James Nelson-Joyce is everywhere. He’s flying to Spain to negotiate a cocaine shipment. He’s prowling a boxing gym in the East End. He’s menacing a fellow prison inmate. He’s modelling trendy sportswear. Look out of your window and you’ll see his silhouette. Open your wardrobe and he’ll probably jump out and go, “boo!”
Nelson-Joyce is having a moment. Most actors dream of landing one major TV series: Nelson-Joyce has ticked off two this year already. He played Treacle, the brother of Stephen Graham’s fearsome bareknuckle boxer in A Thousand Blows, and then went one better with the lead role of Michael, consigliere of Sean Bean’s gang boss in BBC crime drama This City Is Ours. Fittingly, his breakout role as a vicious prisoner in 2021 prison drama Time saw him share the screen with both Bean and Graham. The prodigal son is all grown up.
Indeed, ‘a moment’ may be doing the Liverpudlian a disservice – moments pass. Perhaps ‘ascension’ is a better term, the rise from promising talent to crossover star. In March, he fronted a campaign for adidas SPZL S/S 25. (Spring / summer 2025, for those who don’t speak fashun.) In April, the BBC ran an article entitled ‘Could the new James Bond be '00-Scouse'?, noting his plummeting odds in the race for the most coveted role in cinema. Every young British actor is mooted as the next James Bond, it’s our cultural equivalent of Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, but you can’t win the pot if nobody deals you in.
“It's a bit of a pinch yourself moment if I'm honest,” says Nelson-Joyce of his remarkable 2025. “I've been doing this for 15 years, so it's been a long time, and I just can't believe how lucky I am. I never knew any actors growing up. I didn't even know I wanted to be an actor.”
We’re speaking in Liverpool ahead of This City is Ours premiere. I last saw Nelson-Joyce a week earlier at a London press screening followed by a cast Q&A. Dressed entirely in black, from his leather jacket to the strap of his chunky watch, he radiated star quality while retaining the earthy charm emblematic of his native city. “Can everyone hear me in here?” he asked the audience after being handed a microphone. “I feel like a twat holding this.” He duly relinquished the mic and proceeded to rhapsodise about Sean Bean.
Time was tight that day so I suggested we reconvene in Liverpool, his birthplace and the titular city of the series. Nelson-Joyce has described This City is Ours as a “love letter to Liverpool”. We meet at the Hope Street Hotel, a very chic boutique around the corner from the awe-inspiring Metropolitan Cathedral, constructed in the 1960s and featured prominently in the first episode. Nelson-Joyce grew up in Orrell Park, a short bus ride away.
His dad was a tiler for the council; his mum worked in a factory. “They worked all the hours,” says Nelson-Joyce of his parents. “It was very working class, growing up. Very, very humble beginnings.” He wanted to be a footballer as a kid. His favourite player wasn’t star striker Michael Owen or totemic midfielder Steven Gerrard but Jamie Carragher, a local boy who forged himself into one of the world’s best defenders.
It was Carragher’s personality as much as his playing style that appealed to young James. “Jamie's got something about him where he seems like an everyman, he's got time for everybody.” He saw something of himself in the Carragher ethos of “hard work and determination. Never give up. That fighting attitude is something I can relate to.”
Has he met his footballing hero? The question elicits a grin. “He's a mate of mine now.”
As with so many stories, an inspirational teacher played a prominent role. Enter Miss Griffiths. She taught English at Archbishop Beck secondary school and in the words of her former student, “she was absolutely stunning. I just wanted her attention when I would go to class.” He’d put on accents, play the clown. “It was a proper school boy crush.”
I reached out to Miss Griffiths over email, asking for her memories of James. She emailed back a few days later. “Wow!! Firstly, I am really flattered that he alludes to me, but that’s James for you - extremely humble, grounded and rooted.
“James was such a lovely young lad; he really brought the classroom to life with his ability to bring such characterisation to the texts we were studying. He had a warm sense of humour and was always eager to please and do his best.”
Miss Griffiths was not only a stunning teacher but a brilliant one: rather than discipline James for his antics, she found an outlet for them, submitting him for a speaking and listening exam that required the performance of a monologue. As she recalls, “I think it became a standing joke that I would always ask James to read in class - we were all in awe of his natural flair and ability in bringing characters alive through accents and emotion.”
The monologue Miss Griffiths gave James involved a teenager coming to terms with the death of his beloved dog and the sadness of seeing the dog’s lead and ball lying around the house. “This is how lucky I am,” grins Nelson-Joyce. “The lady who was marking me, I've never met her before in my life. I do the monologue and then as I finish it, she's crying.” The examiner had lost her own dog 18 months earlier and still kept his lead and his blanket. “Come here, love,” said James, and embraced her. “I just gave her a cuddle.”
Several weeks later, another teacher, Miss Lally, called James into her classroom. He’d received the highest grade ever given in the northwest for the monologue. “Cool,” said James. When Miss Lally suggested he seriously consider acting as a career, “I was kind of embarrassed more than anything because I didn't want to get ripped by me mates.”
Yet the seed had been sown. After a stint in college, Nelson-Joyce would enrol at the Italia Conti Stage School. He couldn’t have imagined the career that lay ahead of him, a journey catalysed by an exceptional teacher and an examiner’s dead dog.
