Box to box
Warren Brown reflects on his rise from Thai boxing champion to leading actor after becoming a regular face on British television thanks to shows including The Responder, The Gathering and Ten Pound Poms.
Call it a quirk of television scheduling, but at several points over the past few years, Warren Brown has felt like a constant presence on British TV.
In January 2022, he was starring in two primetime series simultaneously, with roles in BBC crime series The Responder and ITV bomb squad thriller Trigger Point. Then in May this year, he returned for the second season of The Responder at the same as Channel 4 was airing whodunnit mystery The Gathering.
In between, he also partnered with Michelle Keegan and Faye Marsay to lead another BBC show, Australia-set period drama Ten Pound Poms, in May 2023.
“You might not work for a while, and then that happens,” Brown tells DQ. “There was a little bit of a crossover so you’re on two shows [on air] at the same time, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you’re everywhere, you don’t stop.’ Well, not necessarily, but I guess you’re at the mercy of the schedulers. You never know when things will go out.”
Brown’s first television roles came in Shameless and Hollyoaks in 2004 and 2005, and he has appeared on screen almost every year since, with notable parts in dark crime drama Luther, wartime drama X Company and action drama Strike Back.
In The Responder, Tony Schumacher’s gritty Liverpool-set series about morally compromised cop Chris Carson (Martin Freeman), he plays Raymond Mullen, a demoted officer with an axe to grind against Carson.
In Ten Pound Poms, meanwhile, Brown is Terry Roberts, one of a group of Britons who take advantage of an offer to start a new life down under, only to find the promises they were made don’t quite ring true.
And in The Gathering he portrays Paul, the father of young star gymnast Kelly (Eva Morgan) who is the subject of a brutal attack. The series unfolds from the perspectives of a number of key characters in the build-up to the assault to reveal why different suspects might have been responsible, before revealing the truth in a tense final episode.
From ensemble player to leading man, Brown has certainly built a career based on an eclectic and diverse variety of roles, but his next move is never planned.
“It’s so difficult. I feel like it’s so unpredictable that you can’t plan in this business. I’m just prepared for the uncertainty,” he says. “You don’t know what scripts you’re going to read, but when you read a good script, you know you’re reading a good script.
“You read certain things and certain things really stand out, and you want to do that. And then, even once you read a really good script, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be a part of that. For the most part, I’ve still got to audition for stuff. With The Gathering, I read the script, the writing was brilliant, and although it was a coming-of-age [story] and we have seen that, I felt like it was set in a different world and had different things to say. To be asked to do it was brilliant.”
Though the series explores the relationships between a group of teenagers, one of its major themes is ‘surveillance parenting’ and how it can evolve into controlling and toxic behaviour. But Paul is much more the antithesis of that idea, supporting his daughter and her gymnastic ambitions despite his limited means.
“It begs the audience to ask so many questions of what is support, what’s too much support? I think Paul was supportive,” Brown says. “He’s a single parent trying to bring up two kids, and essentially we’re all flawed. And he was flawed in different ways than say Vinette [Robinson]’s character [Natalie, the overbearing mother of Kelly’s friend Jessica]. He wasn’t pushy per se, but their family dynamic and his own flaws scupper that in different ways.”
The series aired to acclaim earlier this year, and awards were quick to follow. Brown was named best actor at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival’s Golden Nymph Awards in June – claiming the prize for the second year running following his win for Ten Pound Poms in 2023 – while Morgan was named best actress and the show scooped the best drama prize.
“She was brilliant,” Brown says of Morgan, with The Gathering marking the rising star’s first screen role. “You literally meet somebody that you’re about to start working with and it’s like, ‘Right, that’s your daughter that you’ve got all this history with’ and you’ve got to create that bond really quickly. So much of it was in the script and it was so beautifully written, but Eva and I just clicked straight away. We were both passionate about serving the material.”
Playing the father of Morgan’s character, Brown also naturally felt protective towards the young actor. “Just having a bit more experience, she’d ask me questions about the business and there was a nice duality that mirrored the father-daughter relationship, just two actors on a set, both trying to trying to serve the material.”
