It’s not often that an actor has two uniquely distinct roles come to life on-screen almost simultaneously. For rising actor Henry Ashton, this has been the case after arriving on the scene and on our screens in Amazon’s My Lady Jane and Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder. His characters, though vastly different, dip in and out of charisma, manipulation, and redeemable flaws. And for Henry Ashton, it means he gets to sink his teeth into two roles that are as different as they are compelling, succinctly showing the many facets of who he is as an actor.
In the TV adaptation of the YA historical fantasy novel, My Lady Jane, Ashton plays Lord Stan Dudley, a lovable and obliviously charming character who wears his heart on his sleeve and lets secrets fly. He also plays the devious Max Hastings in the six-part BBC investigative murder mystery, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The series is a direct adaptation from Holly Jackson’s bestselling novels.
1883’s EJ Saftner catches up with Henry Ashton to discuss his journey to acting, dinner party conversations, and his roles in My Lady Jane and A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder.
Hi! How are you today?
I’m good, I’m good. I just got back to London after being away for a week, so I’m just enjoying being home and having a bit of down time. So, yeah, I’m really good today, thanks.
OK, so let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about what inspired you to pursue acting, and how have those inspirations have impacted you as you play these roles?
Wow… I mean, I’ve always had a love for acting. I started acting when I was in school, I was quite a bit younger, and it’s always something that gave me a lot of joy and made me feel alive and in the moment. It put my quite energetic and chaotic mind into something creative… so I loved it during school and I did always have an idea of being an actor when I was older, but you know, I left school and lost momentum and started working in many different jobs in London. I lost my way a little bit, and before I knew it, ten years had gone by and I basically hadn’t done any acting at all… but I always had that deep, burning desire to get back into it. I guess I was just a little scared, because when you care about something so much, you’re afraid to fail, so you almost don’t want to even try.
I sort of fell back into through a couple friends who worked with a director… and we started during these really interesting shows around Europe, and it kind of got me back into the actor mode. I realized this could be a job… so, I didn’t start acting then, though I should of started. I worked for another couple years, working in a hotel, and I went for a pint with my friend and told him I wasn’t very happy and I wanted to be an actor… and I had three or four pints. The next morning, I applied to drama school.
I read that you applied to drama school – and got accepted – a bit ‘later in life.’ It can be so easy to romanticize and imagine a creative career, but to go for it is terrifying. Can you tell me about that decision and what convinced you to just go for it?
It’s utterly terrifying. It’s a funny thing… you can use that fear as the compass for where you should probably be going. Stuff you don’t really care about, you’re not scared of, because you have no feeling towards. I’ve loved acting, and had this idea of being an actor so much that I was terrified to try it. But, it was a couple things.
I had an amazing support system with my parents. I don’t think many parents would be so happy that their son quit their paying job to pursue the most highly competitive, hard-to-make-a-living job, but as soon as I told them I wanted to do it, they were 100 percent behind me and that made a huge difference. My friends have always inspired me to pursue the things that I love. It was very quick… it happened, as I said, literally overnight. I decided one night with my friends to apply, and the next morning applied to as many drama schools I could think of. [I was] lucky enough to get into the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and yeah, moved to Glasgow for three, four years and I haven’t looked back since. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made in my whole life. I couldn’t be happier.
So while you’re in school, what were the emotions you felt… hopeful, nervous?
You’re always hopeful and it was incredibly exciting. I mean, I’ve been dreaming of going to drama school for ten years. Part of the reason I went to drama school is because, one, I wanted to become a better actor, and two, I needed a way to filter [myself] back into the industry. It’s quite hard when you’re out of it to be noticed or seen, or even get a job. Drama school is a great way of filtering you back into the system, to get get seen my agents.
But the feelings of drama school… I had come to terms with the fact that I could leave and not work for years and years and years. I had made peace with that. I was just happy that I was now going in the direction that felt good to me. If I got work after drama school, it was an added bonus. Obviously, you always hope to get work, but for me, I was happy to be on the journey. I think it helped with my thought process when I left drama school, because I wasn’t expecting anything. So when I got something, it was just pure joy, and I rode that into the next thing and the next thing. I couldn’t have hoped for a better start, so… I’m a very lucky boy.
Lord Stan Dudley in My Lady Jane is quite the character and has somewhat of a personality arc in his quest for love and/or attention. What was the inspiration around Stan, and how did you approach playing the character with so many redeemable flaws?
