{"id":402914,"date":"2026-04-21T05:42:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T05:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/402914\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T05:42:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T05:42:07","slug":"ive-had-white-knuckle-moments-michael-socha-on-this-is-england-his-patchy-beard-and-seedy-new-casino-thriller-the-cage-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/402914\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019ve had white knuckle moments\u2019: Michael Socha on This Is England, his patchy beard \u2013 and seedy new casino thriller The Cage | Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Socha is about to jump on a train to Wales. The impressively bushy beard he\u2019s got is for his role in The Witch House, a dramatic adaptation of an episode of the Danny Robins podcast Uncanny<\/a>, about a supposed haunting in the Brecon Beacons. He plays Bill Rich, who moves his family to a spooky old farmhouse where it all goes \u201chorribly wrong\u201d, Socha says. \u201cIn the photos he has a beard, and I thought, \u2018I\u2019ll match that.\u2019\u201d The actor strokes his chin and turns his head from side to side. It looks pretty substantial to me. \u201cYou say that, but see this bit? I\u2019m struggling. It\u2019s a bit patchy there. I\u2019m happy with this bit, but then this needs work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socha has just left a screening of his new BBC thriller The Cage, and he has the gentle bounce of a man who struggles to stay still. As with his beard, he finds it hard not to find flaws in what he\u2019s done. Normally, he admits, he tries to avoid watching himself on screen. \u201cI\u2019ll sort of nitpick away,\u201d he shrugs, but he had such a nice time making The Cage that he was looking forward to seeing it. \u201cBut the more you watch something, the more you find bits that you\u2019re not too happy with.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation mark\u2018I can walk on to any set and say, \u201cI\u2019ve got a BTec in\u00a0contemporary dance\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

In The Cage, however, such bits must be few and far between. Written by Tony Schumacher, who was responsible for the high-octane, bent-copper thriller The Responder<\/a>, it is set in and around a Liverpool casino. Socha plays the general manager, Matty, who has a cocktail of addictions that he feeds by skimming off the casino\u2019s takings and fiddling the books to cover it up.<\/p>\n

He is one of the few actors in it who kept his own accent. Al McKay, the director, had sent Socha the script and asked what he made of it. \u201cI thought, \u2018OK, this is incredible \u2013 what do I need to do to be in the show?\u2019\u201d He said, \u2018Can you do a Scouse accent?\u2019 I said, \u2018Probably badly.\u2019\u201d Socha came in for an audition regardless. \u201cAnd it was the best audition I\u2019ve ever had. I don\u2019t know if eventually Tony was brought around to the idea of a Derby person being in a Liverpool-set drama, but somehow I ended up on The Cage.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a dense, knotty thriller involving corrupt police, organised crime and complicated families, and like The Responder, it revels in putting the squeeze on its characters. Was it as stressful to play as it is to watch? \u201cI\u2019m being really honest, Rebecca, I found the whole thing fun,\u201d he says. The restless pace and raw energy of it suited him. \u201cYou never know where you are. I enjoy that you\u2019re not stuck in one place for too long, and by the time you run out of nooks and crannies to explore, you\u2019re out of there, doing something else somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sheridan Smith plays Matty\u2019s colleague, Leanne, and the two form a bit of a double act after Matty catches Leanne stealing from the safe, using the exact same methods as him. Like Smith, Socha has become a fixture of British telly, but they had never worked with each other before. They were good friends anyway, he says, and he was \u201cbuzzing\u201d that they finally got to do something together. \u201cIt was nothing but fun.\u201d He catches himself. \u201cI keep saying fun, don\u2019t I?\u201d<\/p>\n

He does \u2013 even though the shows and films he chooses often veer towards the darker side. In The Cage, Matty is a distant father to his teenage daughter, for reasons that become heartbreakingly clear later on. Socha has had a run of playing dreadful dads, in fact. He was the violent father in What It Feels Like for a Girl.<\/a> \u201cShit dad, yeah.\u201d Toxic Town<\/a>? \u201cShit dad.\u201d He laughs. \u201cFucking hell. Right. I\u2019m going to get on to my agent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Skimming the takings \u2026 Socha as Matty in The Cage. Photograph: BBC\/Element Pictures<\/p>\n

