12 Jul 2024
The first time I saw up-and-coming St Albans actor Asha Banks performing publicly was at a late-night Christmas market, when she was belting out ‘Let It Go’ on repeat outside Christopher Place.
“That’s so funny,” she says when I remind her. “It was Martin [Robinson] from the Fighting Cocks on the guitar. He literally taught me how to play guitar. I find it so funny now, I feel like it sounds like I’m lying when I say I learned to play guitar in my local pub.”
Flash forwards more years than I care to imagine, and the 20-year-old Asha is now starring in the must-see new BBC mystery series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, adapted from the book by Holly Jackson.
It focuses on the efforts by teen sleuth Pip Fitz-Amobi [played by Emma Myers] to uncover the truth behind the murder of a local schoolgirl five years ago, with Asha playing her best friend Cara Ward.
In the days since the show dropped on iPlayer last week, Asha has been caught up in a whirlwind of publicity events and interviews.
“It’s been kind of crazy. I haven’t done this type of thing before but it’s been really exciting and so cool. It’s so much fun but it’s also a bit overwhelming.”
So do her parents keep her grounded? “Absolutely. It’s really nice to have my family and all my friends around me. I feel very normal when I’m at home and in St Albans, so it’s nice.
“Inevitably, at some point, I’ll probably move out, but for now, it’s easy to live in St Albans because it’s so quick into London and it’s lovely to live at home and have that support all the time.”
She spent three months in the West Country filming the series last year. “I was up and down from St Albans but it was amazing.
“It was filmed around Bristol and Bath and we did some bits in Axbridge and a couple of bits in Cheddar. The locations were so beautiful.”
Asha was born in St Albans in 2003, attending The Abbey Primary School and Parmiter’s in Garston, showing a talent for drama from an early age which led her to sign up with the acclaimed Top Hat Stage School in St Albans.
“I did the school shows in primary school and played the lead in the Nativity in Year 2 and stuff like that, which was the beginning of it all probably. But Top Hat is where I properly started doing acting outside of school. I took drama at GCSE when I went to Parmiter’s and did it a lot there as well.”
Although she had minor roles in EastEnders and Call the Midwife, her big break came when she was cast as the young Éponine in Les Misérables at the Queen’s Theatre in 2012.
“That was my first ever professional production when I was seven. I turned eight during rehearsals for Les Mis, which was crazy.
“It was my first professional audition as well. I remember I got the audition whilst I was at the Abbey School and me, my mum and my grandma all went up to London and I did this audition and I didn’t expect anything from it. Obviously I was just excited to have a day off school. But it ended up kind of going somewhere and I ended up doing the show, which was amazing.”
It was a role which changed her life, as she followed up with further performances in 1984, Annie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (as Violet Beauregarde), and then Pandora Braithwaite in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ and Lisa James in The Boy in the Dress.
“I think back to like how I balanced school and theatre and I can’t actually quite remember how I did it. I mean, I must have gone up to London and done the show three times a week maybe, and then come back to St Albans and gone to school during the day. The only days I missed school were ones where we had matinees, where I had a show in the middle of the day, but apart from that, I was in school every day.”
With her every step of the way has been mum Sophie, better known locally as one half of PR firm Loudbird, who would accompany her to dozens of auditions and performances over the following few years.
“I’m so lucky and blessed to be able to have had a family that have been able to accommodate everything I’ve needed through the years, because it’s very full on, especially with theatre, because as a child, you have to have your parent there a lot of the time.
“My mum had to take me up to London every single time I had a rehearsal, every single time I had a show or an audition, and I’m very lucky that she was able to do that.
“I know that a lot of my friends who that are acting as adults would have loved to have acted as kids, but they just couldn’t because their families weren’t able to be as flexible as mine.”
Having made her mark as a child actor, she inevitably found herself having to make the jump into older roles, something many youngsters fail to achieve. Was this difficult?
“Yeah it’s definitely a transition. I feel like I probably started doing film and TV more at that transition point, so that’s kind of where it changed for me, but I think I’ve been very lucky in the parts that have come up.