“He has an amazing amount of charisma and he’s always in search of trying to play the truth – as any good actor is.” The verdict is delivered by the mighty Stephen Graham, described by Nelson-Joyce as an “older brother” and now a bonafide national treasure due to the groundbreaking Netflix drama Adolescence. (We like to think his 2021 Square Mile cover also played a role.) I reached out to Graham for his thoughts on Nelson-Joyce and received a typically generous response from a man beloved across the industry.
“He comes to set with an exuberance of joy and wonder at the art of the craft of what we do. He's just an absolute pleasure to have on set, he's got a wonderful sensibility about him. He treats everybody exactly the same and everybody loves to be around him because he just comes to work with a hell of a smile on his face. He's a wonderful actor.”
A fellow Scouser, Graham was one of Nelson-Joyce’s acting inspirations, along with the late Pete Postlethwaite – another Northern trailblazer. “You don't see actors like him any more, do you?” says Nelson-Joyce of Postlethwaite. “Everyone's got to have perfect teeth and all that kind of stuff. Whereas Pete Postlethwaite was the kind of fella you'd sit next to in the boozer.”
It wasn’t the boozer but Nando’s where Nelson-Joyce first encountered Graham. He had recently graduated drama school when he spotted his hero and wife Hannah Walters enjoying some peri-peri. The story shows up in every Nelson-Joyce profile and with good reason – it’s a rather lovely one. I’ll let Graham tell it.
“Me and Hannah were in Nando's and this lad came in and said hello. [He] said he was a big fan and said how much I was kind of an inspiration to him, which was really lovely and we took a photo together. Then Hannah went, ‘you know what, there’s something about that lad’, so I asked him for his e-mail address and said, ‘look if anything ever comes up I’ll let you know, but let's keep in touch about stuff.’
Walters passed her email to Nelson-Joyce, along with a request to keep them informed on his future projects. However the young actor was too embarrassed to alert the couple to his minor roles in the likes of Casualty and Vera. Luck – and talent – intervened when Nelson-Joyce was cast alongside Graham in the 2017 drama series Little Boy Blue. Graham recognised his Nando’s admirer at the table read and later recommended Nelson-Joyce to his agent.
A lifelong friendship had been sired, the pair’s fraternal bond being replicated on screen in A Thousand Blows, the recent, rapturously received Disney+ historical drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Oddly, Walters predicted such a pairing in Nando’s more than a decade earlier. According to Graham, “As he left, we were eating our dinner, and Hannah turned to me and said, ‘you know what, he has a look of you, he could really really play your brother’ – and she was right! Cut to A Thousand Blows.”
Nelson-Joyce is typically cast as a menacing hardman yet the actor is a self-confessed geek who collects vinyl Motown Records and watches history documentaries on YouTube. “I’m the most sensitive, vulnerable person you've ever met. I listen to music and sometimes I cry. Honestly. I'm not scared of showing my emotions. I’m an open book. I tell it exactly how it is. I love people. I think that's my biggest quality as a person, is that I love people.”
His favourite historical periods are the lead-up to the Second World War – “how Hitler won over the people of Germany, he was an outcast growing up” – and the Roman Empire. I mention the viral theory that men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. “Really?” he says. “I didn't know that. At least once a day?” He’s a huge fan of the Rest Is History podcast – “that’s my go-to, when I’m in the car and all that.”
What of the future? His current TV ubiquity continues with a role in the latest Black Mirror. The second season of A Thousand Blows has already been filmed. He wants This City Is Ours to run for multiple seasons – “I do believe this can go into a Soprano-esque show” – an ambition that may well be realised after the buzz generated by the first. “It’s been my favourite job,” says Nelson-Joyce. “The storylines are incredible. I've met so many nice people on this job. We're best mates on this job. How many actors get to say they work with their best mates?”
Mention of the Bond rumours gets a wry smile. “That'd be lovely, wouldn't it? That'd be great.” There’s never been a Scouse Bond… “Daniel Craig’s from the Wirral,” notes Nelson-Joyce. “He's a Liverpool fan, so that goes a lot of the way.” As for being mooted as Craig’s successor, “it's a bit mad. It's a bit mad. That was another pinch-yourself moment.” (For what it’s worth, I think he’d make a brilliant Bond while crucially offering a very different version to Craig. Physically he aligns well to Ian Fleming’s description: slim build, cold eyes, cruel mouth.)
Whatever happens, he can rest assured that Miss Griffiths remains in his corner. “I am immensely proud of the young man he’s grown up to be and the successes he has achieved to date. I have watched everything he has been in and just blown away with his talent! I am extremely privileged to have been his teacher!”
Fifteen years of hard graft means Nelson-Joyce will never take success for granted. “I'm very aware that this could all dry up and I could never work again. That's a possibility. That's how all actors think. I don't think you ever feel safe. There are actors who are ten times better than I'm out there, a million times better, but they don't get the roles. Luck has a lot to do with it.
“I speak on behalf of a lot of actors, we're very cautious to go, ‘oh yeah, I've made it.’ No, you might never work again. That's why you need to enjoy it when you're doing it. That's my biggest advice to anyone – smell the roses while you're doing it.”
James Nelson-Joyce has much to enjoy. His moment is now. All he need do is inhale.
This City is Ours is streaming on BBC iPlayer. A Thousand Blows is streaming on Disney +
