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Billy Howle

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PRADA coat and pants and PAUL SMITH shirt and tie. ![PRADA coat and pants and PAUL SMITH shirt and tie.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b2d7cd20ae262a5ca25c_FLAUNT-MAGAZINE-BILLY-HOWLE-ACTOR-THE-SEAGULL2.jpeg) **PRADA** coat and pants and **PAUL SMITH** shirt and tie. A few minutes into our converstion, actor Billy Howle speaks enthusiastically about the heroes of his youth: Patti Smith, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson. The foundation of his acting career, it turns out, was a life immersed in music.  “I never really had conventional heroes growing up,” Howle tells me. “A lot of them tended to be music-based. I think from quite a young age, I understood one thing about myself: whatever it was that I ended up doing, it was going to involve performance in some regard.”  Performance—both musical and dramatic—fascinated young Howle. The on-stage theatrics of David Bowie or Patti Smith, he says, were just as important to his eventual career choice as any formal training. “I think performing in and of itself is something I was always interested in. I believe that a lot of the arts can afford to be interdisciplinary; virtuosity is something I believe in and respect...I didn’t see how things had to be exclusive.”  WALES BONNER blazer, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN shirt both available at matchesfashion.com, PAUL SMITH trousers, and talent’s own boots. ![WALES BONNER blazer, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN shirt both available at matchesfashion.com, PAUL SMITH trousers, and talent’s own boots.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b2d6cd20ae262a5ca24c_FLAUNT-MAGAZINE-BILLY-HOWLE-ACTOR-THE-SEAGULL3.jpeg) **WALES BONNER** blazer, **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** shirt both available at matchesfashion.com, **PAUL SMITH** trousers, and talent’s own boots. After moving home repeatedly because of his father’s job as a university academic—“we moved about twelve times”—Howle and his family eventually settled in Scarborough, a small seaside town in the north of England. Soon after arriving, his discovery of a thriving underground music scene became the catalyst for his own artistic development.  “There was this micro-culture movement going on in Scarborough, with all sorts of ‘clans’—there were punk bands and a ska movement; here was a real vein of reggae and hip hop going on as well. I got involved in a lot of that from quite a young age...it manifested itself in the way I dressed and the people I hung out with.”  Howle and a group of friends set up a youth club to bring more music to the town. “It was by young people and for young people. It was called Determined Independent Youth—DIY,” he laughs. Initially banned by local authorities for setting up an event without permission (he was told a youth worker had to supervise), the punk spirit of the youth club flourished when they were largely left to their own devices by the supervisor. “We set up a music festival and all sorts of fundraising events and gigs. I was in about five bands at one point, each playing something different. It was a cool place to grow up.”  LANVIN suit and PRADA shirt both at matchesfashion.com. ![LANVIN suit and PRADA shirt both at matchesfashion.com.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b2d6cd20ae262a5ca250_FLAUNT-MAGAZINE-BILLY-HOWLE-ACTOR-THE-SEAGULL4.jpeg) **LANVIN** suit and **PRADA** shirt both at matchesfashion.com. After turning 18, Howle left home and spent the next three years studying drama at the renowned Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where the yearly intake of just twelve students made for an intense but memorable experience. “It was really important in hindsight, because you can often be on a job for quite a long period of time, and you’ve got to not just get on with people but sometimes be incredibly vulnerable around those people emotionally,” Howle says. “It could be quite intense, but it was also very meaningful, very nurturing. I may not see any of those people for three or four years, but if they ever needed anything from me I’d be there in an instant.”  After graduating, Howle landed a starring role in the acclaimed British television drama _Glue_. The transition from student to professional actor was challenging. Howle felt underprepared for screen work after a degree that had focused largely on classical theatre.  “For me, it’s always been about educating myself, learning something, exploring it. I turned up on set and there was a lot of stuff I didn’t really understand fully—what’s an anamorphic lens? What does this lighting do? It was a real learning curve for me, a real education after an education, which is precisely what I needed as preparation for later roles.”  LANVIN suit and PRADA shirt. Both available at matchesfashion.com. ![LANVIN suit and PRADA shirt. Both available at matchesfashion.com.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b2d7cd20ae262a5ca254_FLAUNT-MAGAZINE-BILLY-HOWLE-ACTOR-THE-SEAGULL5.jpeg) **LANVIN** suit and **PRADA** shirt. Both available at matchesfashion.com. Another struggle was dealing with what he terms the “upstairs, downstairs” division, where actors often feel typecast as characters that have a similar social background to their own. “There was this real dichotomy, a feeling, a dilemma in my head when we would do exercises about status or class. Do you know the program Upstairs, Downstairs?” he asks me, referring to a classic British television drama about wealthy socialites (those who live “upstairs”) and their servants (who often work “downstairs”).“On leaving drama school, there was an expectation that I was either going to be ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’ with regard to casting. I didn’t agree with this on so many grounds. I could be upstairs or downstairs... surely, as actors that’s the whole point—we should be able to adapt and change and understand; we should be able to have an empathetic response to something that is wildly outside of our experience.”  