From leaving addiction behind to getting slapped by Kano: Top Boy street casting maestro Des Hamilton tells his wildest stories

The Bafta winner, who has worked on the London thriller since its inception, fell into the casting business by chance. For the past two decades, he’s been passing some of that luck on by discovering new actors all around the country. He tells Nicole Vassell about spotting budding stars everywhere from Glasgow to Grimsby

Talent spotting: Hamilton has been there from the start for (from left) Thomas Turgoose, Letitia Wright, Kane Robinson and Jasmine Jobson (Getty/PA)

When Kano hit him, mid-Top Boy audition, Des Hamilton only had himself to blame. After all, the casting director had asked the rapper to bring his A-game to the try-out scenes. Though they’d only met briefly, a few weeks before this moment, Hamilton could see something in the grime artist, born Kane Robinson, that he believed would make a great actor. So, to get a little more out of the would-be screen star, the Glaswegian got creative.

“I said, ‘They think you’re great, Kane, but they think you’re too nice,’” Hamilton tells me. “It was a bad choice of words on my part because the scene got feisty and then he smacked the f*** out of me. I can’t say anything, though. I say to young actors all the time, ‘I want authenticity, I want truth, do what you’d really do in this scene.’ So if a chair comes at you, or Kane decides to slap me around, I can’t complain.” It was ultimately worth Hamilton’s sore jaw: Kano got the part and has thrilled audiences with his glowering, unsettling portrayal as drug boss Sully ever since.

Hamilton has stories like these for days. Over Zoom, the 58-year-old has a deep fund of anecdotes from his two decades of seeking out talent. From the piercing skinhead drama This is England to the avant-garde Second World War satire Jojo Rabbit, Hamilton has provided award-winning films and TV shows with their performers since 2001. Now, Top Boy is back for a fifth and final season. This marks the end of an era for Hamilton, who has worked on it since its inception in 2011. The thriller – which aired on Channel 4 and then Netflix – lays bare the gruesome effects of drug deals and gang wars on young people in east London. As well as racking up several Bafta wins and nominations, Top Boy has bolstered the acting careers of stars including Ashley Walters, Ashley Thomas, Little Simz and Micheal Ward. Though Hamilton and his co-workers sometimes do things the traditional way, recruiting trained and experienced actors for their projects, Des Hamilton Casting is particularly known throughout the industry for its success in street casting: finding talent out and about in the world.

After spotting Thomas Turgoose on a street corner in Grimsby, Hamilton gave the then 13-year-old his first shot on This is England (2006). Though he’d never acted before, Turgoose possessed a cheek and charm that Hamilton and the filmmaker Shane Meadows knew would shine on screen. The Scottish actor Kathleen McDermott, meanwhile, was a hairdresser and karaoke singer when Hamilton approached her, in Glasgow city centre, to audition for Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 grief drama Morvern Callar, opposite Samantha Morton. McDermott went on to win Best Actress at the Bafta Scotland New Talent Awards. And Hamilton’s many hours of hanging around the streets of Hackney in the early 2010s led to the discovery of half of the cast of Top Boy. He won a Bafta for his casting on the show in 2020.

“I’m always looking for people with the ability to listen and respond, which I know sounds quite basic, but it’s very often underestimated,” he says of his searches. “With Kane, for example, he seems very relaxed in himself, in a very gentle, humble way. There was no arrogance there. You could tell he was a thinker.”

Hamilton had 3,000 submissions for one single part in the most recent season, with members of the public much more interested in street casting opportunities than when he started out. “The usual response was ‘f*** off’,” he says. “I’d go, ‘Well, I’ll be back here tomorrow, I’m not going to stay f***ed off.’ People were uncertain. But they were quite right to be, perhaps, a bit sceptical, a bit dubious, some Scottish guy wandering up to them in the street.”

It’s easy to imagine Hamilton being unfazed by terse brush-offs from teenagers; his rogue, sweary, curious nature seems fitting for the challenge. And according to Stephanie Okoye, who has worked with him on Top Boy, it’s a job he doesn’t simply clock out of. “I’ve been with him when he’s stopped someone random who looked interesting, someone he sees something in,” she says. “He never stops looking.”

‘I haven’t had a f***ing day off in 20 years... I’m not complaining. I’ve been very lucky to fall into a job I’m really into,’ says Des Hamilton (Stafi Samaki)

Hamilton loves that the job gives him the chance “to give somebody an opportunity to perhaps do something on a new path”. “That’s how I got into casting; somebody gave me a chance,” he says.

When I ask what he means by that, Hamilton hesitates. “Erm... it’s quite a convoluted... f*** it,” he says. “In the spirit of Top Boy, everything’s about the truth. When I was younger, I was obsessed with films. And heroin.” He laughs dryly, giving a slight shrug as he recounts how he would constantly nod off during movies, missing big chunks of the storyline. “I shouldn’t be laughing, but f*** it, it was funny.”

During a stint in rehab, he met the director Lynne Ramsay, who’d come to visit a relative in the centre. They bonded over their mutual appreciation of film, and kept in touch after Hamilton left the facility. One day, during a later meetup in London, Ramsay had a proposition. “Lynne was aware I went back up to Glasgow often, and said, ‘I’m making a film up there, I’m looking for some street cast. Do you know what street cast is?’” Despite the answer being no, Hamilton was game to try, and so he set about searching for the Morvern Callar cast. “At 39, I actually got a job, at last. I’d never had a job up until that age.” And to his surprise, he was good at it, and another casting gig came straight after Morvern Callar. “Now I haven’t had a f***ing day off in 20 years,” he says. “I’m not complaining. I’ve been very lucky to fall into a job I’m really into.”

Throughout his years in the industry, Hamilton hasn’t shied away from risky techniques to get the desired results from auditionees. As well as getting a thwack from Kano, Hamilton also had a memorable early encounter with Jasmine Jobson, who plays gang deputy Jaq in Top Boy. “She did the scene, and she was great, but I had a feeling she was better. So I riled her a little bit. I said, ‘You’re f***ing holding back on me. What the f***?’ I do annoy Jasmine quite easily… she was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll f***ing show you.’ She did the scene again, and then she picked up a chair, and I thought, ‘Please don’t’. The next thing, it was flying towards me. It still hurts.”

Jasmine Jobson as Jaq in ‘Top Boy’ (Netflix)

But there are times when it’s gone too far. During one less successful Top Boy search, a hopeful auditionee had worked himself up in order to deliver a scene to remember. “We do the scene, do it calmly, then I just threaten him gently,” says Hamilton. “The guy starts jumping up and down, biting at his wrist. He’s shouting and cursing at me, then he pulls out a gun and he comes rushing at me, pointing it at my forehead. I’m thinking it’s a real f***ing gun and thinking, ‘This motherf***er’s gonna shoot me in the head!’ I’m a nervous wreck, everyone’s darting around… until we realise it’s a replica.”

Unsurprisingly, the actor wasn’t cast, and he’s not a name added to Hamilton’s list of finds. But despite giving plenty of actors their first jobs, Hamilton is loath to say he “discovered” any performer – in his view, they always would have made it big; he was simply there to see it first.

“Somebody mentioned the other day about Letitia Wright, asking me if I felt proud of her,” he notes about the Marvel star, who he cast fresh out of acting school for a four-episode stint on Top Boy, her breakout role. “Letitia was going to do all of that whether she met me or not. I wasn’t raised to think like that. Those people, they were all going where they were going. It’d be dreadfully unmodest for me to be like, ‘I did that.’” He shrugs. “I just did my job.”

‘Top Boy: The Final Season’ is streaming now on Netflix