“I learnt pretty quickly that it doesn’t pay to be shy about your stuff”, says White Lotus actor Will Sharpe

‘I looked different from most of the kids,’ he continues. ‘In Japan, I went to an international school, so there was a mix but there were lots of Japanese kids. Whereas moving to England… you’re slightly aware that you look different. The humour is different. The way people interact is different. So just learning all of that. But I remember feeling quietly confident in creative writing at eight: just, this is the way to fit in. I can do this. Even if I don’t know how to hold a cricket bat, I know how to answer this assignment and not be like a complete alien.’

Acting came later, as an early teenager, by which time he had started school at Winchester. ‘I remember one conversation with mum,’ he laughs, ‘and me saying, “I don’t really get the big deal with acting, it just seems like people pretending to be someone else.” I remember her saying quite shortly, “Well, do it then, if you’re so clever.” So I started to try it out.’

By the time he was studying classics at Cambridge, Sharpe’s proactive, creative streak was starting to show. ‘This is a slightly embarrassing kind of Rushmore story,’ he says, ‘but I found that sometimes it was difficult to be cast at school because of what I looked like. I was getting into Beckett and decided I wanted to put on my own play. The only slot that was available was in the middle of exams, so me and a handful of friends who were up for it just put on the show, in the middle of our exams.’

The production, he tells me after some mild prodding, was called Hang On, Mr Baxton — ‘I can’t even remember why it was called that!’ — and it featured characters who were trapped in a play. He chuckles, face obscured by his hands, at the memory. ‘But people responded to it. I realised that I wanted to carry on, so I would try and write.

Sharpe got signed as an actor off the back of an Edinburgh fringe comedy show and started getting work. He was in Casualty, on the set of which he met his partner, Sophia Di Martino, also an actor. ‘I was a junior doctor and she was playing a paramedic in Bristol,’ he says. ‘We’ve been together for 13 years and have two children: three and one.’

All the time he was acting Sharpe was also writing scripts, which he would pass to his agent. Not much happened, so he took matters into his own hands. ‘I definitely was fairly tenacious. I learnt pretty quickly that it doesn’t pay to be shy about your stuff, and that you have to send it to people and get eyes on it. It felt like something that I was really burning to do and still does. It’s a mixture of make your own luck and you have to put the time and work in, regardless. Then there is also good luck and bad luck.’

He made a short film with his friend Tom Kingsley, who was working as a runner at a production company that makes commercials and music videos. Kingsley’s boss saw what they had done, and liked it. He offered up £50,000 for the pair to make a feature, ‘and then he came back from a sabbatical and had changed his mind’.

Still, ‘the fact that he’d sort of given us permission was enough to push us. It gave us a kind of confidence. So even when that confidence was removed, it was like, well, we’ve built our own confidence now, we’ve got this far down the line, we feel ready to try and push it. That was very formative in the sense that we obviously had to play so many different roles: we were transport, the casting director, catering, everything.’

The pair pressed on. ‘Bit by bit, we managed to raise just under 20 grand. We worked out the whole film cost the same as one second of Transformers. Lots of things I borrowed from Casualty. I borrowed a prop wheelchair to use as a dolly. We downloaded free grading software. By the end of the edit, my laptop was struggling so much it would routinely crash and would take about half an hour to reboot, so we’d just be getting somewhere and it would crash. It would be, “Okay, guess we should go and get some lunch.”’

The film, 2011’s Black Pond, premiered at Raindance. It was nominated for a Bafta for Outstanding British debut and won Sharpe Most Promising Newcomer at the Evening Standard British Film Awards. A second low-budget feature, The Darkest Universe — in which Sharpe also starred — followed in 2016, by which time he had his ‘first proper, grown-up commission’ from Channel 4 in the shape of the surreal and brilliant Flowers. First on the list to star in the show was Olivia Colman. She read it and loved it. ‘I think she shot The Favourite between the two seasons, then it came out after the second series. I don’t know if we would get her now!’

Having worked again with Sharpe on Landscapers, Colman would probably disagree. Cumberbatch, too, sought him out to direct his Louis Wain project. And you suspect he is not short of other big-name potential collaborators for the future. Right now, he says, he has a new TV show and a feature film he is working on. The acting offers, post The White Lotus, will doubtless keep coming in. I just prey that Will Sharpe doesn’t decide that he’d also like to have a go at writing for magazines, or else I might be in trouble.

‘The White Lotus’ airs Mondays on Sky Atlantic and is on streaming service NOW