An upcoming New York screenwriter and Netflix actor’s creative journey began on stage in Angus, dressed as a Christmas pudding.
Brooklyn-based Harry Aspinwall, who lived near Edzell for a large part of his childhood, appears in the Netflix action adventure The Sleepover, which is released on Friday.
His career began treading the boards at Edzell Primary School, near the Burn estate where his mother Virginia Calderwood Aspinwall still lives.
He said: “One play that really sticks out in my head was a Christmas play. We were doing a holiday thing that had a bunch of different shows in it.
“They were getting suggestions from the kids. I was probably eight at this point and the suggestion I came up with was ‘Attack of the Christmas Puddings from Jupiter’.
“When I think back on it, that is very indicative of me as kid and me as an adult. I remember my mum making this huge great cardboard Christmas pudding that I could hold in front of me and move around the stage. I wish I could remember more about the plot.”
It was the perfect preparation for his role as Baxter, a comedy villain in the upcoming Netflix film.
It is less fitting for his other main project, Banishment, a 90-minute horror film hailed by the industry press as one of the first made during the coronavirus lockdown.
Harry and the other film makers created their own safe production protocols before official industry guidance was introduced to manage the risk.
“In March when everything started going really crazy, we took a break from the city and bubbled in a cabin in upstate New York. We started tossing around ideas and tried to work out what we could make safely under those conditions.
“We wanted to write about these issues, not knowing where your information is coming from, who you can trust, feeling that the rules of the world that you are living in are changing so rapidly.”
Harry and his team filmed in a cabin close in Lake Placid, New York.
The small team is now raising money to finish the film and hoping the completed feature will appear on an international streaming service.
He said acting and writing in the US was not the glamorous life it may appear.
“A lot of the process is really disheartening. You grind like crazy and seem to be getting nowhere. There are a lot of moments when I wish I had gone into computer science and got a regular pay check.
“But the moments where it pays off are really fantastic. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
