In just a year, Micheal Ward has risen from online model to leading man in the crime drama Blue Story. He still can’t believe it – nor can his mum
A few hours before I’m due to meet Micheal Ward, I get a text from his publicist. The photoshoot for this interview has finished more than an hour early – could I come a bit sooner? I race to a café in Blackheath, plush south London. When I arrive, Ward has already finished lunch. These shoots normally overrun, I say. How come this one was over so quickly? “I tried to warn them I was a model,” he smirks. “I know what I’m doing.”
He certainly seems to. A year ago, Ward was entirely unknown as an actor. He was working for the e-commerce sites of brands like JD Sports, modelling athleisure. (Apparently there’s still a picture of him somewhere, deep in the bowels of the JD sports website.) Now 21, he’s bagged leading roles in two of the most high-profile portrayals of
British gang life in years. In the first, Netflix’s revival of Top Boy, he plays Jamie, an east
London boy climbing the rungs of a Hackney drug-dealing gang while simultaneously looking after his two young brothers. And there’s the upcoming feature film Blue Story, based on the spoken word performer Rapman’s wildly popular
YouTube series about south London gang violence, in which Ward plays the brother of a gang member who gets dragged into a postcode war.