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James Nelson-Joyce opens up on This City Is Ours season 2 and the Stephen Graham encounter that changed everything
James Nelson-Joyce is proud that his hit gangland thriller-with-a-heart is capturing the brutal underbelly – and the beauty – of his native Liverpool.
Left Bank Pictures/James Stack
- Craig McLean
Published: Monday, 19 October 2026 at 5:00 pm
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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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It’s late February 2026, a grey, overcast afternoon in Liverpool. But the screen gods are shining on the city. Across town, work on director Sam Mendes’s quartet of Fab Four films continues apace, eight days a week, with today’s paparazzi images of the shoot capturing actor Paul Mescal outside the childhood home in Walton of his Beatle, Paul McCartney.
The sprawling Hollywood production is messing with the road closures and location logistics of another project that’s foregrounding a very different set of local heroes. Well, anti-heroes. But here on filming day 89 of 120, no one on the set of series two of the BBC crime thriller This City Is Ours is complaining.
Certainly not mayor Steve Rotheram. He’s pitched up at today’s unit base in Chinatown to talk up, for the benefit of news cameras, the area’s thriving film and television industry, cementing Liverpool’s position as the second-most filmed city in the UK.
For James Nelson-Joyce, the actor leading from the front on the Macbeth-on-Merseyside crime-family drama, that is welcome news. Bossing BBC ratings after the critically acclaimed series’ launch in spring 2025 is one thing. For this staunch Scouser, born and bred and based here, doing his hometown proud is another level entirely.
“One of the things I’m happiest about with this show is that it’s given a lot of young people opportunities to explore creative industries,” says Nelson-Joyce, between takes of scenes deep into the eight-episode series. “Whether that’s with costume, make-up, set design or sound, you see lots of young people on the crew.”
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Bafta-nominated for his portrayal of aspirational gangland prince Michael Kavanagh, the 37-year-old’s civic pride stretches outwards, too. “Our programme shows off this city so beautifully. Of course, it shows the dark side, but also the most gorgeous Georgian architecture, the river, the parks, some of the beautiful restaurants we’ve got. It’s visually stunning.”
This city is theirs, and a character in itself. As show creator and writer Stephen Butchard, another locally born talent, puts it: “There’s an honesty to Liverpool. That can sometimes be a brutal honesty.”
Brutality and honesty: the first series of This City Is Ours delivered on both in spades. Sean Bean played patriarch gangster Ronnie Phelan, the kingpin of Liverpool drug dealers, Julie Graham his formidable wife Elaine, with Jack McMullen his ambitious but reckless son Jamie and Nelson-Joyce his heir-apparent. Both seconds-in-command also grappled with the tough truths of parenthood. Jamie enraged his fiancée Melissa (Darci Shaw) by endangering their baby; Michael and Diana (Hannah Onslow) battled through IVF.
Meanwhile, the Shakespearean power struggle to succeed the king after his impending retirement tore the clan apart – only for the challenges of dealing with a murderous Colombian narco-cartel to lead to an uneasy alliance. The family that slays together stays together… kinda.
The cast of This City Is Ours. BBC
The new series picks up six days after the climax of the first, with fresh threats arising. As Butchard explains, “You don’t run down a Colombian gangster and walk away from it.” Now the fall-out is causing “ructions in Spain, ructions in Liverpool”.
What does Nelson-Joyce credit for the out-of-the-box success of This City Is Ours? “It isn’t your ordinary crime drama,” he replies, over a late-afternoon beer once filming has wrapped seven months later. “A lot of people liked the love story between Michael and Diana. Liked the family. The sense of community.” Of course, he acknowledges, “bad things happened. But you see the reasons why. Because Stephen writes from a place of humanity.”
It’s that humanity that helps the thriller stand out from the other, audience-gripping “prestige” British crime dramas currently on air, notably MobLand and The Gentlemen, both of which bear the unmistakable stamp of Guy Ritchie. Nelson-Joyce makes a face at the mention of the argy-bargy auteur, then concedes that “everyone likes a bit of naughty, don’t they? But This City Is Ours is more than just crime and drugs. It’s got a heart to it. Plus, it has the uniqueness of its setting.”
Feelings about that setting, though, run high. The RT mailbag regularly bulges with missives from Liverpudlians bristling at the depiction of their city as rife with wrong ’uns, as seen in This City Is Ours, The Responder and The Cage. Nelson-Joyce’s quick and polished rebuttal indicates he’s heard it all before.
