Mint condition
Scrapper director Charlotte Regan brings her unique visual flair to Mint, a BBC series that drops a love story in the middle of a crime drama. In the middle of post-production, she tells DQ about writing and directing her first original TV project, and why she isn’t afraid to think big.
When it comes to telling stories on the small screen, Charlotte Regan isn’t afraid of thinking big.
While discussing different scenes with her DOP Christopher Sabogal on the set of her first original TV series, upcoming BBC drama Mint, the filmmaker would often mention “insanely big stuff” as reference points – with executive producer Theo Barrowclough left to keep the series within its financial means.
“I’m like, ‘This is basically Oppenheimer, this sequence.’ And Theo’s like, ‘No, it’s not. We don’t have the money,’” she laughs, speaking to DQ while deep in the editing process. “Then I’m like, ‘And this battle scene is like Game of Thrones.’ And he’s like, ‘It’s not, though, is it?’
“I want to tell big visual stories, and I love films or TV shows that are really audience-facing. I don’t mind watching an art piece, but mostly I love stuff where the filmmakers are constantly thinking about the enjoyment of an audience.”
After the launch of her award-winning debut feature Scrapper in 2023, Regan has written and directed Mint, which is described as a darkly comic and unconventional drama about the life of a crime family, exploring the question of what love might feel like when everyone outside of your family is terrified of you.
Emma Laird stars as Shannon, the naïve and fiercely romantic daughter of the area’s dominant crime family. Shannon is desperately searching for love in the shadow of her gangster father, Dylan (Sam Riley), devoted mum Cat (Laura Fraser), older brother Luke (Lewis Gribben) and the indomitable family matriarch, grandma Ollie (Lindsay Duncan). But having grown up protected by the surreal yet violent confines of the ‘family business,’ things are about to change once she meets Arran (Ben Coyle-Larner).
The series has been approximately four years in the making, its development dovetailing with that of Scrapper, which told the story of a young girl confronting her estranged father after her mother’s death. BBC Film was among its backers. But as with many of Regan’s projects, it was at the “idea stage” for quite a while as she continuously jotted down her ideas for Mint in notebooks until she was ready to start writing the scripts.
“Otherwise, if you leave me in front of a laptop with no ideas, I’ll just fuck around,” she says. “So I have to think of ideas for a long time, travel to the places, spend time in the places, before I can sit down and write. It was years of that really, just talking about it in a really broad sense. Then once it went to the BBC, it came together a little bit and we started working on scripts.”
For Mint, that prep work included visits to the show’s Glasgow setting. The Scottish city was among a number of options for the industrial locale that would serve as the show’s backdrop – but London was never among them, with Regan keen to avoid criminal family stereotypes or comparisons to shows already set there.
“I’d always written it about a town where people have had to turn to crime out of desperation, more so than ambition or greed,” she says. “That was an important part of it – that you looked at them empathetically, instead of being like, ‘Oh, they’re criminals just because they want money.’”
Glasgow also met the brief thanks to Regan’s previous experience working in Scotland, having shot episodes of Apple TV+ period drama The Buccaneers there. “It was the best filming experience I’ve ever had, in terms of the crew, the actors you can get there. Even actors that you have in smaller roles are just sensational,” she says. “All the crew [on Mint], even the gaffer, the grip, were people I’d had on the other show, and I just loved them. I wouldn’t want to do a project without them, because they just love their work, so it makes it so collaborative and exciting.”
Regan also praises the crew for rising to the challenge of some of her more creative ideas, from slow-motion fight sequences to literal sparks flying when Shannon and Arran meet. More often than not, those visual flourishes are linked to the emotions of the characters and turn their internal feelings into physical actions or other visual responses.
“If they feel something, we’re allowed to see it,” she says. “They’re allowed to fly if they feel in love. It’s not like, ‘They now fly.’ It’s not sci-fi. But none of the crew were like, ‘Why?’ They were just like, ‘Oh, sick. That’s fun. That’s different,’ which is a nice environment. They still questioned me if I had dumb ideas, which is more often than the good ideas. But they were very into solving problems, which is pretty incredible.”
Across the eight-part series, which is produced by House Productions and Fearless Minds and distributed by BBC Studios, Shannon and Arran aren’t the only couple dealing with issues of the heart, romantic or otherwise. There are her parents, Dylan and Cat, and then there are Ollie and Cat – additional storylines that put love centre stage and relegate its crime setting to the backdrop – and always told from the perspectives of the women.
