In the current season of writer/director Charlotte Regan, she continues to bring light to the inner worlds of her protagonists. After losing her own father and grandmother a few years ago, she was inspired her to write her debut film, Scrapper (2023), which follows a young girl avoiding foster care after her mother’s death, whose world is upended by the sudden arrival of her estranged father. Praised for its joyful and colourful take on the kitchen sink genre - and for the tenderness of its central father-daughter relationship (played by Lola Campbell and Harris Dickinson, shortly before his Babygirl rise) - Regan has reflected on the magical way in which children process loss, as well as her desire to see more working-class stories on screen: films that are, in her words, “happier”.
It was around this time that she directed a few episodes for The Buccaneers in Glasgow - or “Glasgowood” as it’s increasingly being dubbed - which has quietly established itself as a major UK film and TV hub, with a surge of productions hosted there in 2024 alone. It’s perhaps no surprise that a pull toward personal nostalgia (her grandmother was Scottish) combined with the fresh enthusiasm of Glasgow crews drew Regan back there, reunited with Scrapper producer Theo Barrowclough to film her debut BBC series, Mint.
Where Scrapper peeled back the perspective of a child’s imagination, Mint explores the more complicated lens of Shannon - played by Emma Laird (recently in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) - who is a feisty and naïve young woman raised within the volatile bubble of her crime family, while experiencing love and infatuation for the first time. Alongside a rich ensemble cast, including Sam Riley, Lindsay Duncan and Laura Fraser, Emma Laird delivers a performance that captures the fragile tension between girlhood and adulthood, and fantasy and truth.
In this conversation, I spoke with Charlotte Regan and Emma Laird about placing women at the heart of their crime story, the freedom of collaboration and play on set, and the delicate balance of seeing the world not as it is, but as you wish it could be.
Laura Stratford
House/Fearless Minds/BBC
What sparked Mint?
Charlotte Regan: I think I was always obsessed with, like, gangster films and shows, but always wondered, like, what the women were up to in them? I think a mixture of that and wondering, you know, the bloke who’s shooting everyone up, what is he up to at night? What are they chatting about in bed when they're tired, you know? It was all the stuff that I felt I was missing out on seeing, in a way… Couldn’t afford the shoot-outs, could we?
Emma Laird: They’re boring, though. You sort of need a little bit of that for storytelling, but too much can be quite overstimulating. What actually keeps an audience invested is all the shit that Charli wrote, all the stuff in between the shootouts - that’s my opinion. I was on a show for a long time with a lot of violence - it can get boring. Family life and heart is what people wanna see.
CR: … But we would do James Bond if someone asked us to.
EL: Yes! We would do James Bond, haha.
CR: Not to say we’re anti that, for example…
When did this project first come onto your radar?
EL: I don’t remember when, but I took it because I wanted to work with Charli. She’s a legend. I watched an interview of Charli when she was promoting Scrapper, before I went in to meet her and audition, and I just, like, bowled my eyes out. This process hasn’t felt like I was doing a job. It felt like I was making something with a bunch of people in Scotland and we were making it together, and that’s all down to Charli and the crew she puts together.. Anyone who works with Charli, I imagine, will know what I’m getting at. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had on set.
CR: I think the Scottish crew change it as well, don’t they. There's like a bit of magic to the Scottish crew. The industry there is still growing - they have Outlander and Buccaneers and things like that, but there's a lot of people on the set who haven't done loads and that’s super exciting.
EL: I was really scared to come in and do a Glaswegian accent in front of them, because I thought, oh god, are they going to be offended that I’m coming into Scotland and doing a Scottish role amongst all these Scottish people, but it wasn’t like that at all. They were all just super game to be there. We had a football on set and we were just laughing all of the time.
What inspired you to set this story in Glasgow?
CR: It was partly the experience I've had… I filmed a show there called The Buccaneers, and I honestly just really fell in love with the crew and the atmosphere there. So, I wanted to do it with those people. I also grew up with my nan, who's Scottish, and so I used to go to Scotland for the summer holidays and it felt like a world that I knew, you know? Not as well as I know London, but one that I could learn more about. So yeah, a mixture of the crew, wanting to hear my nan’s accent everywhere, you know? Just an exercise in grief, isn’t it? All of it.
EL: You know what, it was the same thing for me - my grandad was Glaswegian. It was so nice to hear that accent on set because you don’t really hear it in London.
CR: Yeah, it’s comforting isn’t it? I love the Glaswegian accent.
House/Fearless Minds/BBC/Anne Binckebanck
Mint does feel like a love letter to Glasgow - it’s shot beautifully and it does feel incredibly nostalgic. What was it like to bring your stylistic flair to this TV series?
CR: I always justify the stylistic stuff by saying I like things that are seen from the perspective of the lead character. So to me, like, the show is Shannon's retelling of these events - I guess that's just how I write and how I view things. The music is Shannon's playlist. Even the way in which she sees the men fight is heightened, because of her slightly childlike view on what they're up to. So I guess everything comes from the perspective of the character. Theo - our producer - is a very artistic, arthouse cinema man, takes me to the Curzon on Fridays and we’ll be watching different things as he’s very well versed in films. We’ll sit and talk about references and I’ll be like, hey what about the new Waitrose commercial or look at this TikTok I saw someone made, so sick man. We collide somewhere in the middle. There’s an immediacy to that stuff, right? There’s a reason why - as well as our shit attention spans - that we’re obsessed with Instagram footage of someone talking about their day because it’s so immediate, because there isn’t a gloss to it. So I guess that’s what I love about the home video element of the show and what that does to the story.
