‘Every role I do, I’m going to be a Black man first’: David Jonsson on winning Baftas, rebooting Alien and leaving TV’s hottest show | David Jonsson

David Jonsson is the kind of actor who disappears so completely into his roles that it’s easy to forget you’re watching the same person each time. In Rye Lane, he’s a lovestruck south Londoner; in Industry, an Etonian banker with ice in his veins; in Alien: Romulus, a paranoid android. He’s now starring as heroin addict Taylor in the ultraviolent British prison drama Wasteman and, for the first time, the 32-year-old actor claims he is playing something close to himself. “This is the most personal role I’ve done,” he says. “It’s so messed up because it’s a dark story about rehabilitation and addiction, but I know these men really well. Especially when you’re growing up somewhere like where I did.”

We meet on a Friday afternoon at a photo studio in Islington, closer to where Jonsson lives now in north London than to Custom House in the East End, where he grew up. He arrives wearing a beanie pulled tight over his cornrows and a windbreaker. He looks stylish but carries a delicate shyness that mirrors his character’s air of desperation. Wasteman, which opens this month after a critically acclaimed festival run that netted five British Independent Film awards (Bifa) nominations including best lead performance for Jonsson, tells the story of Taylor, a young father who has spent 13 years in prison for a crime he committed as a teenager. In the film’s unflinching depiction of the British prison system, he’s referred to as a “nitty” – UK slang for a desperate, pathetic drug addict. Jonsson lost 1.8 stone to embody Taylor’s “wasted” physique. “I was mawga, properly skinny,” he says, slipping into patois.

Jonsson is the youngest of four children, born to working-class parents – his mother a police officer, his father an IT engineer at Heathrow. His background is Creole: Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Caribbean, with a Swedish surname that hints at truly global origins. But when he was 11, his parents separated and the one stable thing in his life collapsed. “When you come from a broken home, it changes you,” he says. “That’s part of what happens with Taylor.” It’s the knock-on effect of incarceration that Wasteman portrays with devastating clarity: punishment doesn’t end with the prisoner.

At school, that instability manifested as trouble and he was expelled for fighting. “I wasn’t a bad kid at all,” he insists. “I was just a bit … distracted at the time.” He remembers coming home to tell his mother, who had just finished a night shift. She was one of the first Black PCSO officers in London, walking a beat in Islington for decades – the same area we’re sitting in now. Exhausted and extremely disappointed, she asked what he wanted to do with his life. It was one of those existential questions parents ask when you least want to hear it, and Jonsson surprised himself with his answer: he wanted to act. “My parents are hard workers: if you want something then prove it. There’s no point talking about it.” It seems that ethos is still with him; he refers to acting as “a job” rather than “a craft” or “calling” like many young actors.

The irony of having a police officer mother isn’t lost on Jonsson: she spent a decade arresting boys like him, while he now plays a man brutalised by the very system she served. Does that complicate his thoughts on the prison system? “Of course. I have sympathy for everyone working to keep us safe. But growing up as a young Black man in London, I’ve had some weird things happen.” He won’t elaborate, but the implication is clear: his mother’s profession and his own experiences exist in uncomfortable tension – a tension present throughout Wasteman.

After being expelled, he moved to a school in Hammersmith – a 90-minute commute across the city – and discovered acting through school plays and the National Youth Theatre. At 16, he won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, spending much of his two years there skating in Washington Square Park before returning to London. After his mother suggested he audition for Rada, he promptly won a place.

Wasteman was, improbably, Jonsson’s first ever film audition. He was fresh out of drama school and focused entirely on theatre, when his agent sent him the script – not for Taylor, but for Dee, the more traditionally violent convict character eventually portrayed by Tom Blyth (a far cry from Blyth’s role in Netflix’s frothy romcom People We Meet on Vacation). “I got my girlfriend at the time to draw a tattoo on my neck,” he recalls. “The director threw a punch at me. I threw a chair at him. I thought I nailed it.” Then he heard nothing. “I was like, ‘Oh: I guess I’m not as good as I thought.’”

