A late night and a new iPhone changed Liam Walpole’s life. The teenager had stayed up until dawn with mates, drinking and playing Xbox. He emerged from his home in the rundown Norfolk town of Dereham in the early afternoon to buy breakfast from USA Chicken. “I was just walking along the road not looking where I was going, looking at my brand new phone and I happened to bump into Leanne [Flinn] who was doing the casting,” says Walpole.
That night, Guy Myhill, the writer-director of The Goob, a film about a teenage boy with an abusive stepfather and trapped in rural poverty, was flicking through 50 photos emailed in by casting agents when he was confronted with Walpole’s face. He was a “cross between Bowie and Spock” as the director puts it. “He’s got this otherworldly quality, and I thought, if we can tune this right, we’ve got a film.”
Two years on, and Walpole, 21, is the lead in Myhill’s strikingly authentic film, which follows Goob as he leaves school and struggles to cope with his stepfather, as well as work, love and the prospect of leaving home. Two questions drive the film – does Goob want to escape? And if he does, will he? – and they are questions that hover over Walpole in real life too.
Polite, a little shy, but also sure of who he is, Walpole doesn’t like to talk about his past. When he was eight, his lorry-driver dad crashed and was confined to a wheelchair. “He’s not very well,” nods Walpole. His mum died when he was 14 and Walpole was shuffled all over the place – from Lowestoft to Wales – constantly changing schools, and never picking up any GCSEs. He dimly recalls enjoying a school play as a child. “I think I was a mouse, but it was so long ago I can’t remember,” he says.
When he got a call from Myhill, his friends were suspicious. “They said, ‘You want to search up about it and make sure it’s genuine and not some bogus person trying to kidnap you.’” He Googled Myhill and discovered he was a documentary-maker embarking on his first full-length feature, and agreed to meet the director. “On the face of it, it was a bit dodgy,” says Myhill, who is gently guiding Walpole through this, his first press interview. “We went round the back of a church and Liam did a few scenes in a graveyard. Then we took you into a field on the edge of Dereham.” Walpole nods. “On Cutthroat Lane.”
When shooting began, Myhill warmed up his lead by filming scenes where Walpole rides around on an old scooter – easy for someone who has been mucking about on motorbikes since the age of 11. Walpole had no nerves, however. “I just thought: Right, here I am, I’ve just got to get on and do it,” he says. Acting, he thinks, “was tough to begin with because we were shooting the end scenes first but once we got through that bit it flowed quite nicely.”
“The way Liam handles these very different worlds and very different experiences, he just seems to breeze through,” says Myhill. “On set, he’s got that still, calm presence that very few have in front of a camera. He’s a natural. What I always liked about Liam is his physicality. When he walks – and he won’t mind me saying this – it’s like he’s not walked for long.” The pair laugh.
There is a lovely lingering shot in the film where Goob picks up a spider by its thread, and keeps winding it up so he can carefully put it out of the window. It happened naturally at the end of a take. “It’s great,” says Myhill. “Liam is very gentle with animals.” Tender scenes with Goob’s needy mum, Janet (Sienna Guillory), are also particularly poignant when you know a little of Walpole’s past.
Although Walpole was fascinated by the crew required for the £450,000-budget film, he thinks his itinerant childhood “probably helped a bit” in adapting to the intensity of the 24-day shoot, and particularly with the fact that Sean Harris (The Borgias, 24 Hour Party People), who plays his menacing stepfather, stayed in character the whole time. “It was a bit weird,” says Walpole. “Sean would quite often take himself off and disappear into himself. But we got on well.”
Perhaps the diverse cast helped: determined to find actors who could master the deceptively difficult Norfolk accent, Myhill cast two local builders as well as Norfolk-raised Guillory and former S Club 7 singer Hannah Spearritt. Harris, who has been filming Mission: Impossible 5 with Tom Cruise, grew up in Lowestoft, and has known Myhill for 20 years.
Walpole was also in a familiar milieu: the unvarnished working countryside rarely seen in films, or by visitors to Norfolk. The film’s depiction of a rural underclass is convincing probably because Myhill situated his drama in real places (a stock car racetrack, a disused diner, the bleak fields of the Fens), with real people (as well as his two builders, a stock car driver performed a main stunt and the migrant-worker extras were real migrant workers wearing their own hi-vis jackets who were brought over from their digs in a former PoW camp outside Wisbech).
They filmed in the Fens near the home of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed and then freed for shooting dead a traveller who was burgling his house. “There are a lot of scenes running through cornfields,” says Walpole. “That brings me back to when I’ve been in fields with friends and they are saying, ‘You don’t want to be there because the farmer will come out with his shotgun.’ I’ve been chased through a couple of fields.”
On set, Walpole ran for real one day when he received a threatening text message from a local gang to whom he owed money after an ill-advised bet. Scared, he legged it across a field, and the crew had to be dispatched to chase after him. The director paid off his leading man’s debt. “That was the only trouble we had with Liam,” says Myhill. “In situations like that, you’ve got to see the funny side of it.”
Almost two years have passed since the filming of The Goob, and Walpole is unemployed and living with his auntie in Dereham. He worked in a chicken factory for a bit, but after experiencing the Venice film festival last autumn, had an “epiphany” that he would like to be an actor after all, and is now going to a few auditions. What are his hopes for The Goob? “I’d like to see it on a few of the bigger cinemas in Norwich, like the Vue,” he says. “I hope it does really well internationally as well.”
When I ask Walpole a patronising question about whether The Goob has given him confidence, he doesn’t bristle but simply doesn’t believe it applies to him. “Oh, definitely, but I didn’t really think I had a problem with my confidence beforehand. It has just boosted it,” he says. People have said he has a face for modelling. “That’s shocked me completely.” He still suspects they’ve muddled him up with someone else. So he continues to search for more conventional work and is following a lead at the local recycling centre. “They said they’ve got some jobs so I’m going to go back there with my CV,” he says.
“Make sure you do,” says Myhill good-naturedly. The director hopes the long months between finishing the film and its release have helped Walpole figure out his next step. Myhill feels a sense of responsibility for his leading man and wonders if acting or modelling might provide some relatively easy money to help him set up a business – they’ve discussed landscape gardening because Walpole loves being outdoors. “It’s important that we offer Liam support. If I get another film, I’d like to get Liam involved – it might be set in Great Yarmouth and he might be doing the rollercoaster or something, just so you know that he’s alright.”
I ask Myhill what happens to Goob after the film ends. “In my head, he’s safe. He’s got enough about him,” says the director. You sense he thinks, or hopes, that the same applies to Walpole.
The Goob is released in the UK on 29 May (UK)