“I’d been doing theatre up until I was about 18 when I did Spring Awakening which was kind of my crossover. That was my first role as an adult where I didn’t have two other people playing the part, so it was the first time I was playing a role and it was only mine.
“I was on every single night, eight shows a week, the whole thing. But I was cast in that when I was 16 and I was meant to do that during COVID year, but then it got pushed to afterwards.
“It ended up that in the meantime, I did my first film. The Magic Flute was the perfect kind of crossover because I had to sing in it. That immediately kind of gives me a bit of a leg up, I guess, because a lot of actors don’t sing and because I’ve been doing theatre my whole life, that was something that I felt comfortable with.”
The Magic Flute (2022) was a musical fantasy film based on Mozart’s opera of the same name, and featured Iwan Rheon, best known as Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones, as Papageno, with Asha taking the role of Princess Pamina of the Night.
“Iwan was there on my first day filming. I remember not knowing anything that was going on and being very out of my depth and he took my arm and led me through it. I just think, what a wonderful, wonderful person I had there to help me, I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that.”
The production involved a lot of green screen work for its VFX, but Asha feels her theatre background helped here: “I guess theatre doesn’t feel very real because you’re performing in front of an audience, so it was similar in that it didn’t feel like a real world. It did feel like we were on a stage almost because the whole exterior of the studio was green screen.
“My last day filming for Magic Flute, I was on wires, I was flying and pretending I was swimming, it was crazy.”
The other major challenge was that the production took place during the pandemic: Mum and I went out to Germany during lockdown, when we arrived we had to isolate for 10 days, and then everybody from the film was in a bubble.
“Munich was all closed down, there were no pubs or restaurants open, so the cast all became really close because we just spent time in each other’s hotel rooms instead of going out, which was quite nice.”
When not working, Asha has been working on a sideline as a singer-songwriter, as if she didn’t have enough strings to her bow!
“I’d wanted to do music since I was little but didn’t really know how and didn’t have any connections into the music world so I just used to sit in my room, play my guitar and write songs.
“But I’ve now got a wonderful manager who has guided me and I’m doing music sessions all the time when I’m not acting which is really nice. Between jobs you’re just auditioning and hoping for the next one, so it’s nice to be able to do music because it feels quite proactive. I’m able to take myself to sessions and do it myself rather than wait for a job or an audition to come up, it’s just so much fun.”
Her first proper TV role was Rebel Cheer Squad, a BBC teen thriller series which was itself a spin-off from the show Get Even, both set in the fictitious Bannerman School and exploring the twists and turns of teenage life.
“I only played quite a small part in it, but I’m still really close to all the people who were in it. Get Even was very dark and a bit more adult, and I think with Rebel Cheer Squad, the BBC wanted to make it a little bit younger and bring in early teen audiences.”
The show provided Asha with a gateway into television which ultimately led to A Good Girl’s Guide, where similarly to The Magic Flute, she has become close friends with her fellow cast members.
“We were in Bristol for a lot of the time, none of us lived there so we were all in a hotel together, which meant we spent all day, every day together for three months. We’d finish filming, go out to dinner and hang out with each other in our hotel rooms, so we really did start to mirror our characters and that friendship group became very real.
“I always find it wild because obviously the casting team’s job is to cast us as a believable friendship group. But then you walk in the room and it’s like someone’s given you five new friends they know are compatible with you.”
Author Holly Jackson was another major presence during filming: “Holly was there all the time, really. She kind of felt like another cast member. She would come to set and she’s got a cameo in one of the episodes.
“She’s really cool. She’s really young and wrote these characters as a friendship group. She really fits into that friendship group because it’s all her humour that she’s written in the book. And I feel very similar to her. I asked her which character do you think you would be? And she was, ‘Yeah, Cara’, who is my character. I thought, that makes sense, we feel like the same person.”
With the show having only just been released, there’s no news on whether there will be any further series, but Asha is hopeful: “There are three books and obviously the dream is to make all of them, but it depends how well it does I guess.”
The initial reaction and reviews has been overwhelmingly positive, which must come as a huge relief? “Yeah, it’s so exciting. I was very nervous because it’s the first thing that I’ve done that already has a big fan base who love the characters and love the story so much.
