a football team. I quite like it.”
On Chesil Beach is in cinemas now
