This new BBC drama will leave you drooling at the dishes and your stress levels at *actual* Boiling Point, but for its star, Izuka Hoyle, that’s nothing the cast’s banter and WhatsApp group can’t solve. Here, she opens up about the hit show to Josh Smith for his latest GLAMOUR column, Josh Smith Meets.
If you haven’t made your reservation with Boiling Point, the hottest show on TV right now, you are missing out on seriously tasty TV. Think of it as the British answer to The Bear except with the stress levels bubbling over to new levels on the hob.
Following the BAFTA-nominated success of the 2021 movie of the same name, which followed Stephen Graham’s Andy falling into alcoholism from the relentless pressure of running a restaurant, the TV show picks up where it left off. This time with Andy sidelined with his demons, head chef Carly (Viventte Robinson) opens a new restaurant, Point North, which specialises in Northern cuisine, with her old kitchen staff in tow including garnish chef, Camille played by Izuka Hoyle.
The Bear champions a diverse kitchen, but there's a worrying lack of representation elsewhere.
Izuka went IN to play the French chef or as she likes to call her, “the Garnish Queen,” Camille from observing kitchens in London and Paris, to learning French and even buying her own very expensive set of knives. It's giving method. “I tell you what, when I was going through my whole Daniel Lewis moment of going to Paris and wanting to find whatever the knives that I came back with, I was on my way to f**king set on the first day cleaning my knives and I absolutely sliced my thumb open, and arrived drenched in blood. They blunted my knives after that. So my gorgeous Japanese French knives that cost me a bomb are now completely blunted down,” Izuka says, Zooming in from her hotel room in Liverpool where she is already filming her next project.
The Boiling Point kitchen clearly serves up drama. From Sous Chefs with Gordan Ramsey-esque temper tantrums, to canoodling waiters and vile customers it’s a TV melting pot. But it’s more than that, the restaurant is a microcosm of our society and the problems we all experience from mental health to self harm and Izuka’s Camille is at the receiving end of inappropriate advances and behaviour in the workplace.
With the show tackling so many topics in very nuanced ways, I wonder what Izuka is proudest of bringing to the screen by returning to the role of Camille, which she won a BAFTA Scotland award for Best Actress for the movie. “I'm proud of many of them, even from the small moments that you see with Missy (Haysom)’s character, Kit, when they're misgendered a couple of times and we do it in ways that's so passing. Then we spend a bit more time on it in episode four when they're actually approached and asked what the badge is that they're wearing and asked, ‘what country are you from?’ It's like, ‘oh no, it's the badge of non-binary.’ It’s moments like that. Obviously, of course, episode two we really delve into addiction and also self-harming. That was a pretty harrowing scene to film those days on the set. We all went there.” Izuka isn’t wrong, the way the show deals with dessert chef Jamie (Stephen McMillan)’s self harming, from hiding his cuts from colleagues to attempting to take his own life in the staff toilets is raw and important.
“Then there’s the small moments like Camille and her experience with misconduct within the workplace, it’s small bullying or fat shaming sequence but nonetheless it still affected lots of women because lots of people go through things like this each day,” Izuka continues. “What we do really well in Boiling Point is showcase a slice of life in its most organic and authentic form. It's not a dramatised version of it. Kitchens and restaurants offer the perfect playground for heated drama because so much can happen there.”
So many people will see themselves and their experiences reflected back in this heated playground. “We wanted people to feel seen and represented and it was done in a way that they're like, ‘that's exactly what happened to me and I feel seen.’ For the audience throughout [the show], if you'd had it muted or someone had asked you a question you might miss it, but that's how it happens in life. So many adversities and mental health illnesses and physical illnesses are invisible. We wanted to bring the invisibility to visible on the screen but in a very organic way. I think we did that alright.”
Boiling Point is more than alright, the show is getting five star reviews across the board and with the dialogue largely improvised, the cast had to pull on their own experiences. “The dialogue isn't set for you, all you can do is pull from your own experiences,” Izuka shares. “There were lots of discussions with the director about Camille, her storyline with Nick (Steven Ogg) and the way in which we go about that, especially his reaction to rejection and how that plays out in the power play in the way in which he gaslights Camille after the misconduct of the touching in the workplace and then ultimately the fat shaming of it all. These are things that people will experience constantly and a lot of us have experienced some of the stuff that our characters have gone through. With really careful and tentative conversations with the director and creators, you craft storylines that best represent maybe what you've heard from other people from your own life, your own experiences, and collectively they all make the storyline.”
The cast didn’t just collaborate on the script they banded together to get each other through the tougher moments on set. “I can't describe how much we giggled on that set for something so stressful,” Izuka laughs. And their ways of blowing off steam? “Big nights out, lots of lovely dinners and people having cook ups in their hotel rooms.” Whilst Izuka won’t share what happened on the nights out OUT, I sense Manchester, where they filmed the show, was not ready.
