In the thick of it

The South Wales town of Newport is the setting for Ar y Ffin (Mudtown), a crime drama that sees a local magistrate and a criminal kingpin brought together in a story about what people will do for their families. DQ gets stuck in with stars Erin Richards, Tom Cullen, producer Hannah Thomas and writers Hannah Daniel and Georgia Lee to find out more.

Outside a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Newport in South Wales, tempers are fraying. This is the home of Saint Pete, a notorious criminal kingpin operating in the town – but here he is firmly being put in his place after being ordered to pay back a large sum of money.

“When I come, it is to talk,” his visitor explains. “When they come, it is not to talk.”

DQ is on set to watch this scene from Ar y Ffin (Mudtown), a six-part crime drama commissioned by Welsh-language broadcaster S4C and UKTV’s U&Alibi. Shot back-to-back in Welsh and English, it is produced by Severn Screen – the makers of Craith (Hidden) and Steeltown Murders – and distributed by All3Media International.

Gotham’s Erin Richards stars as experienced magistrate Claire Lewis Jones, who faces personal turmoil while presiding over cases at Newport Magistrates’ Court. When Ned Humphries, a childhood friend of Claire’s daughter Beca (Lauren Morais), faces arson charges, Claire’s loyalty to her community is put to the test.

Matters are made worse when Saint Pete (Tom Cullen) – a man who shares a close personal history with Claire – appears on the scene. As she delves deeper into the case, and suspicions grow around Beca’s bad-boy boyfriend Sonny (Lloyd Meredith), Claire uncovers a web of criminality that could put her and her family at risk, with the lines between her maternal instincts and her commitment to the rule of law becomng blurred.

On set in June, it’s day 48 of a 75-day shoot as filming continues apace on block two, which comprises episodes four, five and six. With the cameras setting up on the winding driveway in front of Saint Pete’s mansion, “it’s everything you’d expect a Newport kingpin to have,” Severn Screen producer Hannah Thomas says about the location. “He’s got his pool, he’s got his manicured lawns and a fountain in the front garden. It’s lovely, and the crew love it because there’s plenty of room. We’ve been in some pretty gnarly locations, so it’s always a treat to film here.”

When the cameras roll, it’s for a scene featuring Saint Pete, who is being questioned over the loss of a substantial amount of money by an associate called Agron (Dritan Kastrati). “So it’s a kind of turf war playing out in his house, encroaching on his family life and making everyone feel on edge,” Thomas explains.

“The action set pieces are always the ones that are a bit more challenging, especially because there’s a lot more action than [other Severn series] Hidden or Steeltown Murders. We’ve spent three nights filming in Saint Pete’s garage, and then we did a really amazing scene where Saint Pete was essentially suffocating one of his minions who double-crossed him – bag over the head, proper gangster shit.”

Cullen is known for parts in The Gold, Insomnia, Becoming Elizabeth, Knightfall and The Six, as well as a leading role in one of Black Mirror’s standout episodes, season one’s The Entire History of You. Yet the role of Saint Pete is one he never imagined he’d get to play. “In my older age, I’m quite a gentle person,” he says. “Violence doesn’t come to me naturally, but I do get cast in these violent roles sometimes and it is scary for me. I have to tap into something that is not me.”

During filming, “I just have to try to be as relaxed as possible, which opens up the doors to psychopathy or violence. And the thing about Pete is I don’t think he’s a psychopath at all. But what he’s learned is that violence is a tool he can use. So as an actor, I have to understand what that tool is and I have to justify it and realise that he isn’t necessarily a violent man; he just has to have violence in order to maintain control.”

But when Cullen is called on to perform one of the drama’s most violent scenes – Saint Pete can erupt at a moment’s notice – they can take their toll. “We had a scene where I had to torture someone and it does leave me shaky because you have to really go into a very dark place,” he says. “I got home and I couldn’t sleep for hours. You have to really try to learn to purge it.”

