Scouse rules
Stars James Nelson-Joyce, Hannah Onslow and Jack McMullen join writer Stephen Butchard to take DQ inside the world of This City is Ours, a BBC crime drama where a delicate love story takes centre stage against a backdrop of ambition and power on the streets of Liverpool.
After roles in Little Boy Blue, The Virtues and World on Fire, actor James Nelson-Joyce (pictured below) broke out with a ferociously violent performance in prison drama Time. He now gets to show his sensitive side as one of the leads in BBC drama This City is Ours – a series that has all the hallmarks of a gangster crime drama but might actually be the tender story of a couple seeking lasting love in the most challenging circumstances.
“He brings a bit of freshness to it and he brings real youth,” writer Stephen Butchard (Shardlake, The Good Mothers) tells DQ about casting Nelson-Joyce as Michael Kavanagh. “We were looking at James and we knew he could be violent, but could he fall in love? We were doing auditions with him – and he could do it. He brings such a tenderness to it, which is the real James. He’s such a warm, sweet guy.”
Filmed and set in Liverpool, the eight-part series debuted on BBC One and iPlayer last Sunday. It introduces Michael, a man who has been involved in organised crime all his adult life, working for his friend and gang leader Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean). When Ronnie begins to hint at retirement, Michael too begins to imagine another life and a future with Diana (Hannah Onslow).
The show opens 18 months after the deeply in love Michael and Diana first got together, with the couple undergoing IVF treatment in the hope of starting a family. Yet their relationship is set against the backdrop of the disintegration of Michael’s gang, which has been bringing cocaine into Liverpool and beyond for years. When a shipment goes missing, they know they are under attack. Then when Ronnie’s son Jamie (Jack McMullen) decides he should be the one to inherit the business, it puts Michael and Jamie on a collision course – but Michael’s biggest battle might be to save Diana.
“I just saw the complexities of the character and the consequences that come along with his actions,” explains Nelson-Joyce of his interest in playing Michael. “It comes at a point in his life where he’s at a crossroads. With the IVF, in a very masculine world, he also has that struggle with himself. There’s all different layers to it – stuff with Ronnie, Jamie and Diana. I think the writing is beautiful.”
Ronnie’s admission he might be stepping back from the business certainly gives Michael pause for thought, as he considers how he can rise to power while also having the future he and Diana have always wanted. “No matter how much money you’ve got, no matter how big your house is, an empty bed is the loneliest place in the world – and Michael knows that,” Nelson-Joyce says. “The ultimate goal is to be happy with Diana, and the consequences that come with the life he’s involved with mean you either end up in jail or dead.”
Of course, the path to true love never did run smooth. “I’ll tell you one thing. Michael is desperately trying to save his relationship but, at the same time, he’s trying to save his reputation and what he feels should be his. He has to lose one of them,” Nelson-Joyce adds.
Onslow (The Doll Factory, This is Going to Hurt) found her character to be unlike anyone she’d ever met, and was drawn in by the “simple” love story between Diana and Michael.
“They just get each other,” she says. “I’ve played a few characters where I’ve not been loved back, so it’s nice to play a role [like this], because he loves her and she loves him. I thought the relationships in it were really strong and all the characters felt really vivid.”
The love story separates This City is Ours from many other crime dramas, with gang life often taking a back seat to the numerous romantic relationships portrayed in the series. There’s Ronnie and Elaine (Julie Graham), the heads of the Phelan family, as well as Jamie and Melissa (Darci Shaw), who have a new baby; Bobby and Rachel Duffy (Kevin Harvey and Laura Aikman); and Davy and Cheryl Crawford (Stephen Walters and Saoirse-Monica Jackson).
“It’s almost not about their work; it’s about how their work affects their lives, and how it affects their relationships with each other,” Onslow notes. “I thought the relationships were so strong. I’ve never had a boyfriend on screen like this where it’s so important. He [Nelson-Joyce] just made it so easy.”
