FINN COLE

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A lot is expected of young actors, especially ones thrust so visibly onto the screen as has been Finn Cole, rising star of both Peaky Blinders on BBC Two (Netflix, stateside) and the new series Animal Kingdom on TNT.

At just twenty, Cole’s already sharing screen time with Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Sam Neill, Ellen Barkin, Scott Speedman, and more. He is just two (proper) gigs in and starring front-and-center on two acclaimed and anticipated shows, which is not normally how these things go.

Luck had something to do with it—Finn’s brother Joe was on Peaky Blinders, the cult favorite, post-World War I gangster drama, before him, and the two taped an audition for the show together while Finn was still in school and helped pass it onto the casting director—but luck doesn’t account for Cole’s poise, presence, and intensity on screen. Self-admittedly, these are not things the young actor was taught so much as he picked up from careful observation of co-actors like Murphy and Hardy, two of the bigger names on Peaky Blinders. “They’re two very different actors whom I both admire greatly,” Cole says. “I like to watch and see how they deal with people and situations, how they deal with scripts. It’s something I take from everyone I work with. It’s interesting, I always get asked if I ever went to drama school and I haven’t been.

“Maybe it’s because I’m not good enough,” Cole continues quickly and in stride. “I get asked, ‘Well, how did you learn?’ and I say, ‘Everyone that I meet, when I’m working or not, I can from learn how humans work.’ Working with legends like Cillian and Tom, you learn a hell of a lot more, you learn amazing techniques and ways of dealing with it. I’m very lucky in that respect, very lucky.”

Acting has been a learning experience both onscreen and off for Cole, handling the pressures onset for the first time on Peaky Blinders and then coming to America for the first time to shoot Animal Kingdom in Los Angeles. In a stroke of fortune, Cole’s characters share similarities with his own professional trajectory. Both Michael (Peaky Blinders) and J (Animal Kingdom) are newcomers to the world of crime—postwar Birmingham in the former and modern-day Southern California in the latter—members of lawbreaking families that, for different reasons, have stayed out of the family business until they enter the frame. In Peaky Blinders, Michael is the youngest cousin in the family, raised by foster parents and only recently returned to his biological mother, who quickly makes himself comfortable as an accountant for the family gang. Animal Kingdom is a step up for Cole, who is the lead and focal point of the show, based off the 2011 Australian film of the same name, which earned Jacki Weaver an Oscar nomination for the role now inhabited by Barkin as the grandmother who takes J into her rowdy home and heist-happy family after his mother dies in an drug overdose.

Like Michael and J, Cole is trying to figure out his place. “The characters that I’ve played so far have all been characters that have been brought into very new situations or feel that they shouldn’t be where they are,” Cole says. “There is a certain amount of truth of that in my experience, because I came to this in a very unconventional way. I am working with people whom I’d worshipped from a young age and I’m like, ‘Hold on, I’m just a kid from South London, should I really be here right now?’ That’s a great thing, because you never get too comfortable.”

As Cole’s roles have developed, however, a sense of ease has begun to set in. “The characters in Peaky Blinders and Animal Kingdom are young characters who are getting more comfortable with their surroundings. I think that’s an important part of the story, they’re learning. That’s almost my story,” he explains. “I’m in a room with great actors and I’m not starstruck, but I’m honored. By the time the second season comes, I’ve seen that they’re really great people and I feel far more comfortable, and that’s very important to both characters, because they’re in the same situation. A year later, he’s in that family and now he’s involved.”

Cole’s path to acting took a little bump from his brother Joe, but it’s been in his blood from an early age, sometimes out of necessity. “I did love acting at school. I was always involved in it in some way, but the thought of it being possible to make a career out of never really crossed my mind,” he explains. “I guess I had a need for attention at school and clowning around in drama lessons fueled that. I was also a fairly emotional teenager. If nothing more, I’ve come to explore that on stage using my own experience and personal feelings. It helped me understand myself growing up as a teenager and helped me understand my motives and thoughts, as well as other people’s motives and thoughts, why they did what they did and why I do what I do. I think that actors have a very good gauge on how to deal with people. I think they are very likable people when they want to be.”

Part of this new phase of Cole’s career means taking his craft seriously, picking up skills from the actors and people around him and mining his own emotional depths to produce finer, more robust work. “I’ve always been very fond of exploring what makes people lead these kind of lives. This is why I always loved reading scripts,” he says. “When I was younger, I read two novels. It seems to be my generation, a generational thing that’s dying out. I didn’t read enough when I was younger, but when I started reading scripts it completely changed my view.”

A conversation with Cole is an exercise in earnestness. There is a passion not just for his projects but his improvement that extends beyond sound bites. It manifests on the screen and in the nuance he can add into quiet, observational, but intense roles. “I love playing J because of the layers he has. He’s very three-dimensional underneath, but on the surface he’s desensitized,” Cole explains. “That’s the great thing about J”—and perhaps the actor is obliquely referring to himself here—”he’s subtle, difficult to read, not really sure what’s going on, but I know exactly how he feels and how he operates. It’s kind of like a smile that, off-camera, I like to bring.”

With two shows on air and the kind of future most anyone would hope to be holding in their capable hands, Cole’s off-camera joy seems more literal than figurative. “I am having a really good time. I’m really enjoying myself. Some days can be stressful and sometimes, depending on what you are going through as a character, you sort of torture yourself to a certain extent, but that’s all part of it. I’m really enjoying my experiences and I work very hard and I’m going to be exhausted at the end of it,” he says. “Believe me, it’s not easy but it’s fun.”

Animal Kingdom premieres tomorrow on TNT. Peaky Blinders is available on Netflix.