He has played a good one recently, he protests, in a film called 500 Miles, with Bill Nighy and Maisie Williams. He says that people have good days and they have bad days, and in his job, he gets to do it all. \u201cSometimes I get the opportunity to go and lose my shit and get paid for it \u2013 and no one judges me. In fact, it\u2019s applauded. It\u2019s sort of expected. That\u2019s my job, so I\u2019m very fortunate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socha, now 38, has been a professional actor for 20 years: he was 17 when he did This Is England<\/a>, playing the peroxide blond Bully in the film, later called Harvey in the spinoff series. \u201cWish you hadn\u2019t said that,\u201d he says. \u201cNice one. Thanks a lot.\u201d But, I say, you\u2019ve had 20 successful years. \u201cI\u2019ve had my ups and downs, though, do you know what I mean? There have been gaps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socha left school with no GCSEs or qualifications, but he had been part of the Television<\/a> Workshop in Nottingham, the free drama group for young people where Samantha Morton, Vicky McClure and Jack O\u2019Connell also started out. He managed to talk his way on to a performance studies course at college, even though he was supposed to have done a foundation first. \u201cI blagged it in the interview and they just sort of let me in. I think the Workshop helped. But you also had to do singing and dancing, and it weren\u2019t really my gig.\u201d Were you good at singing and dancing? \u201cAbsolutely not. When it comes to contemporary dance, it\u2019s not for me.\u201d But you\u2019re technically trained and qualified in it? \u201cMaybe I\u2019ve got the equivalent of an A-level in dancing,\u201d he jokes. \u201cI can walk on to any set and go, \u2018Did you know I have a BTec?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Paid the gas bill \u2026 Socha as Harvey, with Chanel Cresswell, Thomas Turgoose, Danielle Watson and Andrew Ellis, in This Is England \u201990. Photograph: Channel 4<\/p>\n

As career-starters go, This Is England was special. Socha slowly came to realise that acting for a living could be possible. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe people were able to pay mortgages and gas bills on the back of filming. I thought it was what everyone did for a hobby.\u201d He realised that, if he started to take it seriously, he might be able to do it himself. So that\u2019s what he did. \u201cThere have been some white knuckle, oh shit moments,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019ve been really lucky managing to maintain a career.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day before we speak, he was on The One Show, where the presenters asked him about a This Is England reunion. \u201cThey said, \u2018We heard a rumour last month that This Is England is coming back.\u2019 But I\u2019ve not heard such a rumour.\u201d This Is England rumours are a bit of a M\u00f6bius strip: this one probably comes from the TV series\u2019 co-writer Jack Thorne being asked the same question earlier this year. Thorne said then that it all depended on director Shane Meadows, with whom Socha also worked on 18th-century drama The Gallows Pole<\/a>. Socha says he\u2019d be on board. \u201cI\u2019ll circulate the rumour even more, if it will get us another one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socha is chatty and friendly, but ask him about his life outside of work and he firmly shuts things down. He has got kids. \u201cBut I just don\u2019t like to talk about it. I remember my eldest, especially, he didn\u2019t want me talking about him. So what I prefer to do, Rebecca, is just not talk about them.\u201d He will say that he lives in Derby, where he grew up, after a nomadic few years of working all over the place. I imagine there\u2019s a pub in the city with photos of him and Jack O\u2019Connell on the wall. \u201cYeah,\u201d he jokes. \u201cSaying, \u2018Don\u2019t let them in.\u2019\u201d But unlike Matty in The Cage, Socha\u2019s wilder days are far behind him. \u201cI don\u2019t really party. I just got to an age where it wasn\u2019t serving me any purpose, so I don\u2019t do it any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socha in Shane Meadows\u2019 The Gallows Pole. Photograph: Dean Rogers\/BBC\/Element Pictures Limited\/Objective Feedback LLC<\/p>\n

He does hike, though. \u201cI think, because we ran out of choices in lockdown, like everyone I jumped on the hiking bus.\u201d He got into some YouTubers and saw that one of them had walked the coast to coast path, from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood\u2019s Bay in Yorkshire. So he did it with his friend, for charity. After that they did a route on the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage across Europe. They walked 500 miles in 20 days, also for charity. \u201cIt\u2019s an amazing experience,\u201d he says. \u201cI strongly recommend doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that he has much time to walk at the moment. Next he\u2019s starring in Deadpoint, a Channel 4 thriller about the far right, set in Eryri national park. And after taking that train to Wales for The Witch House, he\u2019s off to Latvia to finish Young Stalin, a film about the murderous dictator\u2019s early years. He said it himself: he doesn\u2019t like to be stuck in one place for too long.<\/p>\n

The Cage begins on BBC One on 26 April<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Socha is about to jump on a train to Wales. The impressively bushy beard he\u2019s got is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-402914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}