The first time many of us saw Harry Lawtey, he was naked, glassy-eyed, fresh from vomiting on a sheet of newspaper, and rubbing a near-empty bag of drugs across his gums. Then we watched him head to the office. That was five years ago, in early scenes from the hit drama series Industry, in which he played an investment banker. And now, as the star of a new biopic of the Welsh film star Richard Burton, Lawtey slurs, stumbles and punches his way through a booze addiction.
“I’m not a big drinker, really,” the 28-year-old muses over Zoom, smiling sweetly. “I was a late bloomer with alcohol so I had a few years of feeling detached from it. You learn a lot about the nature of what being drunk does to people and the kind of things it amplifies. I just think it’s something to be mindful of.”
Thoughtful, softly spoken, and possibly even a little shy, Lawtey couldn’t be further removed from the characters he tends to play. Speaking to me from his London home, he sits in front of a backdrop that offers various clues about his personality. There’s a Beatles poster, several plants, and what looks like Nivea hand cream. Were it not for the gold-lettered GQ award behind him – he was one of their Men of the Year 2024 – you’d think he was just another well-groomed Gen-Zer. Albeit one with an erudite vocabulary, a dash of imposter syndrome (“I still get a bit queasy referring to myself as an artist”), and a self-diagnosed penchant for rambling, for which he apologises after we spend 10 minutes discussing barriers for working-class kids in the arts.
Along with Back to Black’s Marisa Abela and Bodies Bodies Bodies star Myha’la, Lawtey is part of a crop of Industry cast members who’ve been propelled to movie stardom since the show’s launch. (Last year, Lawtey was one of the stars of the panned musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux.) But while Abela and Myha’la are set to return for the show’s fourth season next year, Lawtey has departed. Fans were bereft. As Rob, a cocaine-fuelled cad turned lovestruck soft boy, Lawtey exuded an endearing fragility that transformed him into one of the show’s most popular characters. He tells me that his decision to leave wasn’t taken lightly.
“It was something I thought about for a long time,” he says. “Ultimately, I reached a place with Robert where I felt like I’d said everything I had to say with him. It was like we’d completed his arc. And I was just ready for a new chapter.”
That new chapter is why we’re speaking today. In the moving biopic Mr Burton, in cinemas next week, Lawtey plays a young Richard Burton, then just a humble miner’s son, before the stage and Hollywood came calling. For Lawtey, the part is a bold, risky swing.
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“The burden is definitely not lost on me – the gumption of some English lad turned up to play the quintessential Welsh hero,” he laughs. It is, he acknowledges, a massive responsibility, one that came about serendipitously after Lawtey had seen The Motive and the Cue, Jack Thorne’s play about Burton’s relationship with Sir John Gielgud during a 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet. “I became briefly obsessed with Richard Burton for a week or two afterwards,” he recalls. “Then a month later this opportunity drops into my inbox.” After sending in a self-taped audition, Lawtey went for lunch with the film’s director, Marc Evans. “It was very, very nerve-racking,” he recalls. “Of course, I was overjoyed to get the job. But I was also scared.”
Mr Burton tells the story of one Richard Jenkins, the 12th of 13 children born to a barmaid – who died when he was just two – and an alcoholic coal miner. It was a schoolteacher named Philip Burton (and played with superb warmth in the film by Toby Jones) who spotted Jenkins’s raw acting talent and eventually adopted him – hence why Jenkins took Burton’s surname once he began acting professionally. It was with Philip’s guidance, and that of his landlady, Ma Smith (Lesley Manville), that Richard secured his first acting gig.
Of course, a major part of Burton’s story was his alcoholism – the actor died in 1984 at the age of 58 after suffering a brain haemorrhage – and the self-destruction that often accompanied it. Mr Burton ends too early in the actor’s life for us to see him go on to meet Elizabeth Taylor and embark on one of the most volatile celebrity relationships of all time, but that feeling of impending doom lingers. “There’s a very confused kind of trauma in Richard that led to his drinking, partially because of his dad and also his muddled nomadic childhood,” Lawtey says.
The confusion, he speculates, spawned from an identity crisis; as part of Burton’s rags-to-riches story, he famously changed his voice, training to replace a thick Welsh accent with the deep, sonorous and more socially accepted RP he’d become known for. “This film is about how a voice speaks for us, and how we project who we are before we even get the chance to show people who we are,” Lawtey says. “With Richard, I think his drinking relates to that dichotomy – he clearly loved performance, but he also felt embarrassed by being an actor. It wasn’t a particularly manly thing to do.”
I ask Lawtey if he thinks that the class barriers that affected Burton still persist today. After some back and forth, he suggests that it’s a necessary conversation to have, but that “it’s important when having this conversation for it not to become some kind of witch hunt against fantastic actors who happen to be middle class”. He continues: “We shouldn’t gatekeep art in either direction. It’s a flexible medium. You just have to make sure that everyone has their right to it and ultimately create structures at a grassroots level. As a young person, you have to feel like something is possible and within reach, or even feel as though you’re coming up in a world where that kind of material can belong to you.”
Lawtey had a peripatetic upbringing. His father’s role as an aircraft engineer in the RAF saw the family debunk from Oxford to Cyprus when Lawtey was five. It was while there that he watched Oliver! and immediately caught the acting bug, later enrolling at the Sylvia Young Theatre School and, later, London’s Drama Centre. He rose through the ranks quickly, landing his role in Industry shortly after his graduation. Hollywood came calling after that, starring opposite Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in the musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux as the dogged district attorney Harvey Dent (later the supervillain Two-Face). Despite its promising premise and cast, the film flopped, becoming a punchline for most of the recent awards season. During a tribute to victims of the LA fires, the city’s fire department captain, Erik Scott, delivered one hell of a zinger: “Our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes. And I’m talking about the producers of Joker 2.”
“For me, it’s very much okay,” says Lawtey. “I had the most wild, joyful experience of my life making that film. People might not love it; that’s entirely up to them.” He laments that much of the film industry is dictated by predictability in a bid to boost commercial success. “But there comes a line where people have to have different ideas, otherwise things don’t get made with the right intentions. [Joker 2] was made with ambition, creativity, and the desire to do something unique and brave. Ultimately, I would rather work in a structure that supports that.”
It’s a solid plan, particularly for someone like Lawtey who, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t seem fazed by fame. Instead, he leans towards the avant garde, he tells me – projects that come with a somewhat smaller dose of notoriety. “I’m in a really nice place with it wherein I think it’s largely quite funny and silly,” he says of the attention he receives. People do come up to him on the street a little more than they used to but, aside from that, it’s not too noticeable. “It’s present in my daily life and is something that I kind of have to participate in. But it doesn’t affect anywhere I go or what I do, you know? At the moment, it’s not something I think about a great deal.”
That might soon change, I suggest, referencing how fan encounters with celebrities can become more invasive as a person’s profile grows. “Yeah, it can be jarring,” he acknowledges. “But you just have to be normal, I guess. There’s no reason not to be normal.”
He takes a pause.
“I’m grateful for it but fame is certainly not the goal,” he says. “I don’t dream of becoming more famous.”
‘Mr Burton’ is in cinemas from 4 April
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