“Deserving of the Greatest”: This English Actor Discovered on Netflix Reveals Empire of Light – Actus Cine

Starting Wednesday in Sam Mendes’ latest movie, Michael Ward stars opposite Olivia Colman. This promising actor’s journey is back.

He was nominated for the last BAFTA in the “Best Supporting Actor” category. If he loses to Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisher laureate Michael Ward won’t have to be ashamed of his young career.

Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1997, he was two years old when his father died in a car accident. Along with his mother and three sisters, he moved to London at the age of four. He attended Chadwell Heath Academy, a terminally abandoned institution for training in fine arts at Epping Forest College. At the same time, he worked odd jobs as a teenager as a delivery boy to his aunt’s Caribbean restaurant or a waiter in the center of Paris.

At university, she signed with a talent agency and began appearing in music videos in 2017. Trigger bang Lily Allen, when she modeled for many brands. In 2018, he landed his first role in the series The A List, which follows a group of teenagers who take a dream vacation on an isolated island.

The following year, he played his first role in Blue Story, a film adaptation of Robman’s YouTube series, which follows two friends who become rivals in a gang war. He also played one of the lead roles in seasons 3 and 4 of Top Boy, a series about a young drug-dealing gang in an East London neighborhood. Acclaimed by critics, the show, which aired on Channel 4 in the early 2010s, enjoyed a renewed interest when it returned to Netflix in 2019.

It was a remarkable debut that earned her the EE Rising Star Award at BAFTA 2020, which highlights new talent among actors and actresses of the year. Michelle Ward continues her rise with the Netflix blockbuster The Old Guard, hosted by Charlize Theron and Steve McQueen’s mini-series, Small Ax (episode). Lovers Rock), for which he was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor.

With Empire of Light, he won a new BAFTA citation for Best Supporting Actor, this time on the cinematic side. Sam Mendes cast him in the role of a film worker who becomes close to an old colleague camped by Olivia Colman. The film is set against the backdrop of the rise of the right wing in England in the 1980s. The director of 1917 and Skyfall made sure to read the script and ask him for his opinion on his character: “Sam didn’t need it: I was new to the business, I hadn’t been an actor for a long time. But he considered my opinion – it was exciting to know that he was ready to cooperate with me. Sam enjoyed it. Time, although he felt the tension around him, to put himself in the shoes of a colored man. Couldn’t.”

Proud to defend the role and grateful for the experience that allowed him to collaborate with big names in cinema, the actor offers, according to the Awardswatch site, a “Performance […] worthy of greatness”. We’ll soon find him in Book of Clarence alongside James McAvoy, Omar Sy and Benedict Cumberbatch.