TheworldaccordingtoMatthewBroome

The Your Fault: London star on the performances that shaped him, the decision that changed his life and how acting has become the lens through which he understands everything around him.

 

INTERVIEW Olive Walton
WORDS Julia Novis

 

Interview taken from IMAGINE Magazine Issue Three Pre Order here

 

Matthew Broome is obsessed with acting. It possesses his thoughts, his dreams and his time off. He can pinpoint the exact moment and decision that led him on the path he’s on now, and only hindsight allows him to realise how close he was to missing the opportunity that would lead him to be cast in his first feature film leading role in My Fault: London and its sequel, Your Fault: London.

 

Before making his film debut as Nick, the leading man in Prime Video’s feature film My Fault: London, Matthew Broome brought Guy Thwarte to life in the Apple TV+ drama series The Buccaneers. With two seasons of the series under his belt, and one more film adapting Mercedes Ron’s bestselling Culpables trilogy still to come, the British actor’s career is quickly picking up speed.

 

Speaking to IMAGINE, Broome recalls the films that shaped him, gives us tips on the best way to watch a movie and discusses how he navigated the pressure of leading a book-series adaptation that already has a beloved following. Now with a growing list of screen credits under his belt, he is energised, excited and only just getting started.

 

Olive Walton: What are some of your favourite films and performances that made you want to start acting?

 

Matthew Broome: I was about 14, 15 [years old] when movies started changing for me from just being an escape – just wanting to go and watch action films and guns and exploding – to suddenly shifting to more of the character driven films, and me becoming aware of an actor doing a performance and moving me. I remember one film, Hacksaw Ridge, which I went to see at a time when I was just really enjoying drama, and I was thinking about whether I should pick it as a subject, and I remember going to see that with my mum. But mainly it was because it was a war film, and I was excited to see a war film. I remember being so moved by Andrew Garfield’s performance, thinking, “Wow. I think that’s what I want to do. Not just make movies, but I want to do this sort of performance.” And then I think Fences came out at a similar time that year, with Viola Davis and Denzel Washington – he’s one of my idols. I’ve watched clips from that film on repeat.

 

It is an August Wilson play that Denzel made into a film. But Viola Davis and him are just two powerhouses going at each other, and it just blew my mind. Then I really just started to just find as many of those character-driven films as I could. Leonardo DiCaprio is a huge influence.

 

My cinema experience was changing, and my dad would be like, “Wait, you want to go and see that? That’s not the sort of film you usually want to go and see.” I remember watching Beautiful Boy with Timothee Chalamet in my bedroom, and thinking, “Wow, he’s so young and so talented to be able to do a performance like that.” And I just started becoming obsessed and watching as many films as I could. I went back recently onto Letterboxd, and I was looking for all the films from my childhood and just making them into one big list. It was interesting to see the sort of films that made me want to be an actor and then the sort of films that I remember being obsessed with as a kid.

 

“Wow. I think that’s what I want to do. Not just make movies, but I want to do this sort of performance”

 

OW: How do you prefer to watch films – alone? At the cinema? With friends? At home?

 

MB: Honestly, my ideal scenario is the cinema. I either loved a packed out cinema or I love no one in it. I go to the cinema a lot on my own, and sometimes I’ll go in there and there’ll be just me and another person. I’ll think “This is literally like my living room, this is amazing.” but I also love a packed out cinema. I’ll always have a Pepsi Max, quite a big one, and a small mixed popcorn – I’m not someone who can eat a whole big bag – and maybe then some Candy Kittens or something like that. I struggle much more to watch things at home because there are just so many distractions. I have 100 million thoughts while I’m watching something and your phone is the way to find those answers. So I like to just switch off everything and watch a film in the cinema.

 

OW: What is the last film you watched in the cinema?

 

MB: I recently watched Obsession in the cinema and it was packed out. That was amazing. I left that being like, that was genuinely one of the top-five, maybe top-three, cinema experiences I’ve had. It was one of those films that everyone is viscerally reacting to and cringing at and jumping at. You feel like you’re all there, watching this moment in time and you’re like, “How is this happening? How are we all getting to witness this?”