While Diana isn’t intrinsically linked to the gang – she works as a sommelier – she does have familial problems of her own, namely her incarcerated mother (Leanne Best). “We definitely dive into that. It is a huge part of her arc,” Onslow says of her character’s backstory. “She’s had quite a dark childhood. What’s happened to her is quite extraordinary, not in the best way, but she’s just like any other girl. That could be me up there, and that’s why it’s so well written. I felt like I knew Diana. You wouldn’t look at her and think what has happened has happened, yet it has – and that dichotomy is going on with all the characters, which is such compelling TV.”
Nelson-Joyce and Onslow had a chemistry read together during the audition process, as they were among several combinations of actors still being considered for the key roles of Michael and Diana. “But it was something about us together that really worked,” says Essex-based actor Onslow, who listened to Liverpool-born Love Island stars to perfect her own Scouse accent. “Sometimes in auditions, you can feel nervous because you’re being judged. There was just a sense of how well we connected. It felt effortless, and James is amazing.”
“She’s fantastic,” Nelson-Joyce says of Onslow. “I knew after the chemistry read that it was Hannah’s [role]. I didn’t know it was mine. But I certainly knew it was hers. She was magic, playful. She brought the fun out of Diana. But she also had the sense of class that Diana’s got within her, and Hannah just exuded that.”
The cast all boarded the project on the strength of the first few scripts, and were then kept on tenterhooks as filming began before they knew how things would turn out for the gang. “I’ve never been on a set where the crew love the show as much as us,” Onslow says. “Sometimes they would rather be anywhere else, but they were all reading the scripts. There was a sweepstake at one point about what they thought was going to happen at the end. It’s not happened on a lot of the jobs I’ve been on, for people to love the show so much.”
Like Nelson-Joyce and Onslow, McMullen (Time, Hijack) was “blown away” by those first scripts. He praises Butchard’s ability to “keep the tension high all the time” while bringing a “human element” to a gangster show. “It’s about family, and he gives us these moments where you see the group together and they’re all wearing a mask, and then he gives us these private moments to show the different sides to each character,” the actor says. “I read the first two scripts when we first started talking about this, and then scripts came as we were filming and each one just got better and better. It really drives through towards the end.”
Nelson-Joyce notes: “There’s not one character in this show that hasn’t got an objective. No one’s there to fill a blank. So he writes all the characters and their conflicting objectives. Obviously, that’s what creates drama, and Stephen has this beautiful way of building the tension and then you let it go. And then something will happen.”
As soon as Ronnie begins to lay out his plans for the future, the tension becomes palpable between Michael and Jamie, with the good friends immediately becoming distant from each other. In a case of prodigal son syndrome, Jamie becomes attentive to conversations between his father and Michael, without him, and can see himself losing his grip on the ‘inheritance’ he always thought would be his.
The theme of fathers and sons runs through the series, and is seen through not only Ronnie and Jamie, but also the celebration of Jamie’s newborn son with a lavish christening and afterparty – the cast perform a group line dance to Andy Williams’s The House of Bamboo – and the difficulty Michael has in becoming a father himself.
“He’s not got a really good standing in the group yet to make the claim [for leadership], so he ends up doing something really drastic at the beginning of the series, which backfires spectacularly,” McMullen explains. “That sets up this rivalry between Michael and Jamie, brings pressure from outside the group and causes conflict inside the group. But he feels pressured to make that move. He’s got a young family and, in that world, not only would you be cast aside, but it can be dangerous. We start the series where the touchpaper’s about to be lit and it’s about to go crazy.”
“It’s that classic thing of a son trying to win his father’s love,” he continues. “Jamie just wants to win his dad’s love, but ultimately there’s an age difference. Michael’s been long established before him and he’s not really had the time or opportunity to make a challenge to Michael’s dominance in the group.”
