Papillon star Michael Socha on acting, accents, and more: 'I'm desperate to portray truth'

Michael Socha speaks quickly, his sentences interspersed with expletives that betray a sincere passion beneath a devil-may-care attitude. “Originally when my agent told me there was an audition for Papillon I was a little bit sceptical,” Socha admits, “because I was a big fan of the book and the original film but when I got the part, I was ecstatic.” Whatever doubts Socha held were quickly dashed when he met his co-stars, Rami Malek and Charlie Hunnam. “Them boys are so professional, they really care, they put their all into it and it was lovely to watch. I’d never worked with Charlie or Rami before, so I went quite fresh-faced without any sort of expectation.”

In Papillon, Socha plays Julot, a repeat criminal whose dastardly deeds finally set him on an irrevocable course towards Devil’s Island, a notorious penal colony.

Though Julot is a criminal, Socha says finding the humanity in it is what he enjoys: “I like playing baddies; there’s a depth to a lot of the baddies that I find quite fulfilling.”

Acting was something Socha was drawn to, though his direction was never part of a definitive timeline he set out; each project is a unique undertaking.

He said: “I think there are times for a character, for research, to put yourself into another skin, but in some of them, I think it’s time to rely on what you know and who you are to convince people or to make people feel something.”

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“I terms of Papillon, I made Julot a character, I worked on him,” Socha says, which he holds up as quite a contrast to his experience playing the character he is best known for: Harvey.

Socha talks about Harvey as if it’s his twin, a separate person in the room with him.

“There’s a lot of backstory to Harvey that wasn’t too different to my own story,” he said.

“He didn’t have a great relationship with his pop, he was quite an angry kid, and I wasn’t a bully but I wasn’t somebody to back down from a scarp and if I was scared, I didn’t show it to anybody.”

But that doesn’t mean Harvey, and Socha himself, are unaware of their own vulnerability, and working on This Is England helped Socha expand on that vulnerability as an actor.

“It’s like working with a bunch of normal folks from the area from where I’m from, doing these things that — you’re not embarrassed to act. You’re vulnerable. You’re convinced these things are going you’re convinced the situation is real, so you play it real so the emotion is real. It’s magic.”

And Socha brought some of that that improvisational magic, which is prevalent in all of the This Is England series, to the set of Papillon, and on his first day with Charlie Hunnam, the pair wound up improvising on Socha’s instigation.

“If you work with an actor who is willing to work with you while you’re improvising, you’re going to make some magic and you’ll come up with something beautiful.”

Luck is a part of Socha’s projects he’s worked on so far, he’s also aware of the different types of sets he could be on.

“I’m really desperate to portray truth, but I realise that I’m not saving lives, I want to have fun. I don’t want to be in a pressured environment – some actors act like ‘actors’ and they use it as an excuse to be wankers, and that attitude doesn’t serve the characters.”

For Socha, the character is built on mutual trust – a trust he finds hard to give to others.

“I don’t really trust – well, I say I that I don’t really trust anybody – I do trust people but I grew up like ‘don’t trust no fucker,’ so when I create a character, that’s a character I know. I understand. I fully trust.

“That’s the only time I can get a hold of somebody who’s not gonna let me down — is a character I’ve created.”

Creating that character comes from a place of curiosity, and Socha says the reason he became an actor was that he finds people interesting – but if it weren’t acting, he would have wound up in some creative field; Socha writes poetry, but adamantly just for himself.

But because of support from a teacher, Socha pursued acting – and his versatility has certainly been proven, and yet there is an entire type of role Socha is missing out on, and much of it has to do with his Midlands accent.

“To Northerners, I’m a Southerner. To Southerners, I’m a Northerner. But I’m a Midlander through and through,” he says proudly, perhaps bolstered by the fact that he was just told the Midland accent is this writer’s favourite British accent.

Though Socha initially said he takes each role as it comes, and has no particular holy-grail of characters, he says: “I suppose the roles that I don’t get are the ones I want. The roles that Tom Hiddleston or Benedict Cumberbatch are getting don’t come my way.

“I’m not getting close to these RP accent roles but I know I could smash them, I know I could play them, that’s one thing I do know.”

RP, or Received Pronunciation, is exactly what you think of when you think of the archetypal British hearthrob: Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, and the aforementioned Hiddleston and Cumberbatch.

“Once you start speaking with a certain accent, the producers assume the audience won’t believe you, so when you ask about a role I do want..

“Yeah, I want a posh boy role. I want a public schoolboy toff role. And I know I could smash that, it’s whether people would trust me enough to do it

“The only reason I suppose I want to do them is to convince myself and the doubters, the ones who wouldn’t believe I could do it.”

As the conversation winds to a close, Socha expresses profuse thanks, his earnestness and passion leaving little doubt that at some point, whatever role Socha wants, he’ll get.

Papillion is out in UK cinemas from December 21, 2018.