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Mint, the new drama from Charlotte Regan, is so simple in concept it’s almost hard to make sense of. It’s a story of impossible love, between two people whose families are bitter crime rivals, so their romance simply cannot be. This is absolutely, brazenly Romeo and Juliet, the oldest love story in the world. How it comes to feel so original, so magnetic, is mystifying. The dialogue is so spare, the look of the piece so unalloyed, there’s nothing sweet about it.
It reminded Emma Laird, who plays Shannon – the female half of the couple – of Twilight. The supernatural series was, she says: “the first romantic story that I attached to. It felt like Mint could be what Twilight was for me, when I was growing up, romantic and beautiful and naive and cinematic, a whole world made of those things. It’s so much more than the story of Shannon, it’s so much bigger than the characters.” It reminded me a bit of Heathers, but not for any reason it doesn’t look like the film, it’s funny – but in a different way – and it doesn’t end the same. But it just reminds you of the first romantic thing you ever saw, the first time you understood what romance was.
Shannon is the daughter of a Scottish crime family; luminous and exquisite, strong-minded, ostensibly carefree, but with an edge of undefined yearning. “Put the crime aside,” Regan says, “and she could be a famous footballer’s kid – sheltered form the world.” Benjamin Coyle-Larner, better known by his hip-hop stage name Loyle Carner, makes his acting debut as Arran, the prodigal son of a different crime family, returning from London, where he grew up in a complicated gangster exile. Their eyes meet across the tracks of a down-at-heel train station, Shannon in fake fur and satin, Arran in street wear, the pair of them as incompatible as they are irresistible to one another.
“Arran and Shannon don’t recognise each other,” Coyle-Larner says. “Girls like that don’t exist where I grew up. Guys like Arran don’t exist where she grew up. It’s like looking at an animal from a different part of the world. Not so much love at first sight, more like interest at first sight. ‘Wow, what’s this? I need to find out more about this.’”
Charlotte Regan, who goes by Charlie, won the Grand Jury prize for World Cinematic Dramatic Competition at Sundance three years ago for Scrapper, her debut as director auteur, about a 12-year old girl reuniting with her father, following the death of her mother. That film “was about class, about a working-class upbringing. Mint is less so,” she says. “But I’m always drawn to working-class characters, and I love them being in worlds that I’ve not seen them in before, or shown in ways I’ve not seen before.”
Before Scrapper, Regan had been directing music videos since she was 15 years old – no-budget and low-budget to start with. By the time she was directing for names such as Mumford and Sons and Stereophonics, she was making some of the most surreally moving music videos you’ll have seen (her video for rapper Wretch 32, His and Hers, features two actors giving such sparse, basically mime performances, that the lyrics plunge into the psyche like an epic poem), and the form remains her obsession, “the way they tell visual stories before film or TV does. I love romances or dramas where I feel what the character is feeling, and a lot of that is visual storytelling. If Shannon’s swept away, I want to see that – I don’t just want to be told that in dialogue.”
The drama is a swirl of visual effects, flashbacks told in Super 8 fragments. Whenever Shannon sees Arran, sparks erupt all around him, which sounds so cheesy but is in fact completely tear-jerking. “I did a project not long before Mint, where we shot on Hi8, the VHSy-looking camera, and it was such a different way to experience something,” Regan says. “I almost felt as if I was watching my own home footage. It broke down that barrier of knowing you’re watching film or TV. We always knew that would be in the language. Also, bloody money-saving, innit? It’s cheap, the old VHS camera – it looks good no matter how you shoot it. It looks cinematic.”
Laird, 27, startedout as a model, which she did for seven years, though her acting CV is long enough now that that hinterland seems a long time ago. She was in 28 Years Later, The Brutalist, and her debut TV role was in Mayor of Kingstown for Paramount+. She paraphrases her entire career to date, half-joking, as: “I’m just hiding behind all these men, God love them. I got three jobs in and my agent would go: ‘This is something you should be in the mix for.’ And it’d be: ‘Glen Powell’s girlfriend’, ‘this person’s partner’, ‘the love interest’. I’m glad I started my career like that – I learned a lot on the job, I’m glad I eased into it. But what’s the character there?”
Coyle-Larner, meanwhile, has had an entire career in music, nominated for three Brit awards and the Mercury prize nearly 10 years ago, when he was 22. He went to the Brit School in Croydon and always wanted to act. “I saw myself maybe being in plays or writing plays,” he says, “but life happened.” He was at the Drama Centre in London when his stepfather died suddenly in 2014. “I had to make some money, made some music, was cool,” he says. “I’ve been open to acting for the best part of a decade, and everything that got sent to me was just a stereotype. It was someone who looked like me, but didn’t reflect the complexity of a human being, of a young man. Everything was expecting me to be somebody who sold drugs, or was a deadbeat father. When I read the early version of the script from Charlie, it was emotional in a way, to see her see that someone who looked like me could be reflected in this way – with nuance, to be delicate and vulnerable, emotionally strong at times and weak at others, and not be built for this tough-guy life.”
So much of the action happens on Laird and Coyle-Larner’s faces. A close up of Shannon, lying in a park, smoking weed, lingers on her face so that you feel as if you’re reading her mind. “In doing American TV, they put a face filter on you and you’re this perfect being. It’s all: ‘Oh, blemish? We’ll fix that in post.’ What was difficult for me, and my vanity, was seeing my spots, and my lines, and my pores. I get acne. But I’m so glad she kept that in. I think it’s a huge part of the show that we’re seeing this real young woman.”
“There were always more words in the script,” Coyle-Larner says, “and then me, Charlie and Emma would sit together on the day, and say: ‘Which bit is actually needed and which bit is for fun?’ Charlie would always say: ‘If you could say it with your eyes, that would be better.’ So there was a lot of pressure on my eyes.”
In a deft piece of casting, Laura Fraser – the brittle crime boss from Breaking Bad – plays Cat, Shannon’s mother, and Lindsay Duncan plays Ollie, her grandmother, and all three share something physically – a coltish fragility with a steely interior, told at different ages. “I was obsessed with that relationship between Laura and Lindsay in particular, the similar yet different experiences they’ve had in their marriages,” says Regan. “They’ve had to devote their lives to their men and now they have this daughter, granddaughter, and they’re hoping she can have more but they don’t know how to navigate a world in which she does have more.”
Mint is the product of the ultimate ensemble, Regan says; part of the reason she set it in Scotland was to shoot it in Scotland, because there was a gaffer and a grip she’d worked with there (on The Buccaneers). “I felt I couldn’t do the project without them,” she says. “Everyone in the crew, all of us, would sit and talk about our experience of being in love and that influenced what it became – it made it more complicated than ‘there’s someone. I love them’.”
I wonder if it’s not complicated so much as profound; and maybe love is profound, but if it were that easy to make the audience feel it with you, well, it would happen a lot more often. “The reason I love my job,” Laird says, “is that I get to experience whatever emotion I’m experiencing in the scene, and I can feel it with no shame. It’s not to say that when I go home, I’m ashamed of the way I feel, but there is a level of concealing for other people. I love that I get to feel all this stuff at work. Maybe I should get a therapist.”
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All episodes of Mint are on BBC iPlayer from Monday 20th April, with the series airing on BBC One from 9pm that night.
