Read more on theguardian.com

‘It’s now or never, this is my chance’: Anson Boon on his biggest break, punk and Johnny Rotten

Something is clearly wrong, I realise, as Anson Boon sips peppermint tea in a plant-filled café in east London, relishing one of the last moments of calm before his career blows up. The 22-year-old actor can soon be seen playing the punk icon Johnny Rotten in Pistol, Danny Boyle’s new six-part Sex Pistols biopic on Disney+. It’s the sort of role that will define how he’s seen for years to come: menacing, volatile, a little dangerous. And yet, how to put this? He’s so nice! So un-punkishly pleased to be here. The kind of boy my mum would love, all “Yes mate!” and “I love my pubs!” and “I’m moving up in the world” (in reference to the fact that his tea comes in an actual pot).

“I feel a bit like Hannah Montana sometimes,” he says, a reference to the Disney Channel sitcom in which Miley Cyrus played an ordinary school girl with a popstar alter ego. “Like, I get to do these cool things and go to photoshoots and fly to LA and stuff like that and that’s when I’m Hannah… Then I go back home to Peterborough and I’m back with my mates that I’ve been to school with and they’re all builders and plumbers and stuff and I love it.”

Which is not a comparison I can see endearing the young lad to Lydon, who has done everything in his power to stop the biopic from happening, including taking his former bandmates to court (and losing) and complaining that Disney has created a “middle-class fairytale”. But Boon, as it emerges, is very far from your typical middle class thespian, and there is something impressively self-willed about the way he has made himself one of the hottest young English actors around.

No one in his family or circle has ever done anything remotely like acting, he says. He’s wearing Comme des Garçons sneakers, a green military jacket and a hip Japanese T-shirt that his dad bought him (“I have a very cool dad”), together with his grandad’s signet ring and his nan’s chain. Family is clearly important to him. His mum was one of four siblings whose entire family lived in a single room in a house in Tottenham until they were relocated to a council house in Peterborough in the 1960s. “They were what you call an overspill family. You can kind of follow the M1 and the A10 north of London and all of the towns along the way are hubs of old working-class Londoners that went to start a new family in their new council house, back when you actually got a house.” The other side is from farming stock. Anson’s grandad is still growing potatoes at 85 (he employs Anson’s younger brother), while his dad runs a small business selling garage equipment, which employs various aunts and uncles, too. Boon’s principal passions outside acting are Tottenham Hotspur FC and “shit pubs”, in particular the Antwerp Arms near the Spurs ground. “It’s literally five doors down from the house with that one bedroom that my mum grew up in. Spurs bought shares in that pub to keep it afloat. That’s our club!”

What made him want to be an actor? “Honestly, I have no idea, mate!” He reckons it might have been watching Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. Or Dirty Dancing. But he does know it’s what he’s always wanted to do – he’s always made people laugh by doing stupid impressions. His mum has a picture of the Hollywood sign that he drew when he was six. When I ask him who his heroes are now, he reels off Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Matthew McConnaughey. But when he left his comprehensive school at 16 he had no connections in the acting world or really a single clue what he was doing.

He did, however, have the internet. He made his way into the industry by watching how-to videos that various casting agents had uploaded on to YouTube. “I asked for a proper camera to do auditions for Christmas when I was 17 and I bought myself some blue wallpaper because they say blue is flattering for self tapes,” he says. “I didn’t go to drama school, so I had it in my head that if I wanted people to take me seriously and if I wanted people to bring me in for serious auditions then I had to commit to looking serious about it.”

I tell them that, having interviewed a few next-big-things about the challenges of boarding school, and the burdens of having parents who are also actors, this is all refreshing. “Actually, my mum’s head of Apple TV,” he jokes. “Nah, it’s not that vibe! I mean I had a really nice childhood, and my parents are so great and so supportive. But I’m definitely aware of what it’s like to not grow up with those things.”

His first really decent role came in the late Roger Michell’s 2019 family ensemble drama, Blackbird, an experience that resulted in him, Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet all getting matching tattoos (a blackbird, on his inner arm). “I was kind of like a sponge when I was 18, 19, working with these people, taking in all the best parts of their process.” Roles in Sam Mendes’s First World War drama 1917 and the play Master Harold and the Boys at the National Theatre followed, before he was invited to audition for an “Untitled Danny Boyle Series” midway through the first Covid lockdown.

He made it through the first round of general auditions before he was asked to film himself again, this time for the role of John Lydon. He got his mum to film him recreating Lydon’s own audition for the band: an improvisation on Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen in front of Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and manager Malcolm McLaren in Vivienne Westwood’s boutique. “That scene is so pivotal because it’s like now or never, this is the chance,” says Boon. “My parents were like: ‘Are you sure you want to go that hard for your audition?’ I said: ‘Do you know what? I feel like I’m either definitely going to get it or they’re going to say what the fuck?’”

And here began the stuff of boyhood dreams. Boon was airlifted out of lockdown for long discussions in the pub with Boyle, meetings with Steve Jones, Chrissy Hynde, Vivienne Westwood and the rest, plus three months of “bandcamp”. Rehearsals took place at the old ITV studio overlooking the Houses of Parliament on the Thames, where Boon and the rest of the band were required to learn the full Pistols set list to near professional standard because Boyle wanted all the music to be played live on set. “I think we formed a bit of a brotherhood for life,” Boon says.

