Ashley Walters has noticed that, much as day slides into night, his greatest career triumphs are followed, often at alarming speed, by his most humbling derailments. He arrived in the early 2000s as a rapper, Asher D, with the 30-strong London garage collective So Solid Crew. He was a lead vocalist on their No 1 hit 21 Seconds, and they won a Brit award in 2002, a prize perhaps overshadowed by the altercation they had with the Irish boyband Westlife’s table on the way up to collect it. A month later, aged 19, Walters was convicted of possession of a converted air pistol loaded with live ammunition and sentenced to 18 months in a young offender institution.
Asher D returned not long afterwards as the electrifying actor Ashley Walters. He brought a powerful, lived intensity to his roles, especially in Top Boy, a drama about drug gangs in east London that is the closest British television has come to matching the detail and ambition of the landmark US drama The Wire. But then, in 2014, Channel 4 dropped the show after two series with no official explanation. Next, Walters teamed up with the actor-director Noel Clarke to make the buddy-cop action comedy Bulletproof. Its first episode in 2018 had a record audience for that year on Sky One, but after three successful series, that show, too, was cancelled after allegations of bullying and sexual harassment were made against Clarke by 20 women, as reported in the Guardian.
