“Just go in there and give it the old razzle dazzle, Danny.” Those were Stephen Graham’s words of wisdom to Daniel Mays after he had persuaded him to accept a role on Disney +’s thumpingly visceral new TV drama A Thousand Blows.
Mays was starring in Guys and Dolls, performing six shows a week at The Bridge Theatre in London, when he got the call from Graham asking him to come on board. “It was a big ask, because I was obviously on stage every night,” says Mays of his 300-performance, Olivier-nominated run playing Nathan Detroit in the classic Broadway musical. It was an even bigger ask given that the new, based-on-history drama – about boxing brothers, Jamaican immigrants trying to find a footing in the cradle of Empire, and Wapping’s fearsome all-female criminal gang The Forty Elephants – was shooting its first and second series back to back.
But it was an offer Mays couldn’t refuse. Not because the man making it was busy bulking up to twice his size to convincingly play Sugar Goodson, the most fearsome bare-knuckle boxer in Victorian London. But because Graham is a mate and kindred spirit – they starred together in Sky’s cop comedy Code 404, both are alumni of Line of Duty, and both are working-class actors with versatility in their veins. It helps that Graham is a stamp of quality in anything in which he appears. If he was onboard, Mays – his name also a sign that a show packs some punch, and even more ubiquitous on British TV than Graham – wasn’t going to say no to playing William “Punch” Lewis, real-life publican-ringmaster at the Blue Coat Boy boozer in the East End of the 1880s.
“I looked at the character and got it instantaneously,” says the 46-year-old. “Punch is the MC, there to whip up a frenzy… And it lent itself immediately to the portrayal being as theatrical as possible. And it actually helped that I was doing Nathan Detroit, because there’s a few pratfalls and hat-spins that bled into the performance of Punch. Which amuses me but no one else would know that.”
The stylish violence. The roar of Industrial Britain and the smell of the working-class streets. The protagonists’ centuries-old aggro-boho clobber that’s about to become a high street staple. A period drama with pop-culture sensibilities. Some more violence. This six-episode, Disney-funded yarn can only be the work of one screenwriter. Cockney Peaky Blinders, anyone?
“The big take-away from today’s junket is how everyone that interviewed us was completely blown away by Steven Knight’s creation of this world,” says Mays of the writer who gave the world Thomas Shelby and his band of Brummie brothers. “There are just brilliant strands to the story.”
It’s a midweek afternoon in The Devonshire, the Guinness-gushing central London pub that’s become a phenomenon in its own right. Mays is fresh(ish) from that all-cast, all-day press junket, and is seeking respite in a pint or three of the black stuff.
It’s a refreshingly down-to-earth way to conduct an interview from a refreshingly down-to-earth actor. As we rattle through a busy-busy CV – recent murder mystery series Moonflower Murders marked his 100th credit, 24 years since the working-class father-of-two from Essex graduated from Rada – the clubbable, pubbable Mays is never less than revealing.
What, for example, did his role in Atonement, Joe Wright’s stellar 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, do for his then-nascent career? “It gave me a big, f*ck-off monologue written at the last minute by Anthony Minghella – he was a script-doctor on it.” For which of those 100 credits is he most often recognised? Line of Duty (2016) “is a big one”, which is good going given that his character was killed in the first episode he was in – the briefest of arcs that nonetheless landed Mays a Bafta nomination for Supporting Actor.
“But it’s just random things sometimes,” he continues. He mentions 2017 one-off BBC drama Against the Law, the true, 50s-set story about the long march to the decriminalisation of homosexuality. “We were doing the [National Lottery’s] Big Night of Musicals with Guys and Dolls in Manchester. And the guy that was handling the press said: ‘I just wanted to say that I saw you in that show and I can’t tell you how much it spoke to me as a gay man. It meant everything.’ You do get pieces of work that really affect the audience. That’s always gratifying.”
Then, bringing us up to 2025, with Mays having four projects about to drop, what can he tell us about his role in Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club, another all-star prestige streamer series, this one from the pen of Richard Osman? The adaptation of the TV-presenter-turned-bestselling author’s novel also features Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie. Or, as Mays puts it, “The Queen, James Bond, Acorn Antiques and Gandhi – it was mad!”
He can’t say much, but he will say that Netflix’s money was obvious “in the calibre of my castmates. That was a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming moment. Hopefully I’m that long in the tooth now that I can just sit there and get on with it. That feeling of imposter syndrome is still there,” he admits, “but you can’t let that dictate what you do.”