Howle proved he could do just that in his next role as Leonard Vole alongside Kim Cattrall in _The Witness for the Prosecution,_ based on the Agatha Christie short story. “I’m fascinated by roles that are problematic for us morally as people. I think for a long time I’d just taken on that idea or that philosophy of good versus evil—that binary thinking that there’s a line here and we’re going to divide it into two and vilify this and celebrate that. I don’t do that now when I approach a character,” he says, detailing his preparation for a role.  I ask him more about why he is attracted to more controversial characters. “I think my rebuttal to that would be: why are they attracted to me? It’s a really strange thing,” he laughs. “I think there’s this really old hat idea that you’re only a comedic or tragic actor, which isn’t the case. There was an idea at drama school that I was sort of able to access those slightly more tragic or dramatic facets of a person and those heavyweight emotions. But I don’t necessarily see them as heavyweight, dramatic, tragic roles; I sort of see them just as stories. I’m very interested in being able to draw out any kind of humor or lightness or joy from the absolute depths of sorrow and loss and misery. I think they inhabit the same space—they’re completely dependent on one another: joy cannot exist without sorrow.”  WALES BONNER blazer, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN shirt both available at matchesfashion.com, ![WALES BONNER blazer, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN shirt both available at matchesfashion.com,](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b2d7cd20ae262a5ca260_FLAUNT-MAGAZINE-BILLY-HOWLE-ACTOR-THE-SEAGULL6.jpeg) **WALES BONNER** blazer, **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** shirt both available at matchesfashion.com, As our conversation continues, it’s evident that Howle prepares meticulously for roles—especially, it seems, when he is working on literary adaptations (Howle has starred in adaptations of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, Chekov’s The Seagull and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach). Working alongside Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan in The Seagull and On Chesil Beach, Howle explains that they would look at the text together and note the differences between novel and script to help decipher a character’s motivation. But preparation can only take you so far. “The novel has to be sometimes relinquished in a way to offer up the freedom to let what happens happen in the moment of a scene. It’s a negotiation, and you’ve got to be adaptable. You certainly don’t want to pre-empt it too much. That kills cinema in my opinion. Eventually all of the groundwork pays off, but you have to get to a point where you can essentially forget about it and just live as the character.”  It may seem that Howle’s path as an actor has been an unbroken ascent, but Howle admits there have been challenges along the way. Our conversation turns to his struggles with depression and anxiety. One of the early pitfalls of his career, he explains, was his use of drama as an escape from his emotions rather than as a means to understand them.  “Once it becomes your profession it can no longer be a therapy. It ends up becoming quite an unhealthy relationship that you have, in the same way as someone who runs to work because their home life is so upsetting. It’s unhealthy to have that kind of dependence on something,” he tells me. “Early on, when I was learning,I would often fall into that trap—but you still had to go home, deal with yourself and your head and whatever was going on there. For me, the coping mechanism was really being able to open up the dialogue about that stuff. I think trying to encourage people to write about their experiences and to talk to other people about their experiences is very important. Even opening up that dialogue can be almost impossible for some young men because they’re utterly ashamed of the way that they feel. It’s debilitating.”  BURBERRY jacket, PAUL SMITH sweater and trousers, and FENDI shirt all available at matchesfashion.com. ![BURBERRY jacket, PAUL SMITH sweater and trousers, and FENDI shirt all available at matchesfashion.com.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b2d7cd20ae262a5ca259_image-asset.jpeg) **BURBERRY** jacket, **PAUL SMITH** sweater and trousers, and **FENDI** shirt all available at matchesfashion.com. Howle talks emotionally and at length about the high statistics for suicide in young men. While he believes that conversations are starting to happen around mental health issues in the arts, he insists more needs to be done to help people from a young age to fully express their emotions.  In his spare time, Howle leads drama workshops with young people to help them access and manage their emotions through the power of drama. Many of the youngsters he works with have been excluded from mainstream education and instead attend pupil referral units in the UK that are, as Howle puts it, “One step away from incarceration.” He’s already seen some progress: “I’m starting to be surrounded by young men where mental health is something that is being talked about. And that’s finally something.”  As our conversation draws to a close, we’re back to heroes—namely, Patti Smith. As a pioneer who refused to follow what was expected, crossing disciplines and experimenting with art, music, poetry, and photography during her vibrant career, Smith is perhaps the hero most in-tune with Howle’s spirit. “I think Patti Smith is a great example because she does so much. I think if you have a skill or an ability to do something then you kind of owe it to yourself to honor that.” As he takes on ever more complex roles, transcending limitations and expectations and helping others along the way, it seems Howle is doing just that. It’s a new model for what an actor, or any creative person, should do: using their talents and prominence not just to entertain, but to make the world a better place.  * * * Written by Elizabeth Aubrey Photographed by Dominic Clarke   Styled by Mark Anthony Bradley  Groomed by Gow Tanaka