What would you do if the zombie apocalypse escaped from fiction? Do you have fantasies of epic survival, or would you simply lie down and accept the collapse of civilisation as people became ravening fiends? Alfie Williams doesn’t fancy his chances, but he’s willing to consider my thought experiment. “It depends on the infected,” he says in his soft Geordie burr, “If they're the fast ones, then that's it. You know, I'm 14, so I'd probably die straight away.”
Spoilers, but Williams doesn’t die in 28 Years Later where he plays Spike, a 12 year old growing up in a post-apocalyptic Northumberland. The UK has been ravaged by a virus that turns people feral and bitey, quarantined away from the rest of the world. The horror blockbuster is a long anticipated follow up to director-writer duo Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 2002 cult classic 28 Days Later and its somewhat divisive sequel 28 Weeks Later (Boyle directed the opening scene, but the project was mostly the work of director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and a team of different writers).
Williams was obviously not even born when the first two films came out. “I got the audition and I watched [the films],” he says. “Then I just knew I wanted to have this part and I tried my hardest.” When his agent called to tell him Boyle loved his performance and the role was his, he was beside himself. “ I was frozen, I couldn't move,” he says. “My parents were jumping and they were screaming and it was just so exciting.”
Polite and thoughtful, it’s easy to forget just how young Williams is. While he is ideally suited to play 12 year old Spike, thanks to that angelic baby face topped by a tufty crop of perma-bedhead hair, he has the gravitas of a much more experienced actor.
Spike is in practically every scene, with a hero’s journey that takes him from a frightened boy being pushed to kill by his overbearing dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to a brave young man calmly guiding his sick mother Isla (Jodie Comer) through a post-apocalyptic England. Williams has range. You can tell from a quirk of his eyebrow what Spike is feeling, and there’s some complicated emotions on display in between the frenetic action sequences.
It’s a big role to rest on young shoulders. When it came to casting Spike, Boyle was taken aback by the calibre of child acting talent in the UK currently.
“Harry Potter’s to blame,” Boyle explained in a Reddit Q and A earlier this week. “Kids over generations have seen other kids in their own accent,,” he added. “The standard has risen hugely. I searched for some kids 20 years ago in the Liverpool area so I know. Searching in Newcastle for Spike, the quality was noticeably higher.”
As Boyle mentioned, these are not “Hollywood kids”. Williams was born and raised in Newcastle, and has a handful of small roles to his name - a part in the BBC/HBO tv adaption of His Dark Materials, and in Radio 4’s serial Our Friend in the North. He is a home-grown talent, much like Owen Cooper, the 15 year old from Warrington who wowed audiences with his performance in Netflix’s Adolescence. 2025 is shaping up to be a big year for sweet-faced Northern lads in shockingly violent media.
Williams has the kind of famous and award-winning scene partners in 28 Years Later that would intimidate an adult, but he absolutely holds his own with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes (or Mr Fiennes, as Williams calls him, because he is a Polite Young Man). “We had a two week rehearsal space and we got to build a relationship there and create a family dynamic,” he says. “It was good to get chatting and know each other's stories. We would have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, be in the same makeup room, spend the full day together. That definitely helps build up chemistry.”
Spike in 28 Days later is a dream role for any child, with stunts and weapons training for the high octane chase scenes with the Infected. “Me and Aaron, we had a little session where we would have to climb over different things and then pull out the bow,” he says. “That was very fun.” He also gets a big set piece with Comer in an abandoned petrol station that has some explosive results, complete with stunt actors getting set on fire right next to him. “It was really intense,” he enthuses.
For the big chase scenes it was a lot of running - pretty tricky when you’re a child being chased through a forest by full grown adults decked out as zombies. “You start to feel the fear when you're getting chased by like six of them,” he says. “I'm not fast, the Infected actors were faster. There's a lot of pressure trying not to mess up the scene, but there's the intensity of getting chased.”
These horror films are not for the faint hearted (Days and Years are both rated 15; Weeks is still an 18) but Williams is chill about sharing the screen with actors dressed as nightmare fuel. “After the scene ended, I would go up to them and say hello to them.”
28 Years Later introduces new Infected types, imagining the Rage Virus has mutated over decades. Towering Alphas that are huge and potentially more intelligent, and bulbous, slimy Slow-lows that crawl along the ground slurping up insects. “The Slow lows are probably my favorite kind of Infected,” says Williams. “They're just so cool and disgusting.” Boyle preferred practical effects for the deaths, even when it came to the scream-worthy sprays of arterial gore. “There was barely any CGI for the blood,” says Williams. “They had a lot of blood squibs, it looked great.”
The only bit that, understandably, grossed him out was a (mild spoiler alert) birth scene that Spike attends in the second half of the film. “That was very gross to watch,” he says. “I mean that scene is beautiful in a way, but it's still gross.” Still, probably more fun than watching a video on the subject in a sex ed class at school.
For Spike’s more emotional moments, Williams carefully worked out a backstory, imagining his upbringing in an isolated community on an island reached by a tidal causeway. “To get inside Spike's head, I had to take a step back and think of everything he's been through," he says. “That two week rehearsal really helped because I could sit down with Danny and we could talk about Spike's life and what life is like on the island.”
Williams sees Spike’s childhood as a fairly normal one up until the film picks up. Cocooned in the safe world of the island community, with the threat of the Infected at a remove on the mainland. “It's just like anyone's childhood. He has friends, he goes to school,” he says. “But there was training, he would still have to do archery, practice trying to survive the Infected.” He developed a story around the stone pendant his character always wears. “I always thought that Isla and Spike went down to the beach one day and she picked out a little stone for him,” he explains. “That's why he holds it so dear to him.”
By the end of 28 Years Later, Spike’s life is far from a normal childhood. Williams will also be in the upcoming sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Directed by Nia Acosta, whose horror credits include 2021’s Candyman, Williams only had a few weeks’ break before filming started up again. He can’t speak about the plot, but does tease one detail. “I can't say much about the baby,” says Williams. “I was gonna give a little detail but I can't.”
There are clearly still secrets in store for the franchise’s devoted fans to theorise about in the coming months. Until he was cast, Williams says he had no idea how much of a cult following it had amassed. “I had no idea how absolutely massive the fandom was. I knew 28 Days was a big movie, but I didn't know how stoked and excited people were for this one,” he says. “It shows that fans stay true to the franchise. The community is really nice.”
It’s a career-making breakout role, and Williams has plenty of ideas for what he wants to do next. “I'd like to be in a Western. One of my favorite movies is [1988 Brat Pack film] Young Guns,” he says. He’d also be very keen to play the live action version of Isaac Clark, hero of 2008 video game Dead Space. “It's about a couple of engineers who come to fix the spaceship and then they find there's been an alien outbreak, so it's kind of similar to this,” he says. It’s a smart idea, sci fi game adaptations are hot right now (See: The Last of Us, Fall Out). Casting directors, take note.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now.
