Tom Cullen: ‘I've worked with some nefarious characters'

Times

4 days ago

When I met Tom Cullen at a chilly Twickenham Studios 18 months ago he had the bone-tired, slightly wired exhaustion of a new dad, deepened by the toll of playing John Palmer in Brink's-Mat thriller The Gold and the many associated takes of snorting ersatz cocaine. 'I could not sleep,' he told me about the shoot. 'Don't do glucose, kids.'
Life is now more hectic still. Cullen turned 40 last month, moved house last week and is filming two projects in parallel. Yet the warm and empathetic Welshman is, he says, 'content for the first time in my life', a happiness that has been hard won, cracked open by fatherhood and a return to his roots after a long, wonky journey.
I speak to a bearded Cullen between takes on the set of an indie film in north Wales (he can't tell me the title because it hasn't been announced). His weekends are spent shooting House of the Dragon and squeezing in trips to Cardiff, where he, his partner the American actress and musician Alison Sudol and their two daughters, aged four and two, have settled. He can't say much about the series because, well, it's House of the Dragon. Although he does concede that he'll be playing Luthor Largent, an ally of Matt Smith's crazed Daemon Targaryen and a warrior so fierce he killed a horse with a single punch. Possibly.
'You'll have to find out, because they always do a different take on the characters [from the books],' Cullen says. 'I really can't say a word. I have to be very shifty, I'm sorry.' He somehow looks contrite yet mischievous. 'Like the rest of the world, I was enraptured by Game of Thrones,' he adds. 'To enter that world has been mind-blowing. I find myself watching these characters I love, in the flesh, going, 'Wow, this is awesome.' '
Like House of the Dragon, his latest series, Mudtown, is — to Cullen's delight — one of many projects now filming in Wales. He plays Pete Burton, a saturnine Newport gangster whose scramble to recoup money lost in a warehouse fire brings him into conflict with a local magistrate (Erin Richards, a long-time friend who introduced Cullen and Sudol).
'Mudtown is about what happens to someone depending on their socioeconomic background and the way the world treats them,' Cullen says. 'Pete's a smart guy. He could have been a banker or something, but grew up in an area without a lot of opportunities.'
Pete was a figure Cullen recognised from a youth spent working and DJing in bars owned by 'nefarious Cardiff characters'. 'You knew they were dangerous and you couldn't cross them, but there was a warmth to them as well. I remember as a student I couldn't afford to pay my phone bill. One of them found out, came down one day and paid it. It was a weird moment, but very kind.' Was the debt ever called in? He laughs. 'Luckily not, no!'
Cullen started filming Mudtown a week after wrapping the second series of The Gold, in which his character, Palmer — born into grinding poverty yet by the 1990s ranked above the Queen in The Sunday Times Rich List — faced the police and criminals circling his Tenerife timeshare empire. Cullen found him fascinating. 'He was driven to escape his upbringing, to better himself and his family's life, but couldn't stop until it went beyond that into obsession and greed. John's legend is still very present on Tenerife. There were rumours he was still hiding out there.'
• I knew The Gold's geezers — this show nailed them
Cullen's way with charming crooks has meant sidelining ethical considerations. 'One of the trickier things of the job is not to judge these characters, because you'd feel it through the performance. I have to embody their reasoning. They're the heroes of their stories, justifying their actions to themselves as we all do.'
At this point, he's called to set. When we reconvene a few days later Cullen is slumped on the sofa after a night-drive home. But he's on relaxed form, excited about school-uniform shopping — his children will attend a Welsh-language school — and delighted to be home, in both senses. 'I wanted my kids to have the autonomy and space I felt they couldn't necessarily have in London. I never thought I'd move back to Wales, but there's a Welsh word, hiraeth, a longing for home. Tthat's been building over the last few years.'
He has good memories of his childhood in Llandrindod Wells, telling a charming story of 'what seemed like hundreds of kids' following him and his best friend Barry as they carried an injured fox to the RSPCA, having first taken it back to their den to feed it leaves and cheese sandwiches ('Barry always had a cheese sandwich').
