Michael Socha is about to jump on a train to Wales. The impressively bushy beard he’s got is for his role in The Witch Farm, a dramatic adaptation of an episode of the Danny Robins podcast Uncanny, 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 “horribly wrong”, Socha says. “In the photos he has a beard, and I thought, ‘I’ll match that.’” The actor strokes his chin and turns his head from side to side. It looks pretty substantial to me. “You say that, but see this bit? I’m struggling. It’s a bit patchy there. I’m happy with this bit, but then this needs work.”
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’s done. Normally, he admits, he tries to avoid watching himself on screen. “I’ll sort of nitpick away,” he shrugs, but he had such a nice time making The Cage that he was looking forward to seeing it. “But the more you watch something, the more you find bits that you’re not too happy with.”
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, 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’s takings and fiddling the books to cover it up.
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. “I thought, ‘OK, this is incredible – what do I need to do to be in the show?’” He said, ‘Can you do a Scouse accent?’ I said, ‘Probably badly.’” Socha came in for an audition regardless. “And it was the best audition I’ve ever had. I don’t 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.”
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? “I’m being really honest, Rebecca, I found the whole thing fun,” he says. The restless pace and raw energy of it suited him. “You never know where you are. I enjoy that you’re not stuck in one place for too long, and by the time you run out of nooks and crannies to explore, you’re out of there, doing something else somewhere else.”
Sheridan Smith plays Matty’s 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 “buzzing” that they finally got to do something together. “It was nothing but fun.” He catches himself. “I keep saying fun, don’t I?”
He does – 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. “Shit dad, yeah.” Toxic Town? “Shit dad.” He laughs. “Fucking hell. Right. I’m going to get on to my agent.”
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. “Sometimes I get the opportunity to go and lose my shit and get paid for it – and no one judges me. In fact, it’s applauded. It’s sort of expected. That’s my job, so I’m very fortunate.”
Socha, now 38, has been a professional actor for 20 years: he was 17 when he did This Is England, playing the peroxide blond Bully in the film, later called Harvey in the spinoff series. “Wish you hadn’t said that,” he says. “Nice one. Thanks a lot.” But, I say, you’ve had 20 successful years. “I’ve had my ups and downs, though, do you know what I mean? There have been gaps.”
Socha left school with no GCSEs or qualifications, but he had been part of the Television Workshop in Nottingham, the free drama group for young people where Samantha Morton, Vicky McClure and Jack O’Connell 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. “I 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’t really my gig.” Were you good at singing and dancing? “Absolutely not. When it comes to contemporary dance, it’s not for me.” But you’re technically trained and qualified in it? “Maybe I’ve got the equivalent of an A-level in dancing,” he jokes. “I can walk on to any set and go, ‘Did you know I have a BTec?’”
As career-starters go, This Is England was special. Socha slowly came to realise that acting for a living could be possible. “I couldn’t 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.” He realised that, if he started to take it seriously, he might be able to do it himself. So that’s what he did. “There have been some white knuckle, oh shit moments,” he says. “But I’ve been really lucky managing to maintain a career.”
The day before we speak, he was on The One Show, where the presenters asked him about a This Is England reunion. “They said, ‘We heard a rumour last month that This Is England is coming back.’ But I’ve not heard such a rumour.” This Is England rumours are a bit of a Möbius strip: this one probably comes from the TV series’ 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. Socha says he’d be on board. “I’ll circulate the rumour even more, if it will get us another one.”
Socha is chatty and friendly, but ask him about his life outside of work and he firmly shuts things down. He has got kids. “But I just don’t like to talk about it. I remember my eldest, especially, he didn’t want me talking about him. So what I prefer to do, Rebecca, is just not talk about them.” 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’s a pub in the city with photos of him and Jack O’Connell on the wall. “Yeah,” he jokes. “Saying, ‘Don’t let them in.’” But unlike Matty in The Cage, Socha’s wilder days are far behind him. “I don’t really party. I just got to an age where it wasn’t serving me any purpose, so I don’t do it any more.”
He does hike, though. “I think, because we ran out of choices in lockdown, like everyone I jumped on the hiking bus.” 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’s 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. “It’s an amazing experience,” he says. “I strongly recommend doing it.”
Not that he has much time to walk at the moment. Next he’s 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 Farm, he’s off to Latvia to finish Young Stalin, a film about the murderous dictator’s early years. He said it himself: he doesn’t like to be stuck in one place for too long.
• The Cage begins on BBC One on 26 April
• The name of the Danny Robins podcast being adapted for TV is The Witch Farm, not The Witch House as an earlier version said.
