The story of how Thomas Turgoose was cast in Shane Meadows’ ‘This is England’
The most prominent acting role of Grimsby-born actor Thomas Turgoose is undoubtedly Shaun from Shane Meadows’ 2006 drama film This is England, a role that the actor later reprised in the subsequent TV series This is England ’86/’ 88/’90.
When making an appearance on the Chatabix podcast with David Earl and Joe Wilkinson, Turgoose explained how he first got into the film industry via a chance meeting with Meadows and casting director Des Hamilton. It was way before Turgoose had even thought about acting for a single moment.
“The way that I was brought into the industry – I was street cast at the age of 13,” Turgoose began. “So essentially, Shane Meadows and Des Hamilton were casting up and down the country for kids who’d never acted before, who had no interest in acting. They just wanted raw, kind of real kids.”
“That’s the avenue that Shane Meadows wanted to go to play Shaun Fields in This is England,” Turgoose continued. “I just walked around the corner one day and saw a big group of people, assuming it was a fight, so I went running over to see what was happening and met them, and auditioned for the film.”
It was the inquisitive and boisterous nature of a 13-year-old Turgoose that led him to wander over to that big crowd and see what was going on. “That’s how I got into the industry,” he added. “It was the right place at the right time, and I’d never even thought about acting once in my life before that day.”
Seeing as reality was the flavour of the film, the audition process for Turgoose, who’d never acted before, was starkly different to the one he knows today. “It wasn’t like nowadays when you get given 12 pages of dialogue in 30 minutes with an Eastern European accent,” the actor noted. “It wasn’t that sort of thing.”
“It was just very much tell us about your life, tell us who you live with, tell us what you do day-to-day, tell us about your friends,” he continued. “So it was just a chat, actually. But I went in there, not trying to impress anybody. When they asked me if I wanted to audition, I said to Des Hamilton, ‘I’ll only do the audition if you give me a fiver,’ because I didn’t think I was going to be put in the film.”
Again, it was that character, that cheekiness, that drew Meadows and Hamilton to cast Turgoose. “I was a hustler from day one,” he said. “I’m not going to be put in the film, so I thought, ‘I want something for my time.’ Des told Shane that I’d charged him for the audition, and Shane Meadows was like, ‘That’s exactly what I would do when I was a kid.’ Shane wanted someone who was exactly like him as a kid.”
Listen to Turgoose discuss his career on Chatabix below.