That sense of not fully feeling that he fits dovetails with something Mays is always asked about – class. It bubbles up today when we talk about theatre work. Mays loves it, viewing it as “the greatest workout. The best parts are onstage.” Aside from Guys and Dolls, he’s done a pair of Pinters (The Caretaker with Timothy Spall, The Dumb Waiter with David Thewlis), a Jez Butterworth (Mojo with Ben Whishaw) and a Patrick Marber (The Red Lion with Peter Wight). But much as he’d love to, he’s never done Shakespeare. Why not?
“I don’t know but it’s become a monkey on my back. And the longer you leave it, the harder it becomes.” Might casting directors think that, despite his Rada training, Mays, with his Essex accent, doesn’t have, shall we say, classical comportment? “Yeah, I think that goes on a lot. But that’s why it should be righted.”
So we might say that Shakespearean drama is one of the last bastions of class-ism? “Yeah, I would agree.”
Not, he adds, that there are many stage roles going generally. Or many roles full-stop. He might be booked solid – he’s also recently completed filming Mark Gatiss’s Bookish and a reboot of the early Noughties Inspector Lynley Mysteries, and is about to reunite with Jason Statham, his co-star on 2008 heist thriller The Bank Job, on an action movie. “I’m playing the Simon Pegg character in Mission: Impossible – computer geek!” But acting, like the British TV industry in general, is in crisis. Or, as he puts it, “it’s f**king dead at the moment… which is a bit of a headf**k because we’ve just had a massive house extension.”
His wife Lou, a former makeup artist, framed it to him another way: “We’re in a financial crisis, there’s less money, they’re not greenlighting as many projects, so there’s more actors out of work. They’re just banking on [projects] that are going to make money.”
Mays tells the story of recently attending the 40th birthday party of Lewis Arnold, who directed the actor in two of the “gritty dramas” in which he specialises – Dennis Nilsen story Des (2020) and Yorkshire Ripper series The Long Shadow (2023). “There was a lot of people there that I hadn’t seen for a while, really good actors. I went: ‘How’s the work?’ And [lots] said they hadn’t worked [for a] year. I thought: ‘Bloody hell, how are you existing?’ I’ve been very fortunate since Guys and Dolls, I’ve been very busy, and I’m lucky that things now seem to get offered [without an audition], which is a godsend. But it is tough.
“And if you want to climb up the food chain,” he continues, “you’ve got to audition for those [bigger jobs]. Then invariably you’re going against top, top actors. And the way the climate is now, there’s going to be a lot of really good actors [going for those jobs]. That’s why there’s a lot of Hollywood A-listers in the West End at the moment,” he adds, intimating that American-based actors are feeling the pinch, too. “And they’re not necessarily giving good performances. That’s a big bugbear of mine.”
Another bugbear: the astronomical prices of London theatre tickets. “It’s got to be accessible to people, otherwise it just becomes elitist. But West End prices are just ridiculous.”
Mays, though, won’t let those bugbears bug him for long. He loves his job, is fortunate with his roles, and knows that the harder he works, the luckier he gets. He pushed himself so furiously to make A Thousand Blows while simultaneously treading the boards nightly in Guys and Dolls that he was averaging five hours of sleep a night for weeks on end. “I learned to conserve energy and take cat naps. One time I even fell asleep in front of the whole cast of A Thousand Blows in the green room, sitting up!” The show’s relaxed camaraderie, though, got him through.
Speaking of which: as we’re finishing off in the back room of The Devonshire, May’s co-star James Nelson-Joyce joins us, his own interview commitments completed. I ask the younger actor, a decade behind Mays, what he thought of the southerner as a young, would-be actor in Liverpool.
“I told Danny this: the thing I loved him in was The Street with Jimmy McGovern,” Nelson-Joyce says of Mays’ 2009 role in the esteemed TV dramatist’s anthology series. “It’s quite a complex storyline – he falls in love with a prostitute… I remember clocking him and thinking: ‘He’s going there with this.’ He was sobbing, and he had vulnerabilities for days… And he was someone from our background. He’s one of us. Him, Stephen [Graham], they’re the ones who inspired me. I think Danny’s our Pete Postlethwaite.”
“Right, write that down!” shouts Mays over the pub hubbub. “That’ll do!”
A Thousand Blows is on Disney+ now
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