Thomas Turgoose on ‘Somers Town’

Thomas ‘Tomo’ Turgoose only auditioned for ‘This Is England’ after someone slipped him a fiver. He’s now teamed up with Shane Meadows again for a film set in London. The teenage truant is testament to what a bit of opportunity can produce, says Cath Clarke

If they weren’t such good friends you might think Shane Meadows was trying to give Thomas Turgoose some kind of complex. Turgoose – everyone calls him Tomo – is the 16 year old from Lincolnshire who played Shaun, the kid adopted by a gang of skinheads in Meadows’s ‘This Is England’. Back then, aged 14 (but looking a good couple of years younger), Turgoose threw a tantrum on set when he was told to walk down the street dressed in the early ’80s bovver-boy uniform of Dr Martens and red braces. In the end, it took a 20-quid bung from another actor to coax him outside.

‘Shane always knew I was really mardy about what I had to wear,’ he says today, smiling. As it turns out, it was Meadows who had the last laugh on their second film together, ‘Somers Town’, which opens in cinemas this month. He cast Turgoose as a northern runaway who has his bag nicked as soon as he steps off the train at King’s Cross. He spends the rest of the film wearing the contents of a bag of washing pinched from a laundrette.

‘I look like a female golfer,’ he complains in one scene in which he’s wearing a pair of Rupert Bear trousers and a big girl’s blouse. By the end, he’s in a floral dress, a pinny and a pair of Marigolds. ‘I felt an absolute tit, but I’m glad I did it.’ Later I ask Meadows about the dress. He laughs. ‘Tomo loves dressing up in women’s clothes, he felt right at home in that frock.’

‘Somers Town’ is a little gift of a film paid for mostly by Eurostar in a canny piece of advertising for its shiny new terminal. The original idea was for Meadows to make a 30-minute short, but with a final edit of 70 minutes, the film’s now getting a general release. Perhaps it’s partly down to the manna-like funding, but this is Meadows’s sweetest film to date. Turgoose, who has a natural knack for comedy, makes friends with a Polish boy, Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a lad who lives in a King’s Cross high-rise with his dad, a worker on the new Eurostar line. Together they are like a teenage Jules et Jim, united in their love for a French waitress working in London.

A cynic might put the gentle mood down to the corporate backing (the first draft, by Meadows’s friend Paul Fraser, was overseen by the ad agency Mother). But of all the settings he could have picked for his Eurostar film – Montmartre, for instance – Meadows chose Somers Town, the patch of estates that stretches north behind Euston Road in between St Pancras and Euston stations. As Turgoose explains, with constant sirens going off, the area wasn’t easy for filming. One scene was interrupted by two men piling out of a pub threatening to kill each other with snooker cues: ‘Things like that got in the way a bit.’

Meadows has described watching the first casting tape he saw of Tomo for ‘This Is England’ as like looking in a mirror 20 years ago. Does Turgoose see the similarity? ‘I suppose I’m a bit like Shane. He was always the small one who wanted to be involved in a lot of stuff.’ Meadows has said he was terrified of Turgoose, a lippy kid plucked from a Grimsby youth club, who charged the casting director for ‘This Is England’ a fiver to audition (it was a tenner for the second reading). ‘I thought I’d be lucky to get five days out of this kid, never mind a whole shoot,’ Meadows said afterwards.

For his part, Turgoose found the first few weeks of ‘This is England’ hard going. He nearly pulled out. Meadows bluffed him, telling him he had another boy in Manchester waiting to fill his shoes. ‘Shane said to me, this other lad is going to get all the money. And I said no, I’m going to.’ After seven weeks, he says he realised that this was what he wanted to do with his life. The film was dedicated to the memory of his mum, who died of cancer in September 2005, two months after shooting. A publicist working on the film at the time says she despaired of journalists asking about his mum, a subject which they’d been told was strictly off-limits.

Today, Turgoose is still cheeky – in an eager-to-please, youngest-child sort of way – and who wouldn’t be with such a brilliantly urchin-like, Dickensian name? More than that, he’s now a professional actor. Whereas before he was making it to school about once a week, this morning, a Saturday, he got up at the crack of dawn to come down on the train from Grimsby – where he lives with his dad and stepmum – for a casting session. If there was ever an example of what a bit of opportunity and self-esteem can do for a talented kid from an estate, it’s sitting right here in a Bloomsbury café.

He’s still friends with Meadows, who sounds proud talking about his young pal. ‘I decided to look out for him after “This Is England”.’ He says that Turgoose had to audition like anyone else for ‘Somers Town’ but turned out to be the best for the job. ‘He’s still cheeky, but he’s grown up a lot.’

As well as his films with Meadows, Turgoose had a part in a BBC drama, ‘The Innocence Project’, and is also in the upcoming Brit horror ‘Eden Lake’. There are other perks – parties and free Champagne are top of the list. Boris Johnson was at the launch for ‘Somers Town’. ‘I met him, he was cool. He was just stood there, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London.’ Turgoose turns to the woman from the film company. ‘He did watch the film?’ She nods. ‘I think so.’

It goes without saying that his life has changed? ‘Yeah, completely. I never had my own money. My mum always gave me money for anything I wanted and I was quite spoilt. Having that money came as a bit of a shock and I wasted a lot of it.’ He adds quickly, ‘But I saved a lot too.’

Nearly – but not quite – all grown up, then.

‘Somers Town’ opens on Aug 22. ‘Eden Lake’ opens on Sept 12.

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