Five Rising Writers to Watch For in 2023
This Deadline feature is now in its third season and aims to highlight the work of some of the most exciting British writers.
These diverse individuals may be different, but they share one thing: They made their mark 2022. There is much more to come.
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They will soon be able to boast credits on major projects including the Ewan McGregor series A Gentleman In Moscow Apple TV+ drama Criminal RecordMany are aspiring to be showrunners.
For a complete list of Rising Writers, scroll on.
Jack Rooke had been on the radar of TV executives for years, but it wasn’t until 2022 that he made good on the promise so many saw.
His hilarious comedy series Big Boys landed fully formed on Channel 4 last summer, tenderly depicting the early university days of a gay teenager who is wrestling with grief and his best friend’s depression.
Rouchcut TV, which is behind the success story of Bafta, produced this video Stath Lets Flats, Big Boys It received rave reviews and was included in newspaper lists listing the top shows of the year.
It was only when Big Boys Featured on Celebrity Gogglebox, Channel 4’s popular TV-watching format, that Rooke felt like he had been truly embraced. “It was a really euphoric moment,” the 29-year-old recalls.
It took six years to accomplish this. Big Boys Rooke viewed this as a blessing in disguise, considering it a chance to achieve overnight success. He claims it enabled him to create a more complex world with a larger cast of characters.
“What I love about writing is thinking up insane things that can come out of characters’ mouths,” he says. “I’m into [writing] wonderful people that embody life and all of the moral questions and quandaries that we’re all trying to figure out.”
Rooke is in the thick of penning a second season, a process he describes as both “cathartic” and “self-sabotaging”. There are discussions about exporting Big Boys America, but not yet any concrete news.
Rooke spent time in a writers’ room this year, a process he loathed. He is too discrete to name the show, but explains: “You see how much influence you have and then you can get left completely uncredited … it was a bitter pill to swallow.”
Rooke can be found performing (he filmed an independent feature this summer that he isn’t able to reveal), a radio storyteller, or a sometime-documentary maker (he studied journalism in university).
“I measure [my career] horizontally rather than vertically,” he says. “It’s great if you’re on the up but — like all the writers, creatives and comedians I love — it’s about doing as many different things as possible.”
Curtis Brown represents Rooke.
“Everything is deeply personal,” Nessah Muthy says of her work. “It’s cheaper than paying for therapy.”
If writing is an antidote, it’s working. As we chat over Zoom, the 34-year old is full of energy and passion as she pours her passion into the screen.
Muthy recently completed the writing of episodes for A Gentleman In MoscowParamount+’s historical drama “The Showtime” starring Ewan MacGregor is available on Showtime and Paramount+. The Winter KingThe Bernard Cornwell adaptation, ITVX.
She’s also juggling a regular job on Coronation Street (she’s scripted 22 episodes of the ITV soap and counting) and a slate of her own projects. These will be covered in more detail later.
Muthy was inspired to write after being taught drama by her drama teacher. She went on to become a Royal Court usher and then began writing. TV was on the horizon in 2020 after her trial, which took place just days before UK Covid lockdown began, was won. Coronation Street This became a more permanent position.
“My Mum is from Morden [London] My Dad is from Mauritius. I was brought up as white, for want of a better phrase, but I have very brown skin, so there’s an inherent duality in who I am. That means that I am always shapeshifting and experimenting,” she says.
“Everything is a fight, but I’m just so determined … being in a room where you’re the only person of colour, you’re the only person who’s from a working-class background, you just have a slightly different understanding of the world.”
After experiencing creativity with it, her goal is to be a showrunner. Cradled, her half-hour story about modern-day motherhood for Channel 4’s The Edge anthology series.
She’s now animatedly developing two of her own series, one of which is with her Cradled BlackLight, a Banijay-backed production firm, has many collaborators.
Her autobiographical comedy-drama, set in the noughties, centers on a mixed-race teenager who is accused by her white crush of conspiring to kill Osama bin Laden. Channel 4 has requested a treatment.
The second project is in with The Forge, which made Jodie Comer’s BAFTA-winning drama Help. It tells the story about a mixed-race architect who is shocked when her husband, a police officer, murders a black victim while on patrol.
Muthy has also teamed up with Story Films in order to create a four-part drama series for Channel 5, the broadcaster that Paramount owns. Story was the producer of critically acclaimed Witness number three Channel 5 in 2022
“I look for something political and then put it within a personal frame,” she says. “I hack my way in and find the human connection. I’m also a bit of a geek … so I will bolster that with massive amounts of research.”
Independent Talent reps Muthy.
If you’re familiar with the guy-tapping-head meme, you will have encountered the work of Tyrell Williams.
The ubiquitous gif is from Williams’ #HoodDocumentary, a 2015 YouTube mockumentary following a hapless “hood celeb” equipped with a “triple threat” of singing, acting and musical talent.
Kayode Ewumi’s performance as Roll Safe may be preserved in the amber of internet history, but it’s the details in Williams’ script that helped create a character watched by millions. Details like Roll Safe, who is always shirtless, reaching for a jacket in his otherwise empty clothes closet. It’s a joke that becomes funnier with repeat viewing.
