By age eleven, Alexander Arnold had already discovered his love for theatre. However, in a tragic turn of events, he missed out on the fateful role of the Artful Dodger in Oliver! when he moved to a new school. Around the same time, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, and his English teacher, who was casting the play, wouldn’t let him read in for the role. Instead, he was cast as the pub landlord who introduces Nancy on stage, with a secondary part as Night Watchman. 

This latter role demanded just one line – “Good night” – which he attempted to deliver with a cockney flourish, having done a deep dive into the character’s backstory. His teacher quickly corrected him, dismissing his artistic interpretation and demanding he articulate properly. In response, Arnold severely over-enunciated during the performance, “just to really piss her off.” 

He, of course, had the last laugh. At seventeen, he was cast in one of the biggest British TV shows of all time. His role as Rich in Skins launched his career, which has most recently seen him lead the horror feature Delivery Run, and star alongside Aaron Taylor Johnson and Theo James in action thriller Fuze. 

Born and raised in Ashford, Kent, Arnold now lives in London. “I was really into film since the age of about ten or eleven,” he tells me on location for Short Stuff’s inaugural cover shoot. “I became the sort of film freak guy at my school.” He watched many of the now-classics, from Paul Thomas Anderson to Tarantino, which influenced his desire to become a writer and director. Around a year before his Skins audition, he had his first brush with the Meisner technique, an acting approach devised by Sanford Meisner in the early 1930s, piquing his interest not only in the art of film but the methodology of acting. 

Following Skins, Arnold was cast in a number of British whodunnit series – A Mother’s Son, Silk, What Remains – and noticed that he was often playing edgy, angsty teens and young men struggling with mental health and loneliness. “Maybe I got a bit stuck there, but I think I’m still drawn to playing people who are isolated and withdrawn from society,” he says. His character Nigel in the upcoming short film The Intimacy Coordinator is one such person – Arnold describes him as a “little bit weedy.” 

The Intimacy Coordinator follows Kate (played by Louisa Connolly-Burnham, also the film’s writer-director), an intimacy coordinator with a sex addiction. She and Nigel both attend Sex Addicts Anonymous, where Kate’s coercive influence over Nigel prevents him from progressing in his recovery. In preparation for the role, Arnold attended an open SAA meeting himself. He found the process fascinating. “It was really interesting to get a vibe of what these meetings were like, and to feel what weight is lifted off when you reveal things. That was important to discover for this character, to know what it feels like to express something that’s weighing you down and to be part of a group,” he says.

I ask what’s the most in depth he’s ever gone for a role, and he shares that when he played the music producer Gavin in Yesterday, his character starts dating someone called Ellie, played by Lily James. During the shoot, Arnold made James a mixtape as a gift – not from himself, but from his character to hers. “I remember she was like, ‘Oh, thanks…Gavin’, and I said, ‘No, we don’t have to do that!’ It wasn’t full method, but I thought it was just a fun thing to do. The exercise of making the playlist felt like something Gavin would be really interested in, and that helped me uncover things about the role, almost like a little cheat sheet,” he says. 

Arnold’s creative, expansive approach to finding his character is tempered by a more pragmatic grasp of the human psyche. “I believe that people can do and be anything – my character might be doing or saying something on page one, and then the complete opposite on page 100, but that’s how people are,” he says. He holds back on elaborating further about his process, and eventually admits that he finds talking about acting a bit pretentious, especially when speaking to non-actors (like me). That’s not to say, however, that he’s not constantly thinking about it. And once he gets into it, the theory, techniques and jargon all start pouring out. 

“I’m really into process,” Arnold begins. And then he reels off his list: John Beschizza, his acting teacher, runs repetition classes based on the aforementioned method devised by Sanford Meisner and Robert Duvall, who were part of Group Theatre, an NYC theatre collective with a cohort including Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, who taught Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro and Marylin Munroe. From here, Arnold lays out Adler, Strasberg and Meisner’s diverging methods, and details them each with examples. All of this is essentially gobbledegook to me, but it’s riveting to watch him dive down the rabbit hole, getting lost in his own train of thought while simultaneously attempting to explain the details to me. 

Having never gone to drama school, I wonder whether Arnold’s self-confessed nerdiness is an attempt to catch up, or is merely a result of his profound interest in the craft. He doesn’t seem too sure, but I never get the sense that he feels lesser or beneath his peers for having broken out young without any training. Equally, Arnold doesn’t have any sort of superiority complex about his early success. And yet, he is a brilliant actor, which Connolly-Burnham summarises perfectly in relation to working with him on The Intimacy Coordinator: “Alex has a really special way of straddling seriousness with humour,” she says. “He is wonderful to shoot, and he has these big brown eyes that say so much while doing very little. He can break your heart but also make you laugh, so he naturally felt like a great fit for Nigel.” 

The Intimacy Coordinator is Arnold’s ninth short film, an unusually high number for an actor of his profile. Yet it makes sense – shorts are so much about craft, in comparison to big budget movies that might help pay the bills, but do little to scratch that artistic itch. He’s also just come off a run at the Soho Theatre of a play called Most Favoured alongside Lauren Lyle, which was his first play in six years. 

I first crossed paths with Arnold when he shared his debut short film, 11+, with Short Stuff. It’s a very sweet and beautifully shot film about two boys on the cusp of going to different secondary schools. One of the boys didn’t pass his 11+ exam, meaning he didn’t get into the local grammar school. He did, however, star in the school play and is, like Arnold, invigorated by the high drama of film, encouraging his friend to “never be boring.” But outside of acting, Arnold does describe his life as relatively boring. When he’s not filming, he works from home as a wine salesman. Other than that, “I go to the pub on occasion, walk in the park, normal things.”

He worries saying this makes him sound too boring, but it turns out he has also been very politically active in the past, adding canvassing and campaigning to his list of extracurricular activities. He was a Corbyn supporter back in 2019, canvassing for the Labour Party leader at the time, and is a fan of the current Green Party. This topic of conversation piques both our interest, and safe in the knowledge that we share a similar perspective, it's suddenly Arnold who seems to be interviewing me. As I explain my own worldview, I also add that I know how much easier it is for me to talk about these ideas (which are, essentially, of the radical left) openly, something that actors and other public figures have struggled with, especially over the last few years. But Arnold isn’t really bothered about this. His issue these days is that he’s become a bit disillusioned with party politics. 

“[Journalist and commentator] Grace Blakely talks about that grievance, that loss in 2019 after Labour’s loss in the general election,” Arnold says, a feeling that seems to encapsulate his current political ennui. “I throw my support behind things, I suppose, but I know that there’s more that I can do.” He’s flirting with getting involved with campaigning again for the 2028/2029 UK General Election, and in the meantime, he’s bringing some of the ideas of democratic socialism pulled from Corbyn’s leadership into his writing – he’s currently working on a feature screenplay involving workplace unionisation. He thinks a lot about job security, especially as an actor, and our relationship to work. He’s recently been delving into the work of Mark Fisher, whose writing popularised Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson’s conception that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Our chat is interrupted many times by various questions about pizza orders and outfit changes, and we go on so many tangents it’s sometimes hard to remember where we even started. Arnold’s responses and musings are dotted with references to films, directors, plays, teachers and theories that have clearly influenced his work over the past decade and a half, and there’s no doubt that he is a deep thinker. He’s also funny, sharp, and oozes a calmness that offsets the manic energy of the day. We end our second interview session confirming a third, but it never happens. I feel that Arnold has so much more to say – about acting, the world, his writing – but I, like everyone else, will have to patiently wait to see what comes next. For now, it’s time to get a snack, another coffee and wander slowly back to the chaos.