Waiting for the Out’s Josh Finan: ‘It’s about prisoners using their brains, not their fists’

Sometimes I can’t get through a sentence without hearing myself and being like, you f***ing tit,” says the actor Josh Finan, who is still getting used to saying actor-type things like “what the work involves” and “the body doesn’t know it’s pretending”. He laughs over a video call from his home in east London, “I’m cringing at myself.”

To be fair to Finan, he’s still relatively new to all this. So far, his career has mostly been made up of small parts in big things: a doomed drug dealer in Black Mirror, an aspiring comedian in Baby Reindeer, and a money man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in Netflix’s The Gentlemen. In 2023, Finan nabbed a Bafta nod for his subtle turn as chaos magnet Marco in BBC drama The Responder. Last year, he earned more acclaim for his baleful performance in Say Nothing as former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. The credits are racking up, and now he is set to lead the BBC’s latest primetime drama – a surefire sign of Finan’s rising star.

Waiting for the Out is a lightly fictionalised adaptation of a memoir by Andy West: Life on the Inside. Like the book, the show follows a philosophy teacher as he starts a new job at a prison. Also, like the book, it chronicles the ways – both good and bad – that his experience in prison and the men he meets there upend his life on the outside, already marked by his own obsessive compulsions. But there are key differences. For example, the teacher played by Finan in the show is called Dan, not Andy – a decision made by writer and executive producer Dennis Kelly (Pulling; Utopia) after he began tweaking elements of West’s story.

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But the narrative drive remains the same and so to prepare for the role, Finan accompanied West to one of his lessons at a local prison. Things didn’t go as planned. For one thing, everyone was on their best behaviour. “I remember Andy was annoyed,” says Finan, laughing. “Not actually but he was huffing and puffing, ‘God that class was so well behaved – sometimes it can get mental!’” But that quietude speaks volumes, and it makes its way into Waiting for the Out, where prison life moves mostly at a snail’s pace. Everything is set to a simmer approaching boil.

Melodramatics or not, that class taught Finan something invaluable. “Seeing the way Andy works and the way that he is really good at his job,” he says. “He doesn’t try to soften or harden who he is in that environment, because they’d f***ing smell it a mile off if he was trying to be one of them.” It’s part of why Dan comes to be an effective teacher to these men – eventually. Nervous about coming face to face with his new students, Dan goes to a Foot Locker and buys steel-capped boots for his first day. They give him blisters and land him in A&E, effectively putting an end to any ill-advised attempts at feigning toughness.

Toughness is not the point of Waiting for the Out, which “gives people a look at prisoners using their brains rather than their fists”, says Finan. “It’s the first time I’ve seen people discuss Theseus in prison.” Dan’s trick, though, is to make the lessons as much about the prisoners as about the philosophers they’re discussing. Conversation roams between free will and fate to Odysseus and Slavoj Žižek, the “Billy Connolly of philosophers”.

Dan has more in common with his students than they think; his family tree is heavy with men who have spent time behind bars, his amiable uncle and recovering addict brother among them. Most notable, though, is his estranged father, who casts a long shadow over Dan’s life – and whom Dan begins seeking out despite his family’s protests.

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The series also takes a granular interest in the modern swathe of masculinity, embodied most acutely by Dan himself, who instantly feels at odds with the seemingly more rough-and-ready prisoners. “He presents like he is from a middle-class background: he wears pink shirts, he’s got floppy hair, crosses his legs and speaks slowly,” says Finan. “Ostensibly, he looks like the sort of model for a 21st-century guy, but behind closed doors, Dan has no idea what to do with his emotions – he screams at the stove and doesn’t know how to process what he’s going through, in a way that’s very much a retrograde look at how men are in touch with their emotions.”

As for Finan’s state of mind during filming? It certainly helped that on the way to and from the show’s Liverpool set every day, there was a floating sauna to release any pent-up emotions from playing a character like Dan. “There’s a certain amount of pressure that builds up in your body over the days.” Pressure is an apt word to describe Finan’s performance, which feels something like watching a lid doing its best to balance on a bubbling pot. It’s a masterclass in restraint, all the while winking at danger.

It took some pressure off to know Dan wasn’t intended to be a carbon copy of West. “There was a real sense of freedom and being able to have the character as my own,” he says. That said, Finan has proven himself to be a remarkable mimic even in sticky circumstances, such as when he played Belfast barman turned controversial president of Sinn Féin Gerry Adams in the Irish thriller-drama Say Nothing last year.

Finan couldn’t help but wonder what Adams, who is now 77 and has always denied being a member of the IRA, might make of his performance. “If I were him, I imagine I’d be above it. I can’t see him being super bothered about a lad from the Wirral playing him in a Disney show,” he says. Finan had, however, heard that Adams was chuffed with Pierce Brosnan’s portrayal in 2017’s The Foreigner. “I think he quite liked the fact that he was played by James Bond,” he laughs. “Sorry I couldn’t live up to that.”

Growing up in the Wirral, a peninsula just west of Liverpool, Finan was a “shy child” who discovered a “pretty good way of covering it up”. Energetic classroom readings of Roald Dahl led to a “50p-a-week drama club”, where Finan got a lot of joy playing everyone from a Geordie pensioner to a cleaning lady from Yorkshire and Buttons in Cinderella. But the path from there was less clear – and less encouraged. “l didn’t want to do anything else but I felt stuck because no one at my secondary school was advocating for it. No one took it seriously.”

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He’s more forgiving of that mindset now that he’s older. “I can understand the reticence of some people who said [acting] wasn’t a proper job,” Finan says. “In a small, sort of nominally working-class area, you’re going to prioritise having a solid life, but I was less sympathetic back then about how my school treated people who wanted to express themselves.”

But his parents, who met at the job centre where they worked, were always supportive of his aspirations – maybe, Finan says, because they knew so little about the industry he wanted to break into. “But I imagine they’d have been just as supportive if I wanted to read maths books all day rather than draw or dress up, which is what I did.”

It was only when studying English literature at Sheffield and hanging out with “a lot of arty, lefty theatremakers” that Finan discovered the prospect of drama school. “Somewhere you can go and spend years studying acting?” he laughs. ”My mind was blown.” His time at Bristol Old Vic was formative; Finan came out more confident than when he went in. “But it wasn’t necessarily very busy coming into the industry, so there was a feeling of like, ‘Oh f***, I think I can do this – but absolutely no one knows or cares.’”

People certainly care now. Waiting for the Out has earned superb early reviews, and next year Finan will appear in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast – the much-anticipated return to telly from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee. (Those Northern Irish accent lessons for Say Nothing are already paying dividends.) Whatever he stars in next, he hopes it will spark a conversation. “When I’m trying to justify what I’ve decided to do as a job – which is not as important as being a doctor or a lawyer or a paramedic – I think of how this is a world in which it is possible for TV and film to actually mean something,” he says, chuckling again. “I’m shivering, that’s cringe!”

‘Waiting For The Out’ is available to watch on BBC iPlayer now