Williams says he’s been in love with storytelling since he was a child and #HoodDocumentary He was his ticket into the entertainment industry. Fudge Park Productions, a company owned by The Inbetweeners Damon Beesley and Iain Morris were the creators. Williams is still involved with Fudge park today.
Theatre is his “first love” and the setting for the second act of his career. His Bush Theatre stage show Red Pitch The story tells the story about three football-mad teenagers who come to terms with the gentrification of their neighborhood. It has won numerous awards, including Williams winning the Evening Standard Theatre Awards’ most promising playwright prize.
“It’s about friendship in the face of regeneration,” he says. “What I like to do in my work is create an argument, create debates and allow all sides to be heard. I leave it to the audience to make decisions.”
Williams is currently working closely with Fudge park to adapt. Red Pitch For television and other projects. He has also written an episode for an unnamed Apple TV+ drama. He has been working with DC Moore, the playwright, on a project.
Williams is repped by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates.
Deadline’s previous run-downs of rising British writers have all featured the top-voted script from the Brit List. This year is no different.
Enter Issy Knels, the 27 year-old model and actress who wrote Model Behaviour#MeToo comedy drama set in the fashion world. Her still-to-be-picked up project received 17 recommendations, which puts it two ahead its closest competitor.
Knowles wrote Model Behaviour From a place of anger. She was ready to participate in a TV documentary about harassment in fashion when the film was “ominously” shelved. Although she was not a victim, she knew of others who were and wanted to tell their stories. So she began to write.
In its initial iteration Model Behaviour It was staged. Knowles took it to Edinburgh in 2018, at which point she says it “grew legs and started leading its own life”. Since February, she has been working on it with Carnival Films (producer of Downton Abbey).
“I compare it to Greek mythology,” she explains. “You meet a character at the beginning of what’s going to be a really difficult journey. There’s a part of the character that maybe knows that, but human hope, belief and innocence carry her towards quite a dark ending.”
Knowles performed the show at Edinburgh, where it was inevitable that comparisons would be made. FleabagPhoebe Waller Bridge’s one-woman show, titled.
Fleabag Knowles believes Waller-Bridge is a huge inspiration. She recalls the moment she ran into Waller-Bridge while riding on a London tube train. “I felt represented for the first time because my life is equally embarrassing, if not more embarrassing,” she laughs.
There is no fourth wall. Model BehaviourKnowles claims it does have tonal similarities to Fleabag. I may destroy youAnother reference point is the, which came from Michaela Coel’s pen.
An unnamed supermodel has contacted Knowles since Knowles was named on the Brit List. Carnival plans to bring the show to market next month. Knowles is currently working as a writer on an American body-horror series. A pilot she wrote for a television program was also hers. Black Mirror-style dystopian drama.
“I kept finding the main character of Model Behaviour poking up in different stories, so the plan is to stretch myself,” she says.
Curtis Brown reps Knowles.
Thomas Eccleshare bagged his first major television credit with Channel 5’s Witness Number Three Last year.
The drama, depicting a single mother (Nina Toussaint-White) who becomes the victim of witness intimidation, evoked the sensation of “fear piling up in layers”, according to one critic.
He was attracted to the suspenseful thriller again. Witness number three Story Films: His Bush Theatre production Heather. Eccleshare started his career in theatre. He co-founded the company Dancing Brick and is passionate about it.
Eccleshare is being pulled towards the latter at the moment. He just wrote an episode of Criminal Record An Apple TV+ crime drama featuring Peter Capaldi & Cush Jumbo is coming soon.
Capaldi, the former, is also his collaborator Doctor Who Sky’s comedy-drama pilot stars the star. Originally in the BBC’s Comedy-Drama Pilot, this show is an adaptation. He looks so normal!, Sarah Naish’s memoir about adopting five children. Eccleshare’s version is titled They’ll Fuck You Up and is housed at Tod Productions, run by Vera producer Elaine Collins. Capaldi directs.
“Sarah’s voice is extremely funny, honest and caustic,” he says. “She’s sort of like the best mother in the world and the worst mother in the world. She will leave her kids on the side of the motorway to make their own way home but also fully support them through their quite extreme difficulties.”
Eccleshare is working with Sky on a second project: A buddy cop drama in Rush Hour style about the Shomrim, a north London Jewish neighborhood watch group. It is located at Monumental Television. Harlots Produced by Alison Owen & Debra Hayward.
Eccleshare delivers the pitch: “An ultra-orthodox Hasidic member of the Shomrim teams up with an energetic and ambitious young Black feminist cop from the Met. They both go rogue against their communities to make this extremely odd couple fighting crime in a heightened Hackney.”
So where does the 38-year-old want to be in five years’ time? “I’d like to have one or two series under my belt, but I’d take more of the same,” he laughs. “Being paid to do this is good.”
Independent Talent in the UK and 3Arts USA rep Eccleshare.
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