He’s gone from Scarborough to Hollywood with a turn in gritty new Disney+ true-crime series Under the Banner of Heaven. The actor talks religion, his love of co-star Andrew Garfield and how ‘boxing and smoking don’t go hand in hand’
Billy Howle is the sort of person you can imagine losing several hours chatting to in the corner of a house party. When I ask how he feels about religion, he widens his eyes and smiles, “Wow, big question!” He takes a puff on his cigarette, leans towards his laptop camera and launches into a meandering contemplation of his relationship with faith. Somewhere between references to Albert Einstein, John Cassavetes and Clifford the Big Red Dog, we get on to whether or not our life paths are predetermined and he apologises for sounding as if he’s “giving a lecture on narrative structure. But it’s stuff I like to talk about!” he says.
If you’re familiar with his work, it might not come as a surprise that Howle is so willing to dig deep. Over the last few years, the 32-year-old British actor has turned in some of TV’s knottiest performances. In MotherFatherSon, he was Caden, the dysfunctional playboy offspring of Richard Gere and Helen McCrory who had a stroke. In lockdown hit The Serpent, he was the dogged diplomat on the trail of a serial killer. And in BritBox’s revenge thriller The Beast Must Die, he was a detective with PTSD.