I absolutely loved playing Stan. I love Stan, I think he’s the best, and I really hope I get to play him again. I mean, you touched on it… I think why Stan is so lovable is that he is flawed. He’s deeply flawed. He’s very relatable, but despite those flaws, he just loves and wears his heart on his sleeve. He feels things deeply and he’s not ashamed to act on those feelings. He is unapologetic in the way he loves Frances. I think that’s why people have got a love for him.
You’re right, the journey arc is something that stood out from the beginning when I read the script. He could’ve so easily been a, you know, two dimensional, unpleasant brother to hero, but he isn’t. I think the real twist, and I heard this so I’m going to steal this from someone else… The real twist is not if Stan is going to be marrying Jane at the beginning, the real twist is they make you think Stan is going to be a bad guy. When it turns out, he’s anything but. So yeah, I think we could all learn from Stan and be a bit more Stan in certain situations.
I mean, in the first scene, you see Stan’s bad side as he yells at the kids… But it reminded me of the idea that sometimes you just catch people at a bad time, and it’s not who they really are…
I think he does go through a journey and at the beginning, you do see him where he is at. I think the main thing with Stan, for me, was that he just wants to be seen. He just wants to be seen as his own man. He’s overshadowed by his troubled, but handsome and charming and rakish brother, he’s completely squashed by his overbearing, ladder-climbing father. You know, he’s squished, and he just wants to be seen. That can come out in less desirable ways, like you see in the beginning, but his journey throughout the season of becoming a really amazing brother, a loving son, and hopefully… a really loving partner to Miss Lady Frances. He’s great.
Stan is so charismatic and one of my favorite scenes has to be the serenade to Frances. What do you think he would be listening to today?
That’s a great question… that’s a really good question. He’d be a big fan of a ballad. I’m going blank…
I was thinking about it, too… trying to answer my own question.
I think he’d be a big fan of Bowie. He’s got that kind of fabulous, not afraid to push the boundaries with fashion, and see about very strange things and love the mushrooms he ate when he was a child.
My Lady Jane is an ensemble with an amazing cast including Edward Bluemel, Emily Bader, Rob Byrdon, Jordan Peters, Anna Chancellor, and more. Tell me about prepping for an ensemble show of this size. How did the cast approach the intricacy, coordination, and camaraderie of My Lady Jane?
It wasn’t an effort at all. From the very beginning when we all met, just before the read through, we all to dinner together and it was easy. It was easy from the start. Obviously, I had a huge amount of scenes with Rob and Anna, and they could not have been more generous, kind, welcoming, and happy to share. They’d been around, doing their thing for much longer than I’ve even thought about acting, so to have them carry me a little bit and give me some pro tips was amazing.
I think the way the show is written, it’s written in such a great way in which the characters have their moments and they have proper story lines and arcs. I think everyone was very happy with how it was all going in terms of an ensemble cast. We all just got on, we all got on so well. We were traveling around for the first three months of filming, staying at very strange, definitely haunted hotels, drinking martinis at the bar. It was great. We all become quick friends. I hope everyone comes back for a second season.
Let’s talk about A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which will be out on Netflix on August 1. Your character, Max Hastings, is perceived as quite a devious character, and I think the audience will ebb and flow with their doubt and concern of guilt throughout the plot … Can you tell us a little about your character? What was your initial impression of Max?
Sure, yeah. When I first got the audition through for Max, it didn’t give too much away and I hadn’t read the books. Just from his physical description, I was like… this is describing me, and where I’m from. That’s where mine and Max’s similarities end. Thank goodness.
Then, when I was going through the audition process, I was reading the book and got more familiar with his part in the story. Like you said, I think we all, myself and Dolly and Florence and Poppy, all wanted Max to be more than a two dimensional villain. Not that he was in the book, we just wanted to make sure in the TV show, it came across. I really wanted to make him as human as possible, not to earmark him at the very beginning to be the bad guy. So that first scene with Pip in episode one, we wanted it to be ambiguous… almost to feel a bit sorry for Max. His best friend died and its painful to talk about. I think we a good job with that. We talked a lot about Max’s relationship with his family and how he grew up… This sense of privilege and entitlement and how that pervades through his whole personality and comes out in awful ways.
