28 Years Later’s Alfie Williams: ‘You don’t want to make a fool of yourself in front of Ralph Fiennes’

The nonsense laws of adolescent film stardom meant that 14-year-old Alfie Williams could be exposed to all kinds of bloody, fleshy zombie splatter on the set of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, but not actually see 28 Years Later in cinemas. He learnt this the hard way. Picture yourself in his mortified shoes: you’ve just made your movie debut in one of the most highly anticipated sequels of 2025, you’ve dragged your mates to the Odeon to show off your work, only to be told it’s rated 15 and you can’t get in without an ID.

“I pulled out my phone and started pointing at this photo, like… ‘This is me and Danny Boyle and one of the infected – please let us in’,” Williams recalls. “They were like, ‘that’s cool, but we still need your ID’.” Williams’s face grows crestfallen. “We had to see F1 instead.”

As if that wasn’t enough of an indignity, six months on and the 28 Years Later sequel – Nia DaCosta’s gnarly yet blackly funny The Bone Temple – has been certified an 18 by the BBFC. Bastards. Williams has seen the movie at a private screening already, but his friends back home in Newcastle are out of luck. “I know the cinema workers there are just doing their job, but…” He sighs.

I meet Williams, his publicist, and his chaperone (his dad) as they hop off a train at London’s King Cross. Since the release of 28 Years Later, life for Williams has been a lot of geographic back and forth between his base in Gateshead and the capital – he’s in town to wrap filming of a horror movie, Banquet, alongside The White Lotus’s Meghann Fahy, and to gear up for another round of movie promotion. He’s more relaxed than he was the first time, he tells me.

“I didn’t feel the pressure when I was filming, because you just can’t make a fool out of yourself in front of Ralph Fiennes,” he grins. “But I definitely did before it came out. I was really worried people were gonna be like, ‘oh, this kid sucks’. But I think people liked my performance, so that was nice to hear.”

For as much as you can be for a budding teenage movie star, Williams is blessedly ordinary – he has the lanky T-shirt-and-jeans scrappiness of, well, me or you when we were 14. And there’s none of that eerie poise of some of his American child star counterparts, which is a bit of a relief. I have no evidence of this, but that normalcy has got to be Danny Boyle’s doing, surely? The filmmaker auditioned all over Newcastle and the North East to find someone to play Spike, a brave 12-year-old born on the safer edges of a zombie apocalypse, and found in Williams a young performer with real grit and pluck, and a lovely lack of actorly affect.

Before he was cast, Williams had only taken a few drama classes. But he did, thanks to his actor dad, have an agent already. He read four times for Boyle, with the very last audition seeing him act out the most heart-wrenching scene in the first film, in which Spike mourns his terminally ill mother (Jodie Comer), who chooses to die peacefully at the hands of a kindly doctor (Ralph Fiennes) rather than face cancer and a zombie hoard.

“That was the scene I spent most of my time preparing for,” he recalls. “On the set, I had to walk off to be by myself for a bit. I have this picture of my granddad that I carry with me. I don’t want people to feel pity for me or anything, but I would just sit there looking at this picture because he passed away like two years before we filmed. So in those moments, it wasn’t Jodie that I was seeing but my grandad. And that really helped. I think he would have been proud of us.”

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One of the great surprises of 28 Years Later was how unabashedly emotional it was, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland smuggling a story of grief and family into a post-apocalyptic horror movie. The Bone Temple, still written by Garland but now with Candyman’s Nia DaCosta taking the reins, leans a little more into the pure violence of it all (see again: that 18 certificate). Brains are torn apart, skin is stripped back, innards are sent flying. “It’s so gory but so awesome,” Williams laughs. “If I’m being honest, I just loved all the make-up and prosthetics.” Spike is more of an observer than an active participant in the film’s events this time around, and Williams relished it. “I’m wearing a mask in the film a lot, which was great because I was just watching this really cool gore and smiling the whole time.”

The sequel finds Spike absorbed into a cult of pseudo-Jimmy Saville impersonators led by a maniacal Jack O’Connell, who crosses paths once more with Fiennes’s character. O’Connell would play guitar for the cast during downtime, Williams remembers, while Fiennes would be just as gentle off-camera as his character is on. “He’s such a lovely scene partner,” Williams says. “He also shakes hands for a really long time, like he takes your hand and then waits until he finishes his sentence to let go.” Thespians!

When I meet Williams, a third 28 Years Later is yet to be officially confirmed by Sony (it’s announced a day later), but he tells me he’s keen for it, if only to finally work with the franchise’s original star, Cillian Murphy, who is set to return. They’ve never actually met, he says, and when Murphy casually, innocuously, unimportantly dropped by the Bone Temple set – no spoilers! – they were like two ships passing in the night.

“Because I’m not 18, I can only be on set for a certain amount of time,” Williams says. “So as soon as I wrapped I had to be rushed off. If we’d finished this scene literally 10 minutes earlier, I could have met him.” God, child labour laws ruin everything, don’t they?

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Until filming begins on the new film, though, Williams has his sights set on a different kind of artistic output: putting a band together. He’s gotten into Weezer and System of a Down over the last year, and rinsed the entire Nirvana back catalogue. “I’ve listened to every one of their albums, and their demo tapes,” he boasts. “I’ve even gone into Kurt Cobain’s solo stuff, like tapes from when he was a teenager.” I recommend Seattle’s lesser known grunge band Tad, in a desperate attempt to seem cool, but he’s got there already. “Ahh, I like them a lot.”

“I’m the only one of my friends that likes alternative music,” he continues. “I think we need to bring rock back. I’m just gonna put up some flyers looking for people who want to make some guitar music, you know? Put ‘em on telephone poles and stuff.”

As we say our goodbyes, Williams’s publicist – overhearing our Nineties rock chat – drops a bombshell: he used to do PR for all the big names from that time, from Korn to Soundgarden to Rage Against the Machine. Williams can’t quite contain his excitement. “Wow, did you do Alice in Chains?” he beams.

He’s a good ‘un, I think.

‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ is in cinemas