'Our council estate was filled with young families, so we were this feral bunch of kids rampaging around the fields and brooks. I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but I never felt it, because it was such a creative household: fun, enriching and loving.'
His parents had moved from east London to 'change the world' with the Theatre In Education programme at Theatre Powys. 'I'd sit in a rehearsal room after school and watch adults be kids. It was a bunch of hippies smoking rollies, the building was rotting and it was kind of chaotic, but also intoxicating and magical. It really stayed with me.'
• Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews
That feeling eventually rescued Cullen from years of drift after leaving school. 'You know when you look in the mirror and really see yourself? I remember this person looking back at me and thinking, 'That guy's really miserable.' So, why not try acting? It felt like I'd been trying to avoid it. Maybe I was afraid of doing something I really wanted and failing.'
After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2009, Cullen and his fellow actor Alexander Vlahos (of Versailles fame) founded Undeb Theatre ('union' in Welsh), putting on plays in pubs and attracting mates with no interest in theatre and national press attention. Then came the film audition that changed his life.
Weekend, Andrew Haigh's gorgeous 2011 debut about two men, Russell (Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), falling in love, set the creative bar impossibly high. 'Absolutely. In many ways, I've been chasing that experience ever since.'
Given the debate over lived experience, would Cullen feel comfortable playing a gay character again? His answer is thoughtful, lengthy, contradictory and careful: first yes, then no, then maybe. Eventually, he follows up over email.
'If a project like Weekend came along again, I'd have to really think about it: the content, whether the writer or director were queer, the other cast members. I think I got the job because of my chemistry with Chris and because I really identified with Russell. He was lost, having spent his life moving around and moulding himself to his surroundings, never sure who he was. I spent a lot of my life feeling like this, disassociated from the capitalist construct of school, university, job. I had some tricky experiences to navigate as a teen that pushed me further and further away from myself and what I wanted to do.'
Having found the right path, the TV work began to flow: Black Mirror, Downton Abbey, Harlan Coben's The Five and, last year, Michael Sheen's ambitious Cymru fantasia The Way. And if the double whammy of Mudtown and The Gold doesn't make him a household name, perhaps his third series of 2025 will: Trespasses is an adaptation of Louise Kennedy's novel, with Cullen as a Protestant barrister who begins an affair with a younger Catholic woman (Lola Petticrew) in 1975 Belfast.
'It looks at what it means to love — others, ourselves and our communities ­— and it's been one of my most challenging, rewarding and moving working experiences. I'm proud it's so inherently female. I don't want to sound reductive, but it has a texture that can only be made by women.'
With the tidal wave of new parenthood receding, he is plotting a return to the stage and a follow-up to Pink Wall, his warmly reviewed 2019 film debut as director. While the juggle remains intense, Cullen is happy personally and professionally, rhapsodising about 'brilliant' Sudol and his 'eccentric, weird, funny' children. In 2023 the two came together when he directed the video for Come On Baby, Sudol's song about a miscarriage. 'It let my grief move,' she said.
Is the Tom Cullen entering his forties a different prospect to the one a decade ago? 'I was a very tough person in my twenties, terrified of vulnerability. The last two decades have been about chipping away at myself, trying to get back to the joy of that kid in his parents' rehearsal room. I used to feel being alive was about chasing massive highs and having massive lows, but now I've got a family and life is simple, not fireworks — porridge at 7am, reading a story at 6.30 at night — and that's not scary, it's amazing.'Turning 40 felt like a celebration of that journey to liking myself and knowing I'm resilient. I'm not held back by a constant fear. I don't know what my forties will look like, but I'm ready for it.'
Mudtown starts on U&Alibi on August 20 at 9pm; Trespasses is on Channel 4 this autumnLove TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our critics' choices to what to watch this week and browse our comprehensive TV guide