The series, based on Lonely Boy, the 2016 memoir by Jones, looks to have the career-launching potential of Boyle’s 1996 classic Trainspotting, which propelled Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller towards stardom. Here, Toby Wallace is magnetic as Jones, and you might recognise Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the kid from Love Actually, as manager McLaren (or “the most evil man in the world,” as Lydon once called him.)

The Sex Pistols story is already one of the most fabled in rock’n’roll: the filth, the fury, the C-word on ITV, that gig that inspired everyone in Manchester to form a band, the Silver Jubilee, the BBC ban, Sid and Nancy, death, disorder, defiance, etc. But the focus on Jones gives Pistol a less familiar centre of gravity, emphasising the child abuse, rejection and delinquency that gave rise to the band’s music. The script, by Baz Luhrmann’s long-term collaborator Craig Pearce, won’t delight every punk fan, but taken as a whole is a sincere attempt to chart punk’s seismic impact on British culture. The thing that the director wanted to impress most on his young cast was just how boring England was until the Sex Pistols came along. “I think it was perhaps the first thing he ever said to me after I was cast,” Boon says. “And he kept reminding us of that, just how dull it was [at the time], and just how outrageous this boy with bright orange spiky hair and a bright pink blazer with safety pins and Tic Tac lids stuck on to it really was.”

Boon and his castmates soon discovered that the idea that anyone can play punk is a myth. “I mean, the way John sings is not easy,” says Boon, who had no prior musical experience. But they all had a sense they were getting somewhere when Jordan (Pamela Rooke), the model and muse credited with creating the punk look, dropped by the rehearsal rooms one afternoon and asked them to play for her.

“That was like big nerves,” says Boon. “I said: ‘What song do you want us to play?’ She said Holidays in the Sun, which is one of the hardest ones. So we did it and her reaction was just like more than we could’ve hoped for. She said: ‘I feel like I’ve just watched them again.’” She thanked him with a present of a face mask made from vintage Vivienne Westwood fabric and a small acting note. “She said: ‘Just make sure you curl your toes in a bit more because John was a bit pigeon-toed.’” Rooke died earlier this year – the face mask means even more to him now.

It feels cruel to interrupt Boon’s reminiscences of what was clearly the time of his life to point out that the idea of a biopic of the Sex Pistols (to be screened on Disney+, no less) is something Lydon himself has taken as a grave personal insult. I read Boon out a few of the comments that Lydon has made since his failed attempt to stop the series left him facing financial ruin: “Disney has stolen the past”…“Middle-class fantasy”… “Rewriting history”… “It would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.” What’s Boon’s response to all that?

He has clearly anticipated the question and, at first, his answer seems prepared. “First of all, Danny comes from a working-class background,” he says. “To me he’s a true hero because he really wants to respect the voices of working-class people.” But then the emotion cracks through. “I love John,” he says. “I’m really sorry that John feels this way; we really wanted him to be involved. I would’ve loved to speak to him. I thought I was going to speak to him. But the fact that he wasn’t involved genuinely spurred me on to keep trying to respect his voice and chase authenticity in my performance.”

Boyle told each cast member that it was their job to know more about their character than anyone else, including him. So Boon spent every spare moment “running the John department” reading Lydon’s three memoirs, YouTubing all the Lydon interviews he could find (including the one where he outed Jimmy Savile as a paedophile in 1978, allegedly leading to him being banned by the BBC), as well as all the concert footage. “He never stutters: that’s one thing I noticed about him early on. He’s such a wordsmith, so intelligent and quick-witted. He always says he spent a lot of time in the library growing up.”

He had to remind himself, in the end, that he was making a drama as opposed to a documentary. “But what lets me sleep at night is the fact that I know that I actually really like this man. I am a huge fan of his. Nothing I ever did in my performance came from a place of anything other than respect and admiration.”

Boon recently read that Lydon intends to watch the series and he hopes that if he does, it will finally vindicate the whole thing. “I’ve left so many clues and hints that I hope he will see. I completely learned to be left-handed. I only ever ate foods I know he loved; I always drink his favourite beer. I made sure that every detail down to the last gig where possible was correct.” And if he still hates it? Well, so be it. Lydon didn’t get where he was by being nice. When he issued his most recent denouncement of the project, Boon texted his fellow cast member, Talulah Riley, who plays Vivienne Westwood: “Is it weird that this endears me to him even more? Like, he says all these hateful things and I love it because that is Johnny Rotten. That’s the guy I love and I admire.”

The world is about to open for Boon. But he has no intention of leaving his parents’ home in Peterborough any time soon: he’s too attached to his nights out in Flares with his mates; his Spurs; the freedom of ordinariness. He is currently single (“You’re not gonna get me on women!”). And, as it stands, his biggest extravagance is: “I like a really wanky, fruity IPA – I’m partial to one of them, yeah.”

He has left the next few months deliberately free. But the experience of being a Pistol is informing his approach. “I find myself saying no to things a lot less now. Life is so short. Who cares what people think about you? I think I was more uptight before this job. Now I just say yes – just don’t give a fuck. That’s what punk taught me.”

Pistol is now streaming on Disney+

Stylist Helen Seamons; fashion assistant Peter Bevan; production Alex Oley; grooming Petra Sellge at the Wall Group using Daimon Barber grooming range.