“First, every city’s dangerous. Secondly, as I’ve said to anyone who’s said that to me: ‘You’re telling me drugs doesn’t go on in Liverpool?’ It goes on in every big city, every town. But it’s not just about that. And we’re not going round shooting every five seconds. Yes, there’s violence and drugs in the show. But you don’t see one line of cocaine getting sniffed. You don’t see one drug user. Violence is kept to a minimum. It’s storytelling.”
Growing up in Walton, the son of a factory worker and a tiler for the council, it was the desire to tell stories that first gripped teenage James. Not, though, until he’d left school, his time there blighted by undiagnosed dyslexia. “When I was 18, 19, I was inspired by Pete Postlethwaite, Stephen Graham, Andrew Schofield. [Local] actors who are relatable and believable, and dramas that were the same, by [writers such as] Jimmy McGovern and Shane Meadows.”
Diana Williams (Hannah Onslow) and Michael Kavanagh (James Nelson-Joyce) in This City Is Ours season 2. BBC / Leftbank Pictures / James Stack
Eventually, at 21, he made it into the Italia Conti drama school, where his dyslexia was finally diagnosed, and he then embarked on the actors’ hustle: audition, audition, audition. A breakthrough of sorts came when he was in his mid-20s, in a central London Nando’s. He’d come out of an audition he felt had gone well, and decided to cash-in his restaurant loyalty-card stamps and treat himself to a half-chicken. Then he spotted Stephen Graham and his producer-actor wife Hannah Walters in the queue.
“You don’t see many Scouse actors on telly, and I’d never watched Brookside. So I didn’t know any – that’s my ignorance. So, I went over and said: ‘You’ve inspired me and shown me there are opportunities. You’re an amazing actor, my actor. Can I get a selfie?’” A few minutes later Walters came over to him. “There’s something about you,” she said to Nelson-Joyce. “Here’s my email. Let us know whenever you’re in anything. We’ll keep our eye open.”
Not long after, Nelson-Joyce was at the table-read for what would be his breakthrough role, in 2017’s Little Boy Blue, Jeff Pope’s searing drama about the 2007 fatal shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool. “I felt these eyes burning into me. I looked up and it was Stephen. And he mouthed: ‘You’re that lad from Nando’s!’ It was like a tap on the shoulder,” says Nelson-Joyce.
He grins widely at the memory of his first job with an actor and mentor alongside whom he’d later act in Shane Meadows’s and Jack Thorne’s The Virtues (2019) and Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows (2025).
Nelson-Joyce seems to have learnt from the example of Graham and Walters (co-producers on Adolescence) in terms of leading by example and by empathy. He gives a “don’t be soft” face when I suggest that he’s the embodiment of the show. “It’s an ensemble piece, and it wouldn’t work without anyone else’s storyline.”
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His co-stars, though, might beg to differ about his leading-man status, and about its source. “James is great at playing strength, leadership and power, but also such a warmth, because it’s similar to who he is,” says Saoirse Monica-Jackson (who plays Cheryl in the series). “He’s able to portray masculinity, lack of empathy and being shut-down emotionally. But in the same breath, he has vulnerability, so you have compassion for him. You want Michael to win. That is a real testament to the person and actor that James is.”
That (slightly) lighter side of James Nelson-Joyce will be to the fore in The Man Who Stole Portugal, an upcoming film in which he has the eponymous role. He plays a real-life 1920s conman who nearly bankrupted the country. In a Catch Me If You Can-like caper, his co-stars include Richard E Grant, Dominic West and Kim Bodnia. “Some great actors in it,” he says with no little understatement. “But I’m lucky – well,” he quickly adds, “blessed. Stephen Graham tells me off for saying ‘lucky’. He goes: ‘You’re not lucky. You’re blessed.’”
He’s also blessed with a look, demeanour and controlled charisma that mean he is, as his Wikipedia entry begins, “an English actor, known for playing the tough guy or villainous characters”.
Upcoming film aside, has he felt any sense of being pigeonholed in that type of role? Nelson-Joyce shakes his head and takes a swig from his bottle. “You’ve got to remember, how you look [informs] a lot of the parts you’re gonna play. If you’re a handsome b*****d, you’re never gonna play the ugly roles. I’ve got a strange face, and I know it blends well with those roles.
“Of course, I want to play the vulnerable roles, and I’m sure they’ll come,” he says with confidence born not of beer but of a range of powerful, screen-burning performances. “But there are actors out there a million times better than me, and they’ve not been given the opportunities I’ve fortunately been given. I do a job I love. Why would I ever complain about that?”
This City Is Ours starts Sunday 25 October at 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer.
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Craig McLean
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