Playing a father in The Gathering also mirrored the role he took up in Ten Pound Poms, in which Brown and Marsay play a married couple who head to Australia to start a new life with their children.
Such roles are “part of the inevitability of getting older,” Brown admits. He first played a father in an episode of Jimmy McGovern’s Accused, and as he gets older, so do the actors playing his on-screen kids.
“You’ve got to accept that, that we’re getting older,” he laughs. “But I guess as you get older, the roles you play get older, and that brings with it more opportunity and challenges. I just feel like, as I’m getting older, the parts are getting better.”
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Starting out as a working-class actor with no experience of the business or formal training through drama school, Mersey-side born Brown remembers spending the first few years of his career playing characters described as “scallys” or “thugs.”
“But then as you persevere and start owning your craft, then you’re a policeman and it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a grown-up job.’ But ultimately, it’s about the script,” he says. “Really early doors, you’re saying yes to absolutely everything because you need to get the experience and you want to learn something from every single job. But actually I’m now getting into a position where you can be a little bit more picky about things, and I feel lucky that if it’s not something I’m 100% feeling, I don’t have to pursue it. That goes back to that question about what is it that you want to do? You don’t know until you read it. And then when you read it, you’re like, ‘Ah, this is hopefully the next thing.’”
But it was never certain that Brown would become an actor at all. A two-time Muay Thai world champion, he entertained working as a supporting artist because a friend of his was doing it too. After a fight in Finland, he came home with stitches and a black eye. And when he called the production company and explained he wouldn’t be able to fulfil the role, he was called back 20 minutes later and told to go to the BBC’s Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham to appear as an extra in Doctors – one of the few roles where his injuries wouldn’t stand out.
“That was my first little taste. I didn’t know anything at all,” he says. “Then I carried on doing a bit more extra work and just getting asked to say little things and then started to entertain the idea [of becoming an actor].
“The conventional route is drama school and, at the time, maybe I couldn’t have afforded to go to London and go to drama school. I started an acting class in Manchester, and a few months into that I got spotted and asked to audition for Shameless. That was like my first proper job, and it snowballed from there.”
As his screen career progressed, Brown also found some of his boxing skills were transferrable to acting, such as his dedication, commitment and a drive to succeed.
“It wasn’t going to happen overnight, and you’ve got to put in the work in the same way. I didn’t become a world champion overnight. To make that decision to retire from professional Thai boxing to pursue acting, nothing was going to happen overnight. But if I was going to have a go, it was about giving it everything. I’d much rather give it a shot and fail, and at least say you tried, than not having tried and going, ‘What if?’ Thankfully I’m still getting away with it.”
Brown has recently returned from Australia, where he was filming the second season of Ten Pound Poms. But away from acting, he also harbours ambitions to direct – and was afforded the opportunity to experience life behind the camera during the final season of Strike Back, when he was invited to shoot some establishing footage with the second unit.
“My character was killed before the last block, and we were all pretty heavy on social media throughout shooting. I thought, ‘If I’m suddenly not on social media with this, everyone’s going to know.’ So I asked if I could shadow for the last block, and [producers] Left Bank and Sky said, ‘Yeah, you can shadow,” he says.
But as production raced to the finish line, Brown ended up taking charge of capturing aerial drone shots of a vehicle convoy and a scene featuring a grenade in a speedboat while the main production unit completed the pick-up shots they needed before wrapping.
“That was a brilliant experience. I’m interested in the whole process, every single part of this machine, and the machine can’t work without every single cog. I’ve kind of always been aware of that and always been interested in every single department,” he says.
Brown has also “threatened” to write a script but as yet has not put pen to paper. “There are a couple of things I’m keen now to try to be involved in – in producing and not just sitting and waiting for the phone and trying to make your own work,” he adds. “Even if you’re just being creative and being a bit more productive in your spare time, [I’m] just trying to keep busy, to keep doing good work and certainly I would want to look to dip my toe in the directing pool.”
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