The film had been with A24 and the Safdie Brothers, who ended up dropping the project to make the Adam Sandler-starring crime drama Uncut Gems instead, meaning the project sat dormant for years. In the meantime, Jonsson left Rada early to join Robert Icke’s stage revival of Mary Stuart, playing opposite Juliet Stevenson. His screen breakthrough came with Industry in 2020, the BBC and HBO series about cutthroat young investment bankers. Cast as Augustus “Gus” Sackey, Jonsson visited Eton and Oxford to research the role of a privileged Black man navigating the overwhelmingly white world of high finance. The performance was revelatory, but after two series, just as the show was becoming a hit, he left. “You only get one life,” he told GQ in August 2025. “Life is short, art is long.”

His first gig post-Industry was Rye Lane, a joyful south London romcom that premiered at Sundance to what Deadline called “sunny, irreverent” acclaim. Then came BBC Christmas detective drama Murder Is Easy, in which Jonsson became the first Black actor to lead an Agatha Christie adaptation. That milestone resurfaces in the news on the morning we meet – a BBC-commissioned review warning against “tick box” diversity casting has just been published, explicitly citing Murder Is Easy as an example of diversity being “superimposed” on a story. The review argues that “unless it’s very skilfully done, there is a danger it will feel overly didactic and preachy.”

Jonsson is diplomatic when I bring it up. “I’m always going to be British,” he says. “Britain will always be home for me. Even when I worked on Alien – this massive American studio film – they’d reference my British sensibility. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s part of it. We do things differently on this tiny island.’” He’s undeniably benefited from a shifting landscape; in the wake of Black Lives Matter, British broadcasters began addressing the whiteness of their output. What’s striking is that he’s already experienced different phases of the conversation – first subverting expectations in Industry, then receiving backlash as a Black lead in period drama.

His casting as a Black robot in 2024’s Alien: Romulus engendered a predictable wave of criticism, too. But his race brought an unexpected edge to the film’s exploration of the ubiquitous sci-fi question, “What does it mean to be human?”, and the film’s $351m box office haul showed the value of inspired casting. When director Fede Álvarez asked him to deliver the franchise’s most famous line – the Sigourney Weaver battle cry “Get away from her, you bitch” – Jonsson understood the stakes. “I was like: ‘I don’t know – you’re kidding right?’” Jonsson recalls, laughing. “Fede said: ‘Just give me one.’ I did and that was the take that made it into the film.”

He’s grinning through the anecdote, but the significance isn’t lost on him. Alien brought visibility, and visibility brought a 2025 Bafta rising star award. When he accepted it, he quipped: “Star, I don’t know, but rising – I guess.” Then he turned serious: “Growing up, I had the Denzel Washingtons and Idris Elbas, but they’re not me. There’s not enough space for diverse talent in this industry. I realise I have an important role in defining what Black is.”

It’s a responsibility he remains acutely aware of. “Every character I do, no matter what, I’m going to be a Black man first,” he says now, echoing the sentiment expressed in his acceptance speech. “Until we change what it is [to be a Black man], everyone’s going to have a certain view on it, you know what I mean? But I think that is evolving.”

In Wasteman, Taylor’s Blackness is never explicitly discussed, yet it shapes everything – the way guards speak to him, the institutional contempt he faces, the lack of resources available to him. This feels deliberate: a crime drama with a Black lead where Blackness isn’t the story. Taylor faces no overtly racist guards or prison gangs. Instead, the racial dynamics are present but unstated, which makes them all the more insidious.

The preparation for the role was intense. Jonsson worked with a charity that reintegrates former inmates and watched “folders and folders” of iPhone footage shot inside British prisons. Many of the supporting cast are former inmates themselves. He watched Steve McQueen’s Hunger – the film about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands – multiple times in the lead-up. “This feeling of people doing something beyond themselves in a contained existence. That’s what’s happening with Taylor. He’s waking up, hitting the drugs, fighting for his life daily, going to sleep, rinsing and repeating. You’ve got to have something keeping you going,” he says.

