Nathan Bryon

Nathan Bryon was at the very first S.O.U.L. event. He was screening short films he'd funded himself, on credit cards, and sending them cold to the head of the BBC. Nobody was watching. He didn't care.

That energy — what he calls being "audaciously insane and delusional" — runs through everything he's made since: the Casualty episode that made him feel like he'd arrived; the years writing on Rastamouse, Apple Tree House and Swashbuckle at odd hours after long filming days on Benidorm; the pitch for Bloods that arrived in a 49-page first draft that his commissioner read and then very kindly used as a teaching moment; the weekend he spent at Waterstones buying every picture book on the shelf because his agent told him Look Up! should be a picture book and he had no idea how to write one; and the film Rye Lane — co-written with Tom Melia, directed by Raine Allen-Miller, premiered at Sundance, distributed by Fox Searchlight, 16 BIFA nominations — made with zero pushback, by a team who were just encouraged to make it as Black and colourful and London as possible.

Right now he's writing features, a young adult novel, and a horror-comedy TV project with Monkeypaw (Jordan Peele's production company) and producer David Heyman. He's also recently become a dad, and is somewhere between restocking everything he knows about craft and reminding himself that he's 34 and things are allowed to fail.

It's a long conversation between two people who have known each other since the beginning, and it moves across twenty years of the industry without trying to be tidy about it. The advice at the end is worth waiting for.