A Chester actor has received a rave review for a BAFTA nominated film, in which he stars.
Tom Hughes, a former Upton High School student, plays Chaz Jankel in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the biopic of punk rocker Ian Dury. Jankel was lead guitarist for Dury’s band The Blockheads and his co-writer. Dury contracted polio at a young age and defied expectations to becoming one of the leading lights of the punk era.
Film industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter says Jankel is ‘portrayed winningly by Hughes’, whose parents Roy and Sue live in Gladstone Road.
Andy Serkis, as Ian Dury, has been nominated in the Leading Actor category of this year’s BAFTAs and the film, directed by Mat Whitecross, is also nominated in the Music category.
Tom was a member of Cheshire Youth Theatre and Chester’s Jigsaw Music Theatre Company and studied at London’s RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).
He also played in Chester band Safehouse.
He played Dr Harry Ingrams in the BBC drama Casualty 1909 and has landed one of the lead roles in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s film Cemetery Junction. The film, a comedy set in the 1970s, is released in April and centres on three upstart professional men working at an insurance company.
Tom is currently in rehearsal at London’s Young Vic Theatre for Arthur Schnitzler’s Sweet Nothings.
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is currently showing at the Vue cinema at Cheshire Oaks.