Originally from Wales, Cullen has enjoyed the chance to return to his home country and work “in the Welsh accent.” But as Pete is an English-speaking character, the actor didn’t have to double up on scenes in Welsh. “It feels such a Welsh story. In so many ways, it’s not specifically a Welsh story, but the environment and the characters feel unique to Newport as well,” he says. “I haven’t seen that before, and that feels really exciting. The Welsh crew are just phenomenal. They’re one of the best crews I’ve ever worked with and it’s just lovely. It’s just such a nice atmosphere. The character I’m playing is so challenging for me and something I never really thought I would get to do. So it’s terrifying, but I’m really enjoying it.”

Saint Pete, he explains, is a product of his environment, hailing from one of the most deprived areas of the UK and being shaped by the time he spent in prison as a young man. His juxtaposition with Claire, a respected magistrate, is at the heart of the story. After an early romance between the pair, they took different paths, only to meet again years later.

“You have these two people who have known each other since they were teenagers, and one’s taken one path and the other’s taken another path and it’s really difficult to know which one’s better off,” Cullen says. “Is it the guy who’s had to make a life of crime in order to survive and provide for his family, or the woman who has gone the other way but their financial circumstances are completely different? It raises a lot of really interesting, complex questions.”

Off screen, making Mudtown has proven to be a particularly happy time for Cullen, who has been reunited with a number of Welsh colleagues among the cast and crew, not least Richards. The pair are old friends, and Richards even introduced Cullen to his partner.

“It was lush to work with him,” Richards says of her co-star. “We did a short together [2010’s Balance] when we were about 20 or something. I played a blind surfer. He was my boyfriend, so we kept making reference to that, and actually one of the crew members worked on it as well, so we had a bit of a laugh. But we’ve known each other and supported each other through our whole careers so it’s really nice to actually be able to work together.”

Like Cullen, Richards was excited to take a leading role in a Welsh drama. Mudtown is also notable for the fact that it marks her first major screen role since returning to Wales after living and working in the US for a number of years – a return that coincided with the arrival of her baby son, who was a popular visitor to the set.

“I was very scared about doing the Welsh language of it all because, even though I am a fluent Welsh speaker, I haven’t acted in Welsh for a very long time,” she says of her bilingual duties. “A lot of the time, what I was doing on this job was just quickly translating the English into Welsh in my head because I found it hard to learn the Welsh lines exactly.”

Richards’ Claire works as a magistrate in a volunteer role that she pairs with another job to earn money to support her family alongside husband Alun (Matthew Gravelle). When Saint Pete reappears, her whole world is thrown into turmoil.

“Claire came up through quite a chaotic upbringing. She came from a slightly less affluent family and got into a lot of trouble when she was younger that you find out has consequences for her older life,” Richards explains. “She’s fiercely loyal. She’s funny. She’s really dogged. She’s got a strong sense of justice now in her magistrate role.

“When we meet her, she’s been a magistrate for a few years and she has this relationship with Saint Pete. She’s got this past with him and that means she gets dragged into the criminal underworld of Newport, which she thought she’d left behind. As we watch her through the series, she’s trying to balance this past with being a mother, a wife and a magistrate. That all comes to a head as the series ends.”

Directed by Rhys Carter (Yr Amgueddfa) and Chris Forster (Hidden), Mudtown is penned by new writing duo Hannah Daniel and Georgia Lee, who have been friends since they studied English literature together at university. Daniel is best known for acting roles in Hinterland and Une Bore Mercher (Keeping Faith), while Lee is a magistrate who drew on that experience for Mudtown.

The choice of a magistrates’ court – where the majority of criminal cases begin their journey through the legal system in England and Wales – as the basis for a television drama emerged because “it is inherently a very dramatic place,” Lee says. “Even if the crime is not a big crime like murder or a huge conspiracy or fraud, it’s often where these big turning points happen in people’s lives, where there are two different paths they can go down – are they going to get another chance or not?”

