Ashley Thomas AKA Bashy reveals biggest hope for Netflix drama Hostage and how acting came before rapping
The award-winning rapper returns to acting, his first passion.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
In Netflix's new thriller Hostage, Ashley Thomas plays Dr Alex Anderson, the husband of Prime Minister Abigail Dalton and a medic with Médecins sans Frontières who is taken hostage while working in French Guiana.
“I read War Doctor by David Nott [the lauded Welsh surgeon who has worked in disaster and war zones across the world] which sort of anchored my character. I also spoke to a doctor from Médecins sans Frontières, who had worked in Haiti. But they are also people with a regular life, and that helped me. At the bottom of it, Alex plays football, he goes to the pub and does what the rest of us do. It was about not getting drawn into acting like a doctor.”
Many viewers will know Thomas as the rapper Bashy. Tracks from his debut album Catch Me If You Can were nominated for a slew of awards, and his 2024 album Being Poor Is Expensive won him both the MOBO [Music of Black Origin] album of the year, and best hip-hop act. This year, his track How Black Men Lose their Smile was nominated for a Novello for best contemporary song, and he also played Glastonbury in June.
So, is he a rapper who acts on the side? Actually, it’s more the other way round. “I started out as an actor. My mum put me into acting workshops and then I trained as an actor at the Brit school. Acting was my first passion and music came later on.”
He thinks that the racial diversity represented by his on-screen marriage to Suranne Jones is par for the course, pointing to the fact that the Conservative party had two people of colour as leader, one of whom was prime minister. “Hostage is art reflecting real life. My hope is that viewers will be open about it and people will just enjoy the characters. That’s what I want people to talk about. The characters and the powerful performances.”
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