A teen boy, all blonde curls and bravado, jumps into a late-night cab. “Has anybody ever fucked in here?” he smirks drunkenly to its 50 something driver, silver-haired and skittish. “Have you?”
Minutes later, his question is answered. On the backseat of the taxi, parked along a dark and wooded drive, the two entwine – all filmed on the vehicle’s dashcam. Lines of consent blur, muddied by the gap in their age. Lives risk ruin.
“It’s important we have ,” says director Dylan Brady, referencing the popular coming-of-age Netflix romance. “But it’s also important we have the antithesis of .” , Brady’s behind-the-camera debut, is just that: 14 minutes of thriller, filmed entirely on dashcam and born from his own experiences growing up, which he says don’t map onto a clean ready-for-TV arc.
“I had no intentions of writing or filmmaking growing up”
Twenty-nine-years-old and brimming with charisma, Brady is already a cinematic triple threat. He has played searing love interests in cult hits like Mikko Mäkelä’s film – a knotty descent into the life of a writer moonlighting as a sex worker – and the BBC’s Two Weeks in August, a sort of British spin on HBO’s .
In 2023, he was chosen by BFI Flare to take part in a screenwriting mentorship under All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh. His protean script for an episodic erotic thriller, set to star Nicole Kidman, was subsequently picked up by A24 after a six-way auctioning war. Its winning bid is estimated in the seven figures.
“I had no intentions of writing or filmmaking growing up,” Brady says between sips of ginger-and-lemon tea at Soho’s Bar Italia (“I come here a lot”). Aged 18, he left his hometown of Derby – “conservative, working-class, very small… a nothing place” – to study acting at Manchester School of Theatre. Since then, he has “never looked back”.
As a kid, Brady had enjoyed doing the school plays and GCSE drama classes. But TV was his first real love. “I watched all the soaps with my mum. We’d be watching and I remember when Sarah [a stalker character] stabbed [fan-favourite] Martin. I was like, ‘how’d she do that?’ I was absolutely fucking fascinated.”
“I was a terrorist in school. Awful. I was loud, rash and I knew I would move away”
In his teens, Brady admits he was a lot like the gobby passenger in , which is set around Derby. “I was a terrorist in school. Awful. I was loud, rash and I knew I would move away. That gave me a superpower. It gave me the currency of an identity bigger than the nest.” He stops to laugh: “I hope that doesn’t make me sound pompous.”
During those “terrorist” years, Brady hooked up with a stranger he met online, lying to him about his age. “I was 15. A few weeks later, I saw him while I was wearing my school uniform. I can remember the look on his face.” It was this moment that would eventually spark . “I always wondered what that did to him.”
Brady explains that, with the film, he wanted to complicate clean-cut narratives of right and wrong, especially when discussing the realities, sometimes complicated, of queer youth. “It’s really easy to say an older man is a predator, but I don’t know if that’s my truth. I wanted to ask: Does age always equal power? Are you always more powerful than someone who’s knowingly deceiving you, who has the currency of queer identity when you don’t?”.
“I’m an actor, I’m a writer, I’m a director and I’ll be even more. I see no need to limit myself”
revels in these sticky ambiguities. Without a classical education in film, Brady self-imposed a queer cinematic curriculum that pushed against ‘good gay’ tropes while writing: Gregg Araki’s seminal , or 2017’s , about a tortured teenage fuckboy unable to reconcile himself with his sexuality. “Moral complexity is a privilege straight characters are afforded all the time,” he explains, but it’s rarer in queer films. “We can’t censor the full range of our experiences.”
Legendary director made a similar point late last year, when he gave a speech at the BAFTA Cymru Awards warning that, as homophobia rises, commissioners might cower from projects with complicated LGBTQ+ characters. Already, Brady has felt this first-hand. After a series of rejections, the director decided to pay for entirely from his own pocket. “Nobody wanted to fund it,” he shrugs.
A second film, upcoming, has managed to win over backers. It’s presumably tamer than , though Brady is reluctant to concede details (“it’s work-in-progress”). He also has more acting roles on their way and, of course, the Nicole Kidman project, which is keeping him busy. It’s an ambitious juggling act, Brady concedes, but it’s one he has no intention of stopping. “I’m an actor, I’m a writer, I’m a director and I’ll be even more. I see no need to limit myself.” Like his characters, it seems, Brady prefers complexity.