Lee was also interested in the idea of a volunteer magistrate and the specific tone of the court, “which can be really harrowing but it also can be really funny,” she says. “The legal advisors are brilliant and all the different court staff and the characters… it’s just this really rich world of characters to dive into. There’s this great feeling with a lot of the crimes that you could be seeing them in Victorian England or even in Ancient Rome. Justice is just continuing to go along, and these people are doing the best they can to execute it. So that was kind of the inspiration.”

Developing the series began with Claire, a “salty, tenacious South Walian warrior” who is a pillar of the community and has worked hard to earn her place on the magistrates’ bench. Lee and Daniel are both new parents, with five young children between them, so they were also clear the series should address the anxieties parents face about how much control they have over who their children become and how far people go to protect their families.

“That is really universal, which is why it will hopefully connect with audiences everywhere,” producer Thomas says. “Claire’s placed in the worst dilemma – how far will she go to save her daughter, who’s made some really appalling life choices, and does a mother’s love trump the sense of duty she feels towards the magistracy? Saint Pete has got to uphold a lifestyle, so how far will he go to protect that? That’s the commonality that brings everyone together – how far will you go to protect the ones you love? It sounds vague but, when you watch the series, it penetrates every scene and every character.”

“There’s also a central theme of survival – everybody is trying to survive,” says Daniel, “and for all of our judgement of Saint Pete and his way of life, he’s trying to do the same as Claire. He’s trying to support a family in an unfair world. He’s had to work hard to get anywhere. And this is the life he’s chosen and he’s being successful at it.”

Lee and Daniel have been “sitting around trying to make each other laugh and telling stories” since they met, and have more than five years’ worth of ideas, scripts and short films to show for their writing partnership so far. Mudtown is now their first series together, and during development they filled whiteboards with ideas and story details before splitting episodes between themselves and then passing drafts back and forth.

“The starting point was if we had a really heroic moral character, what would motivate her to want to put her thumb on the scales of justice?” Lee says. “And then we built the story around her using the court this way and the criminals using it as part of their conspiracy. So that was a backbone. Then we knew we wanted to talk about family and ambition and all these other things and we could build around that.”

With Daniel from Cardiff and Lee from Bristol, Newport was the perfect setting located between the two cities. “Most things we’ve worked on together have been Wales-based, and when Georgia talked to me about the court and the gallows humour, it felt like that would lend itself so easily to a South Walian sensibility,” Daniel says.

“It’s totally and shockingly underrepresented, and I do find just generally the Welsh are quite often misrepresented in film and telly,” she continues. “They’re quite often the butt of the joke, so I was dead set on having Claire and all the characters playing to their highest intelligence. These are smart people. And Newport, in terms of its cinematic value, it’s quite mad to us that it’s very unseen. It’s ‘Mudtown,’ and when the tide goes out in Newport it’s just this expanse of mud [on the banks of the River Usk]. It was this amazing image for the sort of story we were telling. That really spoke to us.”

After completing filming earlier this summer, the bilingual version of Ar y Ffin will now debut on S4C and BBC iPlayer on December 29, before the English version, Mudtown, comes to U&Alibi next year.

Richards has since moved on to her next project, this time directing the second block of Y Golau: Dŵr (Still Waters), the S4C, Sundance Now and Channel 4 follow-up to another bilingual Welsh and English drama, Y Golau (The Light in the Hall). But in her eyes, the success of Welsh drama around the world since breakout hit Y Gwyll (Hinterland) in 2013 has been “a long time coming.”

“It’s such a brilliant thing for our country,” she adds. “We have such great talent and our crews are insane. We used to lose actors because there wasn’t the industry here to keep them, but now they’re all coming back and they want to do these dramas. Hopefully it’s now Wales’s moment, because we’ve just got such strong talent and our writing is amazing. That we can now show that to the world and get recognition for it is wonderful.”

tagged in: Ar y Ffin, Erin Richards, Georgia Lee, Hannah Daniel, Hannah Thomas, Mudtown, Tom Cullen