NYLON - February 2008 - (Page 110) HUSTLE AND FLOW Ashley Walters has come a long way since his time in British grime forerunners So Solid Crew. By Clare Dwyer Hogg. Photographed by Ben Rayner It’s early afternoon when an apologetic Ashley Walters bustles through the door, bundled up in a warm hat and scarf, with throat lozenges at the ready. He is a bit late for our interview: “Sorry. My girlfriend and I have puppies who ran away—I’ve spent all morning trying to get them back. Three children and two puppies; it’s like having five children!” He’s not exactly the most threatening customer in the pub in his native Peckham, Southeast London, but apparently he has a tough time making some people feel relaxed. “I’ve been to interviews where the journalist is shivering. They’ve got this preconceived picture of me,” he says. Five years ago Walters got into an argument with a traffic warden. A subsequent police search found his gun and he was sentenced to 18 months—of which he served seven—in a young offenders’ institute. “As a black boy you feel, whether it’s true or not, like a scapegoat,” he says of that time. “So most of us become very angry with ‘them,’ and you fight everyone because there is no ‘them.’” When convicted, he was a prominent member—under the name Asher D—of So Solid Crew, an underground garage collective which had risen up, like smoke from a burnt-out car, from the urban grime of Peckham. The group had a number one in the British charts with “21 Seconds” in August 2001, and picked up a Brit Award the year later. “Me going to jail and the things we talked about in So Solid were about being angry, what I hated about Britain, how I felt about myself,” Walters says. While in jail, Walters decided to exonerate himself the from gun-toting Asher D image he had cultivated; to go solo and to revive an interest in acting he had put on hold while in So Solid. His break came in 2004, playing the lead in Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy, a movie that follows the lead up to a gun crime through unglamorous everyday details. The result? Crushing personal consequences and quiet family tragedies—things Walters knew all about. “If you break it down,” he says, with a rueful smile, “that argument with a traffic warden wouldn’t have happened if I’d put 20 pence in the parking meter.” But it worked out better for Walters than his character in Bullet Boy—a role for which he won the British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer—because he was caught before he ever used his weapon. “Statistics show that would have happened,” Walters says. “Especially in the job I was in, being in So Solid. There was a lot of attention from all directions—I was bound to get into situations.” Jail was, he says, a blessing (very heavily) in disguise. The decision to leave former attitudes behind meant that suddenly he was being vaunted as a role model. “Sometimes that’s frustrating—I still want to feel I can make mistakes,” he laughs. But he shoulders the responsibility willingly. “I thought so much in jail about what I’d done and how many other kids would put themselves through the same future. I’m in this position to be the inspiration for whoever it is, to change something. I just have to do it. That’s what I’m being paid for.” Now with a lead role in the slick BBC series Hustle, his own film and music company AD82 Productions, a number of movies under his belt (including 50 Cent’s Get Rich Or Die Tryin’) and new album The Appetiser, what does Ashley Walters, away from media suppositions, really want to represent? “In all honesty, the thing I want to be most is a man. A lot of boys without father figures create their own idea of what a man is: to be hard, to protect, to make money. But you have to have a heart, and engage with people without being defensive. That’s what I’m struggling to do.”
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