The idea of his character’s motivation clearly resonates: “Here comes the cringe,” says Jonsson, suddenly self-aware, “but I feel like I’m quite a complicated person. Sometimes I feel great and happy and sometimes I’m not. The darker stuff right now is interesting me.”

Faith, he explains, helps him navigate that darkness. He grew up in the church and still attends, describing it as his “north star”, though he’s careful not to be preachy. “Faith is a personal thing for me. It’s what keeps me going. Life is tough enough without having something outside you … there’s a lot of darkness behind this wall, you know?”

Perhaps the most devastating moment in Wasteman comes when Taylor speaks to his young son for the very first time – on FaceTime. Jonsson, too, met the actor playing his son for the first time during the scene. “The reaction I had is what made it into the movie. Imagine if that was your truth – for some people it is.” Taylor’s incarceration hasn’t just stolen his own life – it’s robbed his son of a father, perpetuating the exact cycle of absence that shaped Taylor himself.

If Wasteman represents one kind of intense male relationship under duress, The Long Walk represents another. The Stephen King adaptation follows a group of teenage boys forced to walk at a relentless pace until only one survives. Jonsson plays the buff Pete McVries opposite Cooper Hoffman’s Ray Garraty, a boy grieving his father’s death. The film’s premise is brutal – teenage boys walking themselves to death for public entertainment – but the real story is about what happens between Ray and Pete as exhaustion strips them bare.

Shot in chronological order over six-and-a-half weeks in Winnipeg, the film required the ensemble to walk many miles each day. “We didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into,” Jonsson recalls. “Baking sun, torrential rain, freezing cold. It was like a marathon.” By the end, he and Hoffman had covered about 350 miles together. The physical ordeal wasn’t method acting for its own sake – it was the point. “I don’t like acting tired. I’d rather just do it,” he says.

But it’s the emotional landscape – and his relationship with Hoffman – that affected Jonsson most deeply. “I’ve never met anyone like him,” he says of his co-star, the 22-year-old son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. “He’s phenomenal. But there’s always more with Cooper. Always something deeper.” Filming a scene in which Hoffman’s character talks about losing his father, Jonsson found himself genuinely moved by what his co-star delivered. “They say our job as actors is to listen. And listening to him was transformative for me.” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “You do stop and think, ‘where’s the line?’ And then you go, hang on, that’s incredibly brave, putting something of yourself out there for other people.”

Now Jonsson and Hoffman are reuniting for upcoming crime comedy The Chaperones. When Jonsson talks about their partnership, he invokes old Hollywood. “I think about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck teaming up, doing stuff again. I kind of dig that.” It’s a deliberate aspiration: two hungry young actors trying to recapture the magic of the late-90s indie boom that birthed, among other things, Hoffman’s father. “We’ve got a chance to go to places we haven’t been,” says Jonsson. “That’s a gift.”

What’s next is characteristically ambitious. He’s currently filming Colman Domingo’s directorial debut Scandalous, playing Sammy Davis Jr opposite Sydney Sweeney’s Kim Novak. He’s also intriguingly set to star in Frank Ocean’s long-awaited directorial debut, though details remain scant. It’s a far cry from Custom House, yet Jonsson insists on treating it all as work rather than destiny. “That’s why I call it a job,” he says. “If I don’t, I’m in la-la land.”

Sitting cross-legged, beanie pulled tight, he seems remarkably at peace with not having all the answers. “I wish I could say I know what I’m doing,” he admits when I ask about navigating this new level of visibility. It’s an unassuming approach and perhaps a helpful one when it comes to completely disappearing into a role. But with Wasteman, for the first time, Jonsson isn’t disappearing at all – he’s showing us exactly who he might have been.

“It was scary, actually,” he says, hesitating slightly. The fear, he explains, wasn’t about the physical transformation or even the character’s darkness – it was about proximity. “I look at myself, someone who got kicked out of school, and I think: one wrong turn – one bad choice – that’s all it takes. Taylor made that choice. I didn’t – but I could have.”

Wasteman is released in UK cinemas on 20 February.