Nhau News Online News that is accurate, reliable, trustworthy!!
Director Shane Meadows has made his first period drama, about a little-known 18th Century criminal mastermind. The cast includes established and first-time actors, from a mechanic to a financial manager.
Stevie Binns says her friends had a long-running joke about her broad accent. So when they saw a social media post looking for people with Yorkshire accents to be in a new TV drama, they tagged her.
“I think it was a bit of a sly dig from my friend,” she says with a smile.
Binns, from Halifax, is a team leader in the financial industry and had never considered acting. “I’d done a grand total of nothing at all.”
While she may have been sent the advert as a bit of a joke, she decided to give it a go.
“I thought, why not? It was Covid time and I’d been stuck in the house with my cat for a very long time. So I thought I’d try something different, and I sent off a tape.”
She’s had the last laugh. Her audition tape earned her a role in Meadows’ The Gallows Pole, which is set in West Yorkshire in the 1760s and starts on BBC Two this week.
Meadows, the acclaimed director behind This Is England and The Virtues, is known for casting newcomers alongside established names and regular collaborators.
When the open casting call for The Gallows Pole went out in 2021, he and casting director Shaheen Baig were overwhelmed. Meadows says he watched more than 5,000 tapes himself.
Binns was one. Charlotte Ockelton was another. She opened a hair salon two months before Covid but was forced to close it and lost her house, and her daughter had to go and live with her father.
Ockelton sent in a tape while sofa surfing and trying to get back on her feet. “Without Shane giving me a chance along with everyone else on that production, I would still have that debt lingering over me,” she says.
In his tape, Dave Perkins explained that he was a mechanic from Dronfield, near Sheffield, who had been a semi-professional boxer, a Gary Barlow tribute singer and a model. BBC
