BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Reggie, steady, go! Reggie Yates is zooming in

For Reggie Yates, the chance to direct his first feature was like a ‘super surreal dream come true’. 

And then, with just a few days of shooting remaining, the corona – virus struck. 

Now, the filmmaker and his creative collaborators are zooming in on ways to get the picture completed in the safest possible way. 

A lot of focus has been put on big blockbusters stopped in their tracks midway through shooting, such as the seventh Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible thriller, or the new caped crusader film The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz. 

But there are some much cherished small-budget British pictures that have also been knocked for six by the pandemic. 

Yates and his cast and crew had been shooting the film Pirates — which he also wrote — on the streets of London when the picture had to shut down in mid-March. 

‘To get to that place — and suddenly stop — was crazy,’ said Yates, who over the years has been a documentarian, TV presenter, DJ — and the voice of Rastamouse in the beloved CBeebies cartoon. 

He and his producers (at Hill – billy Films, BBC Films and the British Film Institute) have been having discussions on Zoom, with key crew members, about the complex new protocols that could enable them to return (safely) to finish the nine or ten filming days left on Pirates. 

‘We will return as soon as we are confident that we can do so safely, without compromising the magic we created on set,’ the producers said in a statement. 

Pirates is set on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and follows the antics of three music-loving young men — played by terrific new – comers Elliot Edusah, Jordan Peters and Reda Elazouar — determined to make it a night to remember. 

‘They’re absolutely mortified that we had to stop,’ Yates told me of his young stars.

 It’s not all bad news. Yates said the lockdown had ‘in a weird way’ been ‘an incredible gift’ for a first-time filmmaker, because it gave him time to go back over footage ‘to see where you can pick things up’. 

The screenplay is full of the everyday banter of close friends, so that the characters pop out of the page. 

‘These are very much normal kids who just want to have a good time. They just want to get to the party, get the right girl — and the right clothes!’ 

This started a riff on the importance of teens having the right outfits. 

‘The stakes are very small, in the great scheme of things,’ he said, ‘but when you’re at that age, those stakes mean everything.’ 

Yates said he wanted Pirates to capture the excitement and fun of friendship between a group of young men of colour. 

‘Obviously, in a city like London, there are difficult distractions, but not every kid gets pulled into that,’ he told me. 

Optimistically, he then issued an invitation to Pirates’ premiere. ‘Make sure you wear a pair of Air Max because you’re going to be dancing all night!’

Fionn O’Shea knew that by taking on the role of Jamie, the sadistic richboy in television drama Normal People, he might attract some glances. 

But the 23-year-old wasn’t prepared for the full-bore reaction that followed the phenomenal success of the series on the BBC. 

‘We expected people to react with a little bit of vitriol,’ O’Shea told me. 

But while he didn’t expect anyone to ‘love’ Jamie, who gets his kicks from sexually abusing Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Marianne in the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-seller, he was unprepared for ‘the level of hate’ that came his way from viewers who spotted him on the streets of his home town, Dublin.

 O’Shea is one of Ireland’s fast-rising young actors — part of an exciting new generation of future stars that also includes Normal People’s leads Paul Mescal and Edgar-Jones (whose mum is from Northern Ireland). 

Last year, Fionn told me, they’d all enjoyed ‘an amazing summer of craic’ in Dublin. 

He was finishing work on writer and director David Freyne’s poignant new film Dating Amber, in which he stars with Lola Petticrew (who plays the title character). 

And filming was about to start on Normal People. During the overlap, the two casts socialised ‘constantly’. 

Dating Amber is set in Kildare in 1995, two years after homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland. 

O’Shea’s character Eddie and Amber are outsiders at school. ‘It’s a love story that’s completely platonic,’ he explained. 

‘It’s all about friendship. They’re both struggling with identity and family dynamics.’

 He said Freyne called the film ‘a love letter to kids who needed to escape to be themselves’. 

Eddie’s father is pushing his son to follow him into the Army. But the lad, wrestling with the whole notion of masculinity, is ‘strangled by his internal struggle’, whereas Amber is much more comfortable with her sexual orientation. 

The actor, who attended Gonzaga College (hot priest Andrew Scott is another old boy), said Dating Amber, and his 2016 film Handsome Devil, are niche in some ways — Irish high school films — ‘but they’re both universal’. 

Certainly Amazon Prime believe that, because they’ve put some muscle behind releasing the picture this week. O’Shea and Petticrew spark off each other marvellously. 

‘You could see that from the chemistry test we did. It was the right kind of fit,’ he agreed. That doesn’t stop Amber being beastly to Eddie sometimes: chucking stones at him as he rides his bike. 

Luckily, the ‘stones’ were just painted Styrofoam. He did take a tumble, though, on the second day of shooting. 

‘I got a little brave and thought: ‘Oh, I can just throw myself off the bike.’ But, I pressed the wrong brake and flew over the handlebars.’ 

He and Petticrew, now the best of mates, have been sharing a flat in Dublin during the lockdown. And he’s become a ‘fairweather vegan’. Because she can cook, and he can’t. 

WATCH OUT FOR… 

Patrick Robinson and Nadine Marshall, who star in the scorching BBC and Left Bank Pictures TV drama Sitting In Limbo, which airs on Monday (June 8). 

It’s based on the real-life story of Anthony Bryan, whose world was upended when the Home Office wrongly targeted him for deportation to Jamaica. 

He lost his job, and his home. It’s staggering how the incompetence of the immigration authorities led to so much hardship and emotional suffering — all captured superbly in the portrayals of Bryan and his partner by Robinson and Marshall. 

Bryan’s case was taken up by The Guardian, which exposed the notorious Windrush scandal. Sitting In Limbo is being shown at a time when systemic racism is rocking society in America, and it’s being protested here, too. 

Why Aaron’s indulging in some pillowtalk

The much anticipated revival of Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black play The Pillowman, which was to have marked a return to the stage for Golden Globe-winning star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, has had its July 24 opening at the Duke of York’s Theatre postponed. 

Producer James Bierman said the production, which also stars Steve Pemberton, will be looking for a date to open next year. 

The two actors, and director Matthew Dunster, have confirmed their commitment to the project once theatre availability and industry-wide safety issues have been settled. 

The Pillowman is a dark fairy tale involving the interrogation of two brothers living in a totalitarian state.

McDonagh is celebrated for his dramas such as The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, and films In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.