EL: The response to Mint so far and the questions that I've had about it are about the sort of surprise that it is, and it was a surprise to me as well. I didn't really know what Charli was doing. I didn't know that it was going to be through Shannon's lens. I didn't know we were going to be doing all the jazzy bits in the studio and then shooting on this little camera and then doing a scene without dialogue. I didn't quite realise Charli’s vision until I saw it, because everything was done in post, really. I'm so blown away by the show.
Were there any moments in the script that changed dramatically once you got to set?
EL: Charli rewrites the script and adapts it as she goes along, so the scripts change quite a bit but I think the character of Shannon, and the essence of Shannon has always stayed the same. It was fascinating to play a young, naive girl who’s grown up in a bubble of protection. It made me think of my younger self and my later teenage years at school, not necessarily who I was at school, but the girls I was friends with and the girls I sort of wanted to be, you know? Shannon’s lens was very clear to me and I think I just could put myself in that position and make decisions through that, from her girly-like ways to the youthful costumes that she wears. As much as we call Shannon a princess, I think it’s a really beautiful trait that she has this positive outlook and hope. What do you think?
CR: Like what you said, Shannon’s always been that anchor throughout every draft. I just love the idea of Shannon and her brother Luke (played by Lewis Gribben) in this weird world where they’ve been, like, locked up and not allowed to have a lot of experiences that other teenagers or young adults have, but then in another way, they’re so used to violence - nothing you should be exposed to at that age. It’s such a mad kind of contradiction; and I love how Emma plays Shannon with this sense that she’s so sure of herself, when really she shouldn’t be.
Let’s talk about that fight scene… What was it like to shoot it?
CR: Absolute nightmare.
EL: All the men?
CR: Honestly, I dislike nothing more than - am I allowed to say this? Filming with a group of thirty lads…
EL: The first location we filmed at was the house. We shot there for the first three weeks or something and we did a lot of night shoots because there’s a party scene outside and… Our green room, the actor's green room, was one of the rooms upstairs, which was full of men, and there was a point where I was like, “Get me out of here!”. Lindsay Duncan and Laura Fraser, who play my nan and mum, weren’t there yet, neither was Ben - Loyle Carner, musician-turned-actor, who plays Shannon’s love interest, Arran - and so it was just like all those men at 3am they’d be talking about tools or something. It was a lot.
CR: A lot of chatting on that day that we filmed the fight scene, as well. I knew how I wanted it to look, and then we just worked backwards from there. We couldn't afford the stunt work to have them actually clash, so we had to figure out how to make it look like a fight without it being violent. Again, if we did James Bond, we’d be happy to do that.
EL: We’re up for stunts. We love a stunt.
CR: So it was like a painting, lots of still movements. We filmed a lot on a phantom camera, which is like super slo mo. It's almost like a still image.
EL: That massive one.
CR: Yeah. It took ages because we had to really over-light it. It was a lot of just picking frames and still images and working with our stunt guy, Lloyd, to get that stunt image moment - slo mo saved us with the fighting.
How are you feeling, Charli? It’s your debut TV series. What was the learning experience, or what was different about making this?
CR: The people working on it, and to be fair, the BBC, who were great because they said “we're going to let you do it and trust you”. Also, the process of making it felt very film-like…?
EL: Yes!
CR: I've done other people's TV shows and that's kind of - it can be a bit different; the script system is different and stuff like that. Whereas with this, it felt the same as making a film. Plus we were working with Theo, who was my producer on Scrapper, so he helped create that same environment. No dickheads.
EL: Not a single dickhead, which can be rare.
CR: You know, out of 120 people, you’re usually gonna get 5, those are my stats.
EL: But we had all the scripts. For TV, normally, you’d shoot two episodes and then you don't know what you’re doing in three and four. TV is a bit of a nightmare to shoot, really. This wasn’t that. We made a film.
CR: Again, different in the edit - phwaor it really drags on, you know? Sometimes it felt like we were doing Lord of the Rings extended edition and I was like, god, we’re still in the edit are we? But other than that, it did feel exactly the same as making a film, strangely.
House/Fearless Minds/BBC/Anne Binckebanck
Emma, was there a particular scene you enjoyed shooting with Charli?
EL: My memory’s shit. I don’t remember the scenes. I’m really bad because when I wrap, I just forget everything.
CR: I liked all the two handers with you and Ben.
EL: I loved the stuff with Ben.
CR: They were, like, both of our favorite days on set was when it was just the three of us. A small crew. More intimate.
EL: I felt guilty when we previewed Mint at Berlinale, because we had Sam Riley - who I love - and the rest of the cast there and I’m like, I LOVE BEN. I genuinely love the cast so much, but Ben is so pure, so special. He made it really fun. If you're in a bad mood around Ben then there’s something wrong with you because he's just a light, pure joy. So yeah, the scenes with just the three of us - that was very special, and just like, chill.
CR: It was a nice process… We’d always sit down and look at the script and say which bits do we need? Which bits do we not need? And we were all very open to that. No one was, like, alarmed, by the thought of change on the day.
EL: Ben likes to talk stuff through. He was dead invested and asking loads of questions. I remember we were trying to figure out the mirror scene in rehearsals and it was just such a fun process of working on it together. The great thing about Charli’s set is that you felt that you had time to talk things through and explore and try stuff. That was really valuable.
What do you want people to take away from Mint?
CR: That Emma and Charli should do Bond… Or a reboot of Twilight. When people are ready for it…
EL: I think you’d be so good at remaking Twilight. When I was watching episode one of Mint, it reminded me of Twilight… That feeling I get when I watch those films, that’s what I hope Mint feels like to teenage girls. What do you want audiences to take away from this, Charli?
CR: I don’t really think about that. Scrapper was different - it had a lot to do with working class children, and wanting to see themselves in a film. There’s lots going on in Mint and I love that it’s about the women in this crime family… Mint is trying to be entertaining, so I hope people don’t think it’s shit.
Mint arrives 20 April on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.