“With Shannon, there’s dramatic gang things going on, but in her mind, all that’s important is this boy she’s met, because she’s never loved a boy before, and that’s the more important thing,” Regan explains. “So screen-wise, that’s what is important to us visually as well. We never set out to make a big shootout show, it was always love stories, and the women and their perspective on that world are at the centre of this.”
Prior to Mint, Regan’s other TV experience included directing episodes of BBC crime drama The Responder. She is also heavily influenced by music videos – she has directed videos for bands including Stereophonics and Mumford & Sons – and describes that medium as “leagues ahead” of film and TV in terms of visual storytelling. “The visual stuff they do, we often do it three years later in TV or film, and then people are like, ‘Wow, revolutionary.’ But someone did that for a rap video 10 years ago, you know? It’s just that you’ve not used it as a storytelling format. So it’s a lot of music video references for the visuals and character stuff.”
Announcing the commission in February 2024, the BBC was “amazing” in supporting Regan by giving her plenty of time to write the scripts, to avoid a situation where she would be still writing while also preparing to direct the series. All eight drafts were in hand when she did pick up directing duties, “which is semi-unheard of in TV,” she says.
She also found freedom in her dual writing and directing role, being able to change lines or scenes based on her conversations with the cast once filming began. “They can often have ideas, and often those ideas are great, but when you’re not the writer and you’re directing TV, you don’t want to tread on toes or disrespect anyone,” Regan says. “Often the writer is busy writing, so they can’t be on set every day. That creates quite a mad delay, and actors don’t feel as supported, I suppose. If you’ve written it, you can come straight back and be like, ‘No, do it how it’s written.’
“I love that I could rewrite as I went. I always had things that you couldn’t change, but there was other stuff where Emma or Ben would change bits of dialogue, and that was totally fine, and I knew it wouldn’t affect anything, which was the privilege of having written them all.”
Regan also likes to be involved in casting, and partnered with Barrowclough and the casting team to “meet all these cool people, and then imagine them as your characters, which is pretty insane.”
As Shannon, The Brutalist star Laird is “so compelling to watch,” she says. “She’s like a proper movie star in that she could just say nothing, and I find her so interesting. Never, ever have I felt like she’s acting, which is mad. “Shannon’s meant to be mature and worldly in lots of ways, because of what she’s been exposed to. But then in other ways, she’s almost like a princess who’s been locked in a tower. Emma plays that so well, a bratty princess who is more mature than most of us.”
Meanwhile, she first met Coyle-Larner (aka musician Loyle Carner) at a market as she was writing the show. He had seen Scrapper and introduced himself, while she knew about him through a mutual friend and loved his music. They spoke for 10 minutes, and then Regan immediately called Barrowclough to tell him she’d found their Arran.
“He’s just the most empathetic and emotionally mature human I’ve ever met,” she says of Coyle-Larner. “He’s so mature, but then so childlike and so joyful in the way he looks at the world. That was a really important quality for Arran, because I didn’t ever want Arran to be this gangster character. He’s meant to be new to it, and he’s meant to not find it comfortable in lots of ways. It’s like a role reversal, where Shannon, the woman, is almost supporting him through those hard times, instead of the other way around that we classically see.”
Working with the cast, Regan says there’s “more chatting than rehearsing,” as she wants them to perform the dialogue as they read it, rather than how she has told them to. “Sometimes that first take is something you’ve never imagined, and they’ve got something totally different from the words than what you thought of when you wrote them,” she says. “I tend to spend loads of time with them beforehand, just talking and hanging out. We have a shorthand by the time we’re on set, but I’ve not rehearsed scenes, which is the way I prefer it.”
After completing her first TV series, Regan says she found it much more of an endurance test than shooting a film: “I probably should have upped my 5k time and my fibre intake beforehand, so my body was in a better position to take the endurance.” But that hasn’t stopped her already considering where the story might head in a second season – and beyond. “I keep pitching that Ollie goes to Ibiza for the entire series. But I don’t think anyone’s gonna go for it, just her drinking every night like teenagers abroad,” she jokes. “I’ll have to stick in the real world for now.”
Regan hopes viewers will be uplifted by Mint’s joyful tone when the show debuts in 2026, and also be compelled to watch the next episode straightaway. “When I watch a true crime documentary, I’m not sleeping all night and I’m feeling heavy the next day, which is great – I enjoy them,” she says. “But I want the feeling to be like you’re swept away by the love stories or the visual style of it, because even though it can sound tonally dark, it’s actually done with a lens of joy and sweeping romance. I hope people just enjoy it.”
tagged in: BBC, Charlotte Regan, Mint