Top Boy star Ashley Walters has talked about how he feels shows about Black people should be written by Black people.
The Jasmine Brand reported that Walters said during a recent Independent interview promoting the final season of Top Boy that he personally vetted the series’ screenwriter Ronan Bennett, an older white man. He said, “I did scrutinize Ronan. But understanding the people he consulted for the script was key.”
“Let me be frank. It would have been ideal for Black people’s stories to have been told by a Black person,” he said.
Walter’s comments are part of an ongoing conversation in the entertainment industry about culturally-sensitive writing and giving opportunities to writers of color to tell their stories from their lived vantage points. To Top Boy‘s credit, Walters was able to use his own experience to bring more legitimacy to the series about London’s criminal underworld; Walters talked about how he was incarcerated at 19 years of age on gun possession charges and was sentenced to over a year in prison. He said the experience put him in a depression after he was released.
“When I was released from prison, I didn’t want to leave my house for the first three months,” he said. “I stayed inside and at the time I just felt like I didn’t face people…I didn’t want to talk about what had happened and I just felt like I had a lot of catching up to do, becuase when you’re in that scenario–your world stays the same and everybody else’s world keeps moving. You feel behind, you feel left out, you feel lonely.”
After becoming addicted to alcohol, his mother confronted him about his behavior and he decided to do more with his life and became the actor we now see headlining the globally-popular series.
The third and final season of Top Boy is now streaming on Netflix and also stars Kane Robinson, Simbi Ajikawo, Jasmine Jobson, Saffron Hocking, Araloyin Oshunremi, Barry Keoghan and Brian Gleeson.