“From the day it was announced I was in the show, so many people were actively talking about it online. Then people would come and find the sets that we were filming on and ask us to sign the books, which made the whole experience really surreal.
“I hadn’t read the books before I had the audition but I’d heard about them and I’d seen the book cover everywhere and I had such a cool response to my casting. I would tell my friends and some would say
‘Oh I’ve heard of that!’ and then I’d tell others who would be ‘That’s my favourite book ever, oh my gosh!’ started reading them as soon as I got cast and they’re all amazing. They’re just phenomenal.”
Although Asha’s past productions have featured the likes of F Murray Abraham and Greg Wise, she missed the opportunity of appearing with them, so having both Anna Maxwell Martin and Matthew Baynton in A Good Girl’s Guide was an opportunity to work with and learn from some more experienced actors.
“I did a couple of scenes with Anna Maxwell Martin in the show, but she plays Pip’s mum, whereas Matthew Baynton was my dad, so I was in a lot of scenes with him.
“He was wonderful to work with, and I think for my generation he is best known for Horrible Histories, especially his Horrible Histories rap. I told my brother he was in it and he immediately started rapping!
“He was so amazing to work with, they all were.
“I think just watching people who are really experienced – and I’d say the same about Emma [Myers] who plays Pip – their courtesy on set is so wonderful, and the respect they have for the crew and everybody is really amazing to watch, and something I definitely took onto my next job.
“I felt even the way they tailor their acting depending on the shot and what they know that the crew needs was something I hadn’t really thought about before and was really educational.
“It felt like I was learning every day on set, even about how you make a TV show.”
Following on from A Good Girl’s Guide, Asha is starring in Amazon Prime’s My Fault: London, an English language adaptation of the Spanish romantic drama My Fault which was based on the novel ‘Culpa mía’ by Mercedes Ron.
It is a huge deal for her, as she plays the lead, Noah: “That was very, very exciting. It’s my first lead and like the whole film is from my character’s perspective, so a bit more weight to carry on my shoulders, I guess.
“I did have a dialect coach who was amazing, and I had a few sessions with her where we kind of just went through the scripts and phonetically wrote out some words that were a bit harder for me to say.”
The production includes her first love scenes, a big deal for any actor: “I had to warn my mum about that one! But it was great, we had an amazing intimacy coordinator on set the whole time [Adelaide Waldrop] who felt like a third director and made the whole process so much easier. The male lead, Matthew Broome, we’re so close and we get on, which is very lucky, and he’s so respectful.
“So we were super comfortable and everybody cares a lot about it now, which is amazing. I mean, I still can’t believe that even 10 years ago, intimacy coordinators didn’t exist in film and TV, you just had to knuckle up and do it, which is crazy. Luckily everything is in place now, and it just feels like an extension of the part and another scene that you’re filming.
“But even the content of the film is more adult than I’m used to. I mean, it’s got a thriller aspect to it, it’s a bit more actiony, which was so fun to do. I’m a race car driver, which is amazing. And I drove a McLaren whilst I was filming, so that was wild.”
Filming took place in Tenerife and London earlier this year, and it is currently being edited for release, although no date has been confirmed.
With no current work to focus on, what are her future plans? “I’m sat here hoping and praying for season two of Good Girl’s, so hopefully that comes around.
“Also My Fault has three books, so that could be three films as well. But I’m just doing lots of music at the moment, which is really nice so I just fill my time in with that, and hopefully we’ll start releasing music soon.”
Would she say music was her first love then? “I think as a kid, I just loved singing so much. But you can’t do music as a kid, you can’t take it seriously like an artist does, so kind of the route was musical theatre and maybe I realised the singing was what I realised and then the acting came at a very short distance after that.”
Returning to her acting, are there any roles or genres she would like to explore further? “Good Girl’s is kind of on the same line, but I really love like psychological thrillers. I love watching them and I think I’d like to play an evil character because it’s something that I haven’t really done.
“All the characters I’ve played feel quite similar to myself, which is lovely because it’s easier to do as obviously they’re rooted in myself, but I’d love to challenge myself and do something a bit scary maybe.”
All episodes of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder are available to watch on BBC iPlayer now and on Netflix from August 1.
