Loyle Carner, the album-charting, Brit Award-nominated hip-hop musician, doesn’t hesitate when asked if he was nervous shooting his first TV show. “Hell yeah,” he confesses to The Hollywood Reporter. “The whole time.”
There’s a delicious irony in the fact that Carner, also a Glastonbury fan-favorite (he headlined the fest’s buzzy West Holts stage only last year), was so cautious of missing a beat on Charlotte Regan’s new BBC drama, Mint. After all, this is the man who’s accrued over 1.4 billion Spotify streams — a celebrated British artist with a cool-as-ice stage presence.
But THR isn’t talking to Loyle Carner ahead of Mint‘s world premiere here on Potsdamer Platz. No — we’re speaking with the TV newbie set to make his acting debut, Ben Coyle-Larner.
“When I was growing up, I was very interested in a lot of that, but it didn’t feel like it was tangible for me. A lot of people talked about it like it wasn’t something that would be possible,” continues the 31-year-old about his dreams of hitting pause on music and getting in front of a rolling camera. The London-born rapper talks candidly about dropping out of university to help his mother, and finding financial security as Loyle Carner.
Directing his own music videos helped to “scratch the itch” arising from his underlying TV and film ambitions, but it was mostly seeing others go before him that gave him the confidence to branch out. “I’ve got a lot of friends who have recently made really beautiful films,” says Coyle-Larner. “They’re people I feel are a lot smarter than me, but definitely my contemporaries in terms of hanging out. So if they can do it, I felt like maybe I could be brave enough to give it a go.”
He has, until now, gone by his spoonerism-stage name — a nod to his childhood struggle with dyslexia — but when the credits roll on Regan’s quirky dark comedy, it’s Ben Coyle-Larner leading this new chapter of his life.
The eight-part Mint follows Shannon (The Brutalist‘s Emma Laird), a young teenager looking to fall in love for the first time. The only problem is, her father (Control star Sam Riley) is the charismatic, controlling kingpin at the helm of a powerful crime family in the north of England, and most of his daughter’s suitors are thus swiftly spooked. When Coyle-Larner’s Arran has Shannon googoo-eyed after a chance meeting at a train station, Regan asks us to consider what love might feel like when everyone outside of your family is utterly terrified of you.
Coyle-Larner, an admirer of the creative’s after her debut feature Scrapper, spotted Regan out shopping at Broadway Market in Hackney, east London. By coincidence, she had recently sent him the script for what would go on to become Mint. When he approached to say he enjoyed the work, it was the beginning of a real friendship. “I was talking about my frustration of being sent a lot of things that felt like they were a stereotype of people who look like me, but didn’t have much emotional weight or vulnerability or the things that I know to be true of people who look like myself,” he says about spending time with Regan.
“So when I read [Mint], I just expressed to her that I felt like I’d seen a little bit of that in it, and I was moved by it.” The task then, he adds, was convincing the BBC that he could actually do “a half-decent job.” Thankfully — after a very long audition process, he admits — he landed the role.
The show’s rival household story is loosely Shakespearean and effortlessly stylized. Handheld camera footage is intertwined with surrealist fantasies and needle-drop montages — including a wonderful use of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” — as Regan navigates her vision with vital self-confidence. The final product has left Coyle-Larner, as the Brits would say, chuffed to bits about his leap of faith.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve seen on TV. It’s magic,” he says about his decision to play Arran. “She just has integrity… and is a great director in the sense that she trusts her own opinion. That’s a really hard thing to do on set, especially when there’s so many people there.” He adds about the BBC: “It was nice to see them give her the trust.”
He’d been on a television set before — Philip Barantini and Stephen Graham invited Coyle-Larner onto the set of Adolescence, so it’s safe to say he’d witnessed the making of TV success firsthand — and later found it helpful that Regan “leant into” his nerves. “She understood I had a process that I was trying to work through, but yeah,” he laughs to THR. “I was fucking nervous — a lot.” The others, seasoned pros Laird, Riley, and Laura Fraser included, “reveled in [his] childlike enjoyment.”
All that’s left is for Ben Coyle-Larner to swap the screaming fans and sold-out gigs for a packed press conference and Berlinale photocall at his first-ever film festival. It’s here that we catch a glimpse of that nonchalant music star. “I love Berlin,” he says. “As long as I can get a good kebab, I’ll be fine.”
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