For all the love Izuka has for the cast though, the love doesn’t continue for the cast’s WhatsApp group. “I call them out all the time, but that sh*t' is muted for me. The other day I looked at it and it had 264 unread messages. We use it every single day. It is Carnage. And Shaun Fagan, who plays Bolton - absolute love of my life - he can make memes in 25 seconds. So it's just meme reactions to everyone in the kitchen. It's just insane. It's too much.” That is too much admin, I am sure you can agree. “It's so much admin,” Izuka admits, “one of the cast members the other day, it was like, ‘this person has left the chat,’ and everyone was like, ‘what?’ I was like, ‘yeah, I don't blame you.’ And he was like, ‘what are you talking about? I'm still here. It was my old number.’ I absolutely outed myself that I can’t stand the chat.” We have all been there, babes.
Dodging the group messages is something Izuka can take in her stride but nothing could quite prepare Izuka for an attack on her senses whilst filming. “One of the days the art department forgot to put the f**king fish in the real fridge,” she laughs, “and we had to work with the smell of rotten fish for two days. Literally my eyes are filled with tears through a scene that involves no emotion. They built an entire kitchen for us and put it in the fake fridge. It had fake toilets, fake everything. People did take a sh*t. People were using our stuff and not realising.”
Whilst the world was fake, the show and it’s cast is very reflective of the world we *actually* live in. You watch Boiling Point and see all faces of society reflected back and at no point does this feel like tokenism. Stepping onto this set for Izuka was empowering to say the least. “At times it was cathartic, too,” she admits, “because if there's things that you're pulling from that still hit a nerve when you're able to act them out again with people who are with you and understand it’s incredibly empowering. It’s the dream, actually, because ultimately that's why everyone should get into acting and the arts. It’s to represent people like yourself that you've known growing up and then be able to educate people furthermore, or help people feel seen on their TV screen. When you do that and the response to it is exactly how you wanted it to be, it fuels you for war.”
I ask when Izuka, who grew up in Edinburgh, first felt seen on screen. “I remember on stage before I remember on screen. I was 18 and I saw The Lion King in London and it was like something was awakened within me immediately. I'd never seen so many people of colour on stage before and also traditional African music as well. It wasn't something that I grew up with, but it was something that I was connected to and that I was missing. Also when I went to drama school at 18 and I moved to London that hit me like nothing else. To suddenly go from a city that was pretty much white and my sister and I were one of very few people in a school of thousands and to come to London and suddenly on every corner I turned, there was somebody that was not only a person of colour, but women that were gorgeous, that were curvaceous things I didn't see every day in Scotland. I was always very much the odd one, not the odd one out, but I just wasn't like the other gals. So to come to London it was just heaven on earth. It was just so cool to see people that were like me. But on screen, I'm trying to think and nothing comes to mind immediately, which maybe says a lot. There was never really a leading character or somebody that I was like, ‘f**k me, that's me!’”
The show will focus on “mental health issues faced by British teenagers”.
Boiling Point is therefore a show even Izuka couldn’t have dreamed of when she started her acting career which has seen her star on the West End as the OG Katherine Parr in the feminist all singing, all dancing retelling of Henry VIII and his six wives in Six: The Musical, star alongside Dakota Johnson in Netflix’s Persuasion and earn her comedy chops in Channel 4’s Big Boys. “Watching this when I was younger would've made me realise how big the world is, how colourful the world is and maybe where I was at the time wasn't the full picture. There was so much to discover and be patient, you'll find that very soon. I would've felt seen. I would've been so much kinder to myself in terms of the way that I look and I felt about myself,” Izuka says.
How was she unkind to herself growing up? “Being a person of colour in a very white city, which maybe at times wasn't equipped to cater to that all the time, being in primary school and all of your friends and all of the gals had a similar look and you not looking like them, that does something to a kid and your inner monologue. I was comparing myself so much throughout my childhood, constantly, and I was always comparing myself to whatever I was at school with and that was a lot of white people. So, I myself felt lesser and I told myself that. I wasn't the pretty gal or the hot gal and then when I moved to London, suddenly for people to be interested it was different.”
It’s obvious that Boiling Point has been a life and career changing experience for Izuka. What's the lasting lesson she will take from the show? “Get out of your head and into your body,” she replies instantly, talking about the nerves she had before filming and delivering a lesson in staying present which we all need, right?
One thing Izuka now has zero nerves about, is the rustling something up in the kitchen but don’t expect anything too fancy if you pop over to Izuka’s for dinner. “Sometimes I pull out some of the cutting things that I've learned. If I've got a bit of an audience and I'm just cutting some spring onions, I can now chop and not even look.” Dinner and a show? Count us in!
Boiling Point is available on BBC iPlayer now.
