Craig Russell is a busy man. His acting, producing and writing work has taken him all over the globe for the last three decades, and even when he's at home in Cornwall he's not one to put his feet up. Whether the 45-year-old is chasing after his two boys or lifting weights in the gym, he's always on the go.
But in February 2023 he was forced to slow town. To be precise, a brain tumour made him slow down. A tumour that doctors have told him could have been growing in his head for 15 years with Craig - who is originally from Cwmtwrch in the Swansea valley - none the wiser.
It was weeks of pounding headaches and bizarre moments of memory loss - like forgetting how to get out of his own spare room - that eventually led Craig to see his GP. Within weeks he was having emergency brain surgery.
And it appears that even in the moments when life forces him to slow down, Craig has other plans. For example, it is less than two months after his serious surgery in March and one of his biggest projects to date has been released - playing Marc Antony in Netflix's docuseries Queen Cleopatra, produced by Jada Pinkett Smith.
According to Craig, when growing up in Cwmtwrch acting was never on his radar. But when you consider that he alongside fellow actors Richard Corgan and Steven Meo all hail from the tiny village, and all similar ages, with Torchwood's Eve Myles just a stone's throw away in Ystradgynlais, it almost seems inevitable.
While over the years he's had parts in shows such as Pitching In among many more including Hollyoaks and Doctors, like most young Welsh children he discovered his love for acting through being forced to take part in his school Eisteddfod, in this case at Ysgol Maesydderwen.
"I wasn’t into it at all," he jokes when we speak on the phone, still recovering from that morning's work out. Pretty impressive considering his life was in the balance on the operating table eight weeks earlier. "When I was young, the only person I knew who did anything like that was Richard (Cogan, The Pembrokeshire Murders). I never had any interest whatsoever.
"But as you know in the Eisteddfod you have to do something so Steve came up to me one day and said ‘I need you to do this thing with me’. I really wasn’t into it but then the teacher said we'd get loads of time off class so I said ‘yep I’ll do it’. So me and Steve dressed up as Russ Abbot's version of Pavarotti and wrote our own comedy basically."
That year the school had hired a drama teacher named Hazel Williams and she was the one who encouraged the pair to audition for the National Youth Theatre of Wales. Hazel would also be instrumental in getting Craig his first acting gig in London some years later. Both Craig and Steve attended the theatre school before moving to London in the 1990s, a period of his life which Craig described as "brilliant".
"Steve and I lived together for almost 10 years in London, and Rich lived there a large chunk of that. Eve (Myles) even stayed with us when she had work in London. So we've always sort of been together. And Eve’s husband Brad is one of our best mates as well. It was a brilliant time.
"My father still lived in London. So I was going up to London anyway regularly as a kid to see him. And so London to me was no mystery, but then living with my friends in London was just the best. It was brilliant. And we lived along the street from Richard Ellis, who, at the time was in EastEnders, he played the first Welsh character in EastEnders.
"Thanks to Rich we were going off like VIPs with backstage passes to Stereophonics gigs and Manic Street Preachers gigs. And that was just insane. Just chatting normally with people you've been seeing on the telly all your life. It was just the most bizarre time. And then you'd go back to Cwmtwrch 'and they'd say 'what have you been up to?' And you just didn't know where to start."
Despite all the excitement of the big smoke, Craig said he was always more than happy to come back to 'Cwm. "Cwmtwrch is still the best. London was awesome but nothing compares to Cwm." He lives in Cornwall now with his wife Kate Edney who is also an actor.
"I came down to Cornwall in 2005 to do a play. We met then, and we've been together ever since. And when we had our first child we moved back to Cornwall. And we've since had another one. Obviously we've stayed here because it's just wonderful. It's brilliant. It's very much like Wales as well."
Aged 20 in London it was his school teacher Hazel who helped him secure his first work as her husband was a director and she recommended him for a part in his latest show 'Sorted'. "That was my first bit of telly. That was in the November, I moved up in October that was in November.
"And then I did a play that Harold Pinter produced, and that opened a lot more doors. That sort of then set me up really." It was around this time that Craig started to take more of an interest in writing and working behind the camera rather than in front of it. "I realised quite early on, that I wasn't totally enamoured with acting and so I started learning loads about the industry.
"I mean, I love it very much, but for me, it's not the be-all and end-all you know, it's just something I think I fell into because my friends were doing it.
"I was in my early 20s [when] I realised that it wasn't the acting I was drawn to, it was the people that did it, and when that clicked, it all became a lot easier. It was the energy of it, you know, when like-minded people get in a room to create something or talk about something, whether that's rugby or music or what, it's that feeling of having a group of like-minded people."
