Interview with Andrew Shim who plays Milky

3 September 2015

Where do we find Milky at the start of the series?

Obviously This Is England ’88 was a difficult time for Milky, with the breakdown in his friendship with Woody. Coming to the end of ’88, they rekindled their friendship in the hospital after Lol had tried to commit suicide, so coming in to ’90, you find Milky and Woody and Lol somehow managing to make the best of a difficult and extraordinary situation. They seem to be able to play happy families, with everyone getting on. So things are back to normal.

 

Do you think being a dad has changed Milky?

Definitely, yeah. He’s a lot more mature than he used to be. I’m a dad myself, and it does make you more mature. Suddenly you’re not the most important thing in the world, and your whole outlook changes.

 

You’ve got to know Milky pretty well over the years – what do you think of him?

I think he’s a fucking top lad. He’s a good guy. Obviously the whole Milky-Lol situation is a difficult one – sometimes even the best of us get ourselves into situations that we probably shouldn’t have, and everyone learns from their mistakes. Milky is eternally sorry for the turmoil that he caused with Lol and Woody. But he’s a good guy, a loyal friend, and he stands by all the gang through thick and thin.

 

He seems to be a bit more sorted than the others – is that fair to say?

Yeah, I’d say so. You can tell he’s definitely older than most of the others. Not Lol and Woody, but Kelly, Trev, Shaun, Harvey, Gadget. There’s always a friend like that in a gang, the one who drives first, the one who’s moving a bit further on in life.

 

Is there much of you in him?

I think there is a lot of me in him. I wouldn’t shag my best mate’s girlfriend, by any means, I don’t care how hot she is. But yeah, there’s definitely a lot of me in Milky. It’s hard not to put at least some of your own character into someone you’ve been playing for ten years. That’s wht we’re all able to inhabit the characters so well, because we’re all able to place ourselves in their position. It’s almost like not having to act at all, which I think produces the best results. The best acting should come naturally. So yeah, I think a lot of Milky is me, and I think people that know me would say the same thing. But I’d like to repeat, 100 per cent, for the record, I would never shag somebody else’s missus. And I definitely wouldn’t get her pregnant!

 

Going back to the original film, the scene where Combo beats Milky to a pulp in This Is England is one of the most intense scenes you could ever watch. What was it like to film that?

It was extremely difficult, to be honest. It was the biggest scene I’d ever shot, and the longest scene. It’s all shot in one room, and we took three days to shoot it. Just like all of Shane’s scenes, we didn’t exactly know how it was going to work. We knew where it started and where it ended. For the first bit, we just played around with it, and it wasn’t really working. But the day before we started shooting the scene, Shane [Meadows] and Ste [Stephen Graham, who plays Combo] came round to my grandma’s house, and she cooked us rice and peas and curried chicken and curried mutton, and we had an evening chatting and looking at old pictures and stuff. And the next day, when the scene wasn’t working, we had a chat about what was motivating Combo to attack Milky, and we decided it was jealousy, about the fact that Milky had everything that Combo always wanted and never had, growing up. So we went back in, and Combo asked Milky about his family, and then it just flowed, and I started telling him about my grandma, and explained my own upbringing. I explained my life to him, and I could see the emotion building in Ste’s eyes, and it was the most intense feeling I’ve ever had filming a scene, up until this series.

 

How does it feel, to have been in a scene that has had such a massive impact?

I suppose sometimes I’m a bit naïve about how much of an impact that scene has had on the public. It’s lovely, and I really appreciate it every time someone comes up and tells me. But it’s a really satisfying feeling, because I wasn’t from a particularly privileged background, I never finished college or went to Uni, and I didn’t do that well at school. I’ll never forget one teacher in particular telling me I’d never make anything of myself. That stuck in my head for years and years. To think now that I was privileged enough to play Milky, and to do him justice, and to have that sort of an impact on people, it’s one of the most blessed feelings I could ever describe.

 

What have been your favourite scenes over the years?

I think one of them was smashing up those houses in the original film. That was one of the most fun days, because it was like you were a kid again, and you were just able to destroy things and get away with it. That was one of the best. It’s hard to pick individual days or scenes that have really stuck out, just because the whole shooting experience with someone like Shane is so incredible. Every single day, it just doesn’t feel like work. I would literally – and I’m not saying I want to – but I would literally do it for free. I’m glad that I don’t do it for free, and it certainly helps pay the bills and look after my daughter – but it’s that much fun. The crew are brilliant as well. It’s a group of friends messing about and playing pranks on each other all the time.

 

So were you all very excited to get back together for this series?

Oh yeah, it was unbelievable. I see some of the characters all the time, like Michael Socha, Thomas Turgoose, Joe Gilgun and Vicky McClure, and Shane I see all the time. But some of the others you might not have seen for a long time, but as soon as you’re back with each other, it’s like you were all together last week. I can’t describe it, it’s the best feeling, being back on that set. I hope to God this isn’t the last one, because it’s brilliant.

 

Does being so close help you all deal with some of the more tricky and harrowing material?

Yeah, definitely, That connection is a massive help, especially after the really big emotional scenes. You have to trust each other. I’ve done some huge scenes in this latest series, that have surpassed anything I’ve had to do previously, and you end up putting your heart and soul into what’s going down. You go and revisit memories and experiences that might make you really sad or angry, and you make yourself really vulnerable. If you didn’t get on with the people you worked with, you wouldn’t want to show them that side of yourself.

 

You started working with Shane at the age of 15. Why do you think he’s so good at working with young people?

Half of me wants to say it’s because he’s like a big kid himself. He’s 42 now, I started working with him when he was about 24, and I can honestly say he’s the same person now as he was back then, in spite of getting married and having kids and so on. And he’s not from a privileged background, so he’s very real, he can relate to where we’ve come from. He knows it just as well. When we’re filming, there might be times when one of us is going through a bit of a tough time off camera, and it’s so great to have a director who understands and will try and help you – the producer Mark Herbert is exactly the same. They’ll do whatever they can to help you. Whether it’s money or personal issues or whatever, they’ll help you out, because they know what it’s like. Shane’s just a wicked guy.

 

You’ve probably worked with him as much as any actor over the years. Would you say he’s changed your life?

There are three people I have to thank for where I am today. One of them’s Ian Smith, from the Television Workshop in Nottingham – that’s where I started acting. The other two are my grandma, who I lost recently, and Shane. Nothing I’m doing right now would I be doing if it wasn’t for those three people. Shane has been, on and off camera, so many different roles for me. There are times when he’s been like my dad, he’s been like a brother, a best friend, at times he’s had to be very harsh with me. When I was 22 I was doing shit that I shouldn’t have been doing, and he was there to tell me to snap out of it. I owe him everything, I genuinely do. Even right up until this series, the stuff he’s given me, it’s the kind of storyline actors hope for all the way through their career. There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for that man, not just for my career, but for the man that I’ve turned out to be.

 

This Is England ‘90 starts on Channel 4 on Sunday 13th September at 9pm