It was important for me to approach Max with as little judgement as possible, and just try to figure out why he thinks that what he’s doing is OK, and why he justifies it. As long as I understand that justification, I hopefully will be able to play him somewhat convincingly.
Tell me a little bit more about that. I’ve heard a lot of actors talk about approaching their characters… you have to like your character, you have to find some lane of justification or lack of judgement. I feel like with Max, that has to be difficult.
Oh, he has many, many redeemable qualities, Max… that’s why he hasn’t been outed as the person that he is. He’s charming, he’s confident, he might not be as smart as Pip intellectually, but he’s smart in his own way. He’s manipulative. He’s aware. He’s always watching. So, he does have qualities that some people would think are positive. Like you said, if I started playing Max from a place of… ‘Oh, this guy is horrible, he’s evil, I hate him…’ Then, how on earth am I going to be able to play him convincingly?
Obviously, I don’t condone, or agree. I detest the actions that he commits, but if I can find just even a thread of justification, not for me, but for him, I can understand. Whether if its his relationship with his parents and they showed him love in a way that was… just give him what he wants, anything he wants he gets. Maybe there’s not a lot of love behind that. How does that twist someones mind to think, when I get something, I’m loved… so when I don’t get something, which I think I’m entitled to, how do I react? It’s that kind of stuff, but it was a challenge because you have to go to some really unpleasant places and justify some pretty horrendous things. It was a challenge which I really, really enjoyed the process of, and yeah, I’d love to do it again.
True crime is a wildly popular genre in our culture today, whether it is in film or TV or podcasting. Is there a cold case or true crime story that related to this case that influenced your interest? Or one that keeps you up at night?
I mean, you’re talking to a massive true crime fan.
OK, so there are options…
Yes. I mean, I listen to a podcast called ‘Case File,’ that is phenomenal. I listen to ‘Crime Junkie.’ I listen to ‘Other World,’ which is more paranormal. I love these types of stories, and sometimes I feel a bit weird about them, especially when I’ve just acted in something like this. I think it’s just an inherent curiosity of why and how people could do the things that they do. I think it’s that curiosity that is intriguing, not the actual stuff that happens.
I’m trying to think of something that relates to ‘Good Girl’s,’ but nothing is jumping to my mind. I think, ‘Good Girl’s’ is so clever in the way that it preys on that, especially in the next books. It preys on that morbid desire to hear all the grizzly facts of a cold case or a murder case, and highlights the darker sides of it. Maybe a little bit more responsibility on people consuming true crime…
If your two characters met at a dinner party… let’s say it is assigned seating, and Stan and Max are sitting next to each other. What do you think they would talk about?
That’s a really good question… Wow. Stan probably would ask him about his clothes, and where he got them from. He’d probably explain his codpiece to him, and Max would be confused by that. I mean, I hate to say it, but they’d probably talk about women, but in very, very different ways. Unbelievably different ways.
I mean, Stan would be telling him all about his one true love, Frances. Max would be… oh, God, I don’t even want to think about what Max would be saying. Probably boasting about a party he’d been to the other night. I don’t think they’d get on. I think Stan would see through Max’s charm pretty quickly, and I think Max would be intimidated by Stan’s heart and golden retriever energy.
I imagine they are talking at each other, but not listening.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
So, these two characters are wildly different, and they exist in such world-building stories. How did you balance these characters and the worlds they live in?
I think two things really helped. The first is that they are just so different. The world of My Lady Jane… not a good amount of it exists in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, and vice versa. So, I think them being very different helped. Also, I did have a bit of time in between. I had Stan until February 2023, and then I had amount five months before I started Max. So, the timing between helped me reset and approach Max from a fresh perspective.
I guess you always have to have a really firm idea. You always have to bring some of yourself to every role, some more than others. I brought a lot of myself to the role of Stan, because it fit, but with Max, not a lot of it fit. I did bring some of myself. It’s all about having a really clear idea of what you’re taking from yourself and what you have to find additionally… doing that with Max kind of knocked all the Stan out of me, to be honest.
Well, I hope we can bring some of the Stan back…
Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry. Max hasn’t knocked all the Stan out of Stan. Don’t worry. Stan is going to Stan.
My Lady Jane is available now on Amazon Prime. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is out now on Netflix.
Interview EJ Saftner
Photography Brennan Bucannan
Styling Freya Watson
Grooming Charlie Cullen