OW: I read about how you decided to choose to switch to studying drama from computing while you were at school? You were kind of worried about making that decision because it wasn’t considered the cool option at the time. I wanted to ask, looking back now, how important was that decision in shaping the path that you’re now on?

 

MB: I love the fact that I can pinpoint it to a day. I nearly didn’t [choose to study drama], I really nearly didn’t. My drama teachers used to remind me of it all the time. When it was getting to the point where I was auditioning for drama school, they were like, “Do you remember you were going to pick computing at one point?” and I’m so thankful that I didn’t. There are a few things that I look back on when thinking about my past self, and I think “Thank God for past me, for making that decision, for following whatever instinct or gut feeling that was or, epiphany. Because if I didn’t pick [to study Drama] I just wouldn’t have done it in school anymore. I’d like to think that I would’ve found it, that it would come back into my life some other way, but I could have just drifted from it, and I have no idea where I’d be if that was the case, because it consumes so much of my thoughts and it’s been my North Star since I was 15. I wake up thinking about it. I go to bed thinking about it. Everything in life I absorb and it all goes through that lens of what it is to be an actor, to play a character and tell the truth. It’s in the fabric of my being and it really shaped my outlook on life and on growing up. I felt like I was growing up in a movie. I genuinely was viewing everything as “This would be an awesome scene in a movie.” It would be the simplest thing but it made me so appreciative of life because I’d be with my mates, drinking on a hill, overlooking this industrial estate. And I thought, “This is a movie. This is cinema.” Someone else would probably think, “What? You’re on a hill looking at an industrial estate.” But it was just so beautiful to me. I think without that I don’t know if I’d have had that outlook.

 

OW: If you could speak to your younger self, and to those who are choosing what to study now, how would you encourage those who are wanting to pursue creative endeavours but are worried about what their friends might think?

 

MB: It’s hard because when you’re that age, and before I found acting, all I really cared about was hanging out, having a good time with my mates, girls and fitting in. At secondary school that’s all that’s going through your mind. You’re going through puberty and all that’s going on in your brain. There’s so much to worry about. So then to find something, especially as a boy, that was not the typical path to go down… I was playing football with my mates and then suddenly I thought, “Actually, I kinda want to go and do drama,” which felt like a counter. So it is tough. I don’t blame myself for doing that.

 

OW: Peer pressure is a strong force.

 

MB: It’s so strong, but I think if you love it enough you will just do it. It got to a point where it was almost like I just couldn’t not [act]. So, I think that’s it. Just go for it. Take the plunge. Because I think one thing that happens is when you start getting older, if you see anyone doing something that they love, I’m like, “Oh, fuck yeah, good for them.” That’s the best shit. It will go from that awkward stage of, “Oh, my God, people, what are people thinking?” Until everyone goes, “Oh, he does that thing and he loves it. That’s sick.”

 

“Oh my God, I’m fucking doing a movie. This is the most insane thing ever”

 

OW: Moving on to the moment you were cast in My Fault: London. Nick was your first leading film role. What were some of the challenges and some of the rewards that came with carrying a film of this scale?

 

MB: I think that because it was my first time, it was that balance between, “Oh my God, I’m fucking doing a movie. This is the most insane thing ever,” and having that wonder and awe about what I’m doing, and then also thinking, “Okay, I need to get to work. I need to do the work now.” That was a tough balance. But the best thing is that Asha was in the exact same boat and we both had that exact same outlook on it so we both really cared and worked hard.

 

OW: You said that you hadn’t quite grasped the existing fan base that had come from the original, Spanish Culpa Mia book trilogy. Was there a moment that made you understand the gravity of support that pre-dated the British remake?

 

MB: I remember seeing it on Amazon [Prime] when I was flicking through but it hadn’t registered to me. I remember watching the first couple of minutes when I got the job, and then I decided, “Actually, this is not going to be helpful,” so I turned it off. I shut myself off from it. And then it literally wasn’t until we were in the car in Tenerife, me and Asha on the way to the hotel where we were going to be filming, and she was like, “Do you understand the scale of this? And I was like, “No.” Then she was flicking through the numbers and the socials of the Spanish films and I was like, “Wait, what?!” But then it wasn’t a helpful thing to think about so I kind of pushed it to my unconscious afterwards.