It was around the mid-2000s when Craig started taking his own material more seriously. He developed a character called Dave Granger which he describes as a "Bear Grylls parody" which he decided to turn into a web series. "This was back in 2009 and back then there weren't many people doing that sort of thing. I never expected anything to come of it but then lots of people started watching it. We started getting nominated for awards, here and in America, things like that. It was really a mental time because it was still sort of unknown.
"I remember we put one episode up and within a week 22,000 people had watched it, which today is not really much. But back then it was a lot." Now, in complete juxtaposition to those early internet days, Craig is starring in a new show on what is undoubtedly the world's largest streaming platform.
But while 2023 has undoubtedly been a career-high, it has also been the year his health took a major knock. In January he visited his GP after weeks of struggling with headaches and other symptoms, a month later he was given the devastating news, and a month after that he was in the operating theatre.
"With the tumour, it was my wife who first started noticing I think. Kate has just been the best, she's the best anyway, but she's been the most incredible support. That's why all of this has been so easy compared to what it could have been because she's just been wonderful and she knew there was something not quite right.
"I was different, and I started to notice it. I think it was November, I went into the spare room to put something away, and I couldn't remember how to get out of the spare room. And then, a couple of weeks after that, I was driving one of the kids back from a children's party and on one of the last roundabouts before our house, that I've been going around now for eight years, and I took the wrong turn. My son had to direct us home.
"And then I started getting these headaches at the back of my head every morning waking up with a very specific headache." Craig said that when he went to the GP he was told that he'd slowly started going blind in his left eye and he would need a brain scan.
"That's when it started unravelling. I saw my GP at the end of January, I had the CT scan in the middle of February, I had the MRI scan a couple of days later. And then I just got a phone call out of the blue and it was for a surgeon PA who basically told me then and there it was a brain tumour. By March 6 I was having it out."
Craig said the doctors explained the urgency was because the tumour was so big that it had essentially run out of room in his head and would soon start putting pressure on his skull, causing him to have seizures and strokes. Unbelievably they also told him that its size indicated it has likely been growing for around 15 years.
"The only reason I started getting the symptoms when I did was because it had run out of room. I started to go blind, my hair started to go and it was basically slowly shutting down that side of my brain. I've got to praise the NHS and my wife because at no point ever did I feel scared. At no point did I ever feel like I wasn't in the best hands.
"Obviously he explained that they would have to take the back of my skull off so there was a chance I could die, lose my sight completely, have a stroke and all of those things. That was a bit sobering. But again, because of the support I was getting from my wife, all my family, all my friends, I never ever felt danger, I always knew I would beat it. And I wasn't going to have it any other way."
Ahead of the operation some of Craig's friends set up a gofundme fundraiser and dozens of fellow actors and friends left well wishers on social media, you can read about that here.
While Craig has always enjoyed keeping fit and had an interest in sport, it ended up being this fitness regime that saved him from needing a second operation. He said that initially his brain wasn't recovering as well as surgeons had hoped but he was sent home with the instruction to "move as much as you can" for a week while doctors assessed whether it was necessary.
"So I started walking about 10 miles a day and then I started lifting weights again. They sent me home for 10 days and if the brain swelling hadn't gone down in this time I would need another op so I thought 'right that's it' so I started training again, walking again doing the gentleness of jobs, and bit by bit the swelling just started coming down and coming down. And it's finally gone.
"I mean, my vision is not back to normal yet, I can't drive yet, in my head I still get these weird sort of shooting pains where basically the new bit of skull is sort of connecting with my actual skull and that part of it is uncomfortable at times.
"The back of my head does look like Frankenstein's monster. It is the least of my worries. But it's bizarre because in the last 15 years I've done so many other jobs. I've done leads and dramas and soaps. I've done films and commercials all over the world. And all the while, this thing has been growing away in the back of my head. I am just so lucky. Very lucky indeed. I am just unbelievably grateful to everyone who has supported me."
Now on the road to recovery, Craig is soon to be back working on his series of children's books that he writes with Caryl Parry Jones and remembering what the last ones were about. "When I came out of the hospital I couldn't remember a single thing about the books and had no recollection of the stories I'd written," joked Craig.
He is also soon to get back in the producing chair for his second feature called 'Protein' which stars actors such as Charlie Dale, Richard Elis, Steven Meo, Kezia Burrows, Richard Mylan, Kai Owen and Claire Cage. It’s due to hit the festival circuit this summer.
But above all else Craig is just grateful to still be here and says he owes it all to the NHS. "I want to get across how unbelievably grateful I am to everyone who has supported me, especially my superhuman wife Kate who made the journey easier than I ever thought it would be, and our remarkable NHS. We are nothing without our health service and I owe them so much."
Queen Cleopatra premiers on Netflix on May 10.
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