Top Boy, the British crime drama about two Black drug dealers living in a housing project in East London, is one of Netflix’s biggest hits. But its white creator, Ronan Bennett, has remained enigmatic.
Bennett was raised by a single mother in Belfast during the Troubles—the sectarian warfare between Catholics and Protestants—in the 1970s. In 1974, when he was only 18, Bennett, a Catholic, was wrongly convicted of murder and imprisoned in the Long Kesh prison, known colloquially as “the Maze,” where leading I.R.A. activist Bobby Sands died of a hunger strike.
Eighteen months later, conviction overturned, he was arrested again, this time in London after a raid. The police found wigs, false mustaches, and The Anarchist Cookbook in his Bayswater apartment.
After successfully defending himself against charges of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown,” he was freed once more, but only after spending 20 months in Brixton Prison, a lot of it in solitary confinement.
Bennett flinches at the idea of dredging up that period of his life—it was half a century ago, when he was a very angry young man, he explains—but he allows that his early experiences remain one of the major influences on his work.
“What stays when the details fade are the feelings,” he says from his vacation home, in Cádiz, Spain. “Almost everything I’ve ever written is from the point of view of the socially marginalized, the criminal.”
After leaving prison, Bennett earned a doctorate in law and enforcement in 17th-century England. After immersing himself in political activism, at one point working for the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, he discovered his passion for writing. An acclaimed novelist and screenwriter, his first major success was The Catastrophist, his 1997 novel set in the Congo. It earned him comparisons to Graham Greene, and he was soon writing screenplays for television and films, including Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.
Bennett was inspired to write Top Boy after seeing a young child dealing drugs in the parking garage of his local supermarket in the Hackney neighborhood of London, where he has been primarily based for the past 30 years. The show was dropped in 2013, after just two seasons. But it was resuscitated a few years later by Drake, the Canadian musician and producer who is a fan of grime, a genre of British rap music from the early aughts. He lobbied Netflix to recommission it.
He may be a white man writing about Black experience, but accusations of cultural appropriation have been rare: the show has been widely embraced by the Black community, and the storylines have been hewn out of many of his own experiences. Bennett’s great skill is to make alien landscapes relatable while creating a forensic exploration of how communities, particularly marginalized ones, stick together. “That was the takeaway [of the Maze],” he says in his gentle Belfast accent. “The notion of solidarity.”
If incarceration is one major influence on his writing, the others are parenthood and bereavement. His late wife, the Guardian journalist Georgina Henry, died of cancer in 2014 while he was writing Top Boy, and he became a single parent to their children, Molly and Finn.
Close watchers of Top Boy will note the park bench that the orphaned character of Stefan seeks out when he wants to commune with his elder brother, who was murdered. It’s the same bench in Victoria Park where Bennett and his children, who are now adults, celebrate Georgina’s birthday.
The fifth season, which is available to stream on Netflix, is its final one, but Bennett’s latest novel, promisingly entitled Jaq: A Top Boy Story, is being released on January 30, and it should provide some consolation. It’s written from the point of view of the show’s surly, pigtailed female lead, and provides a deeper dive into the final season.
Bennett will soon finish production on Day of the Jackal, his television reimagining of the 1973 film. Starring Eddie Redmayne, it will be broadcast on Peacock at the end of the year. “Yeah, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,” he chuckles. Next up: a script he wrote last year for Disney, and an intriguing pilot in development he describes as “the Palestinian version of Fauda.” Sounds like we’ll be spending even more time on the sofa.
Christa D’Souza is a London-based writer who contributes to The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and The Sunday Times
