What happens when you take two of Britain’s most exciting rising screen talents, and put them behind bars? You get Wasteman – a gritty new prison drama, which stars David Jonsson (of Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus, and The Long Walk) and Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes) as two inmates forced to share a cell, with intense results. That’s because Jonsson’s Taylor is finally nearing parole; on the outside, he can reconnect with the son who’s grown up without him. But the arrival of Blyth’s volatile Dee threatens Taylor’s impending freedom.
The film – the directorial debut of Cal McMau, produced by Adolescence director Philip Barantini – was partly shot in a disused prison in Shepton Mallet, as well as in a studio in Enfield. That real location only added to the visceral atmosphere. ”We had a window where they could put a camera lens in if they needed to, but we didn’t use that much because the difficulties of shooting in the cell forced us to think outside the box and step up to the challenge,” Blyth tells Empire of the filmmaking process. “It created this claustrophobia which adds to the feeling of this pressure cooker that is constantly building throughout the film until it blows.”
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For Jonsson, the overall sense of authenticity it created is the point. “Tom, Cal and I made a conscious decision that we were making a film about prison. The Hollywood version would be bullying and crime, [but] we were like, ‘No, this is about real people. This is about our justice system and the wrecked product that it creates’,” he says. “We shot this for about 18 days and it was an incredibly intense shoot.”