Pride Context

Founding LGSM members working with Stephen Beresford, Matthew Warchus and the Cast

All the cast thought the story was very important as the current generation and generation before probably wouldn’t know the story, in fact, most of the cast didn’t. It has been so pushed back that history forgot it and turned it into an old wives tale.

Some of the cast were lucky enough to meet their character and use them as a basis for how they performed and built up a backstory to create the most realistic and true person. Jessica Gunning was able to spend bountiful amounts of time with Siân James and Joseph Gilgan could converse with Mark – the two being very active and supportive towards the film, wanting to get the story out and having confidence in the film’s potential for greatness. Mike said that he thought the film would be a “phenomenal global success”. Mike himself was a very valuable resource when it came to research and fact checking.

Other actors that couldn’t talk to their characters or just wanted to do some more research before or during filming read tabloids and photocopies of newspapers and reports at the time. Andrew Scott recalls the media calling the LGBTQ+ community the “Slime of Society”.

Some actors could take artistic liberty with their characters. Faye Marsay only met Steph after filming had wrapped. She was from the south and had corn rows whereas Faye kept her northern accent and changed the hair completely to bright colours and shaved sides.

The way that the writer Stephen Beresford came across the story was through a video on YouTube of LGSM documenting the events. He then went about finding and contacting everyone in the video that he could, asking if they’d be up for the idea of making it into a movie.

The director, Matthew Warchus, had a theatre background and so was able to block the actors and had most shots with everyone on screen instead of lots of close ups. This was because there were usually about 15 people in the scene at all times. He didn’t want to “generalise or stereotype” the LGBTQ+ community and tell the story well.