The rivalry between Michael and Jamie doesn’t run too deep, however, as Nelson-Joyce and McMullen are best friends off screen and revelled in the chance to play ‘frenemies’ in This City is Ours – a dynamic that was enhanced by Butchard keeping them in the dark about where their characters’ paths would take them. “We didn’t know [what would happen next], so you’re not overthinking it or trying to plant little things for what’s coming,” McMullen says. “You’ve just got to play what’s on the page each episode. James and I were excited to read each one as it came through. We were calling each other going, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen next?’”
Butchard says he was “channeling a bit of Macbeth” when he conceived the story and characters in This City is Ours, as ambition, jealousy and envy sit at the core of every action and reaction. “But the love story is the backbone,” he adds. “It was having a man like Michael who suddenly has something he really wants more than money, power and wealth, so how does he balance the two? We put Michael and Diana through it, we test them. But it was about keeping that relationship real as well.
“It’s about chasing two dreams– the dream of love and the dream of money and wealth. Which one do you abandon first? As things go on and get worse, and Jamie’s misbehaving, we explore the fallout.”
As the men “lose their way,” the women step up, Butchard continues. “Initially it’s dominated by the men, but the women come more into it because bravado and machismo is creeping into their behaviour. Suddenly it’s the women talking sense. We make decisions from an emotional point of view. It’s a very rare person who can sit down rationally and go, ‘I really want to do this but I’m not going to do this.’ Too often we’re up on our toes and doing the thing we feel rather than the thing we think. It’s exploring that. It’s emotion over intellect, and emotion wins too many times.”
“It definitely gets more intense between Michael and Jamie,” McMullen says, “and it helped that James and I had that relationship there, because if there are times when something’s not working, we can improvise. You can be physical with each other, and to do that, you need the trust there, and we had that naturally being such close mates.”
Like Nelson-Joyce, McMullen and many of the cast and crew, Butchard is a Liverpool native, and the series is his first set in his home city since 2012’s Good Cop. Produced by Left Bank Pictures and distributed by Sony Pictures Television, the show was filmed in Liverpool for five months, using numerous locations from the city centre to the docks. However, by that time, the cast had already bonded during a block of shooting in Marbella, Spain, for scenes featuring the Phelans’ Spanish drug contacts and moments showcasing the lavish lifestyle their criminality has afforded them.
“A lot of the cast are from Liverpool and a good few of us have worked together before, so there’s a relationship there anyway, but we started in Spain all together where we all kind of bonded before going back to Liverpool, and that really helped the dynamic,” McMullen says.
Butchard wrote the majority of the series, with Robbie O’Neill co-writing on two episodes and providing support when the story and character arcs were being fleshed out during development. With eight episodes and a full roster of characters, it meant they needed a “rock solid foundation” for the series to build from, while also taking care not to rush through too much story and finding quieter moments to spend time with the characters.
“If you’ve got good characters, you want to spend time with them,” Butchard says. “If a big incident happens, it’s seeing different people’s point of view, and how it has a knock-on effect and what it will lead to. If you have something physical or visually dramatic, go for it, but be careful. It’s all about character. The point is, if you’re going to have a car chase, make sure people care about the people in the car. It’s thinking about those moments and getting the most out of them from an emotional point of view, as much as you do want people to be crunching their fingers at what’s going on.”
This City is Ours is a story about family – and whether love can stand up to the combined forces of ambition, pride and greed. “These people ultimately are businessmen. They see themselves as running a business,” Butchard says. “But it’s not a good business. It’s covered in blood, and the end product doesn’t do any good. Sadly there’s a real demand for it. They are criminals on the front line and they don’t pretend to be anything else, but they’re good company. It’s a really good story and it tells a familiar tale really well. It’s a good love story too.”
It’s also a show about how people can evolve, especially Michael. “People start off as one thing and they grow,” he adds. “They change from being criminals to men in love, and that change is always possible. If there is a message, that’s it.”
tagged in: BBC, Hannah Onslow, Jack McMullen, James Nelson-Joyce, Left Bank Pictures, Sony Pictures Television, Stephen Butchard, This City is Ours