Keep your eye on David Jonsson. The 32-year-old actor has built up a steady momentum, transmuting his brief stint on HBO’s finance drama Industry, one of the UK’s most productive talent factories, into a wide array of big-screen roles: a winsome romcom lead in Rye Lane (2023), a stammering synthetic in Alien: Romulus (2024), and a tortured idealist in the Stephen King adaptationThe Long Walk (2025). It’s already an impressive CV, yet it feels like Jonsson is on the precipice of something major. If you see him in Wasteman, you’ll understand why.
Cal McMau’s debut takes the well-worn path of prison dramas, focusing on a violent feud waged between cell block bunkbeds. But there’s enough of a noxious stink in the air – the sense that all the system does is create a microcosm of the state, with even less power to scrap over – that Jonsson has the material he needs to fully mesmerise. He finds poetry within the brutality, his eyebrows turned upward like hands in prayer, his sentences all half-swallowed by his own tongue. He can act as nervous as a mouse, but the resilience is always there; the survivor’s drive.
