Ashley Walters, Formerly of So Solid Crew, Makes His Directing Debut With ‘Animol’

Ashley Walters has been Asher D, Dushane and a Netflix detective. Now he’s a film director. Animol, his feature debut behind the camera, premieres at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday (Oct. 11) before a full release on Oct. 30, NME reports.

Nick Love, the writer of Goodbye Charlie Bright and Marching Powder, wrote the script. It follows Troy, played by Tut Nyuot, who arrives at a young offender institution and is pulled into a world of gangs, loyalty and violence. Vladyslav Baliuk, Sekou Diaby and Sharon Duncan-Brewster co-star, and Stephen Graham plays a welfare worker named Claypole. The official logline says Troy’s growing bond with a fellow inmate “becomes a dangerous vulnerability.”

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The festival is backing him as a filmmaker, not just a name. In its programme note, the London Film Festival said Walters, who has already built a career as one of the U.K.’s most talented actors, “now emerges as an exciting filmmaking voice.”

From “21 Seconds” to the director’s chair

Music readers know him from another life. Walters, born in Peckham in 1982, joined the garage collective So Solid Crew in 2001, and their single “21 Seconds” topped the U.K. chart, per Wikipedia. He went solo as Asher D with the albums In Memory of the Street Fighter in 2006 and Ashley Walters in 2009. He then became best known as Dushane in Top Boy and, in 2025, played DI Luke Bascombe in Netflix’s Adolescence.

Walters told NME last year that Animol was the “hardest thing” he has done. He and Graham prayed together before filming, and they talked about the imposter syndrome that working-class actors carry. He said he treats it as fuel:

Some of the places I go into are completely white-dominated. Feeling like people don’t want you there or they’re waiting for you to fail, I use that as fuel. It hasn’t broken me yet.

Ashley Walters, NME

The London Film Festival runs through Oct. 18, and Animol reaches cinemas 19 days after its premiere.