“I have a duty of care”: Samuel Bottomley on ‘California Schemin’ and creating opportunities for the next generation
The feature-length directorial debut of James McAvoy, California Schemin’, tells a story so ridiculously far-fetched that it could only be true.
In the early 2000s, Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, frustrated that their aspirations to become rappers would be thwarted by the prejudice shown towards their Scottishness, decided to pass themselves off as a pair of Californians instead, discovering that their fake accents opened more doors than their real ones ever could.
It’s a tale that sounds tailor-made for a biopic, with McAvoy deciding the misadventures of Silibil N’ Brains would be the perfect backdrop for his first film from behind the camera, with Samuel Bottomley and Séamus McLean Ross cast as Boyd and Bain, respectively.
Bottomley, a rising star and Bafta nominee who made his acting debut in Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, might be a Yorkshire lad, but he does an impressive job of passing himself off as both an aspiring Dundonian emcee and their fictitious alter-ego who gets a foot on the music industry ladder.
With his casting first announced in May 2024 and the movie shooting later that year, and with California Schemin’ premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 before hitting the festival circuit hard ahead of its theatrical release in the United Kingdom on April 10th, 2026, with America still to come, it’s a project he’s been living with for a long time now.
“I think, on a personal level, I feel like it’s the beginning of the end,” he explained to Far Out. “It feels like it’s the end, but I suppose, for everyone else, it’s just the beginning. It’s strange, really. Professionally, I feel very, very, very grateful that we’re a part of something so well-received.”
While Silibil N’ Brains have some cult notoriety in Scotland for the way they duped the business, they never quite reached the levels of entering musical folklore. California Schemin’ hopes to change that, but Bottomley, a hip-hop fan, can’t seem to remember if he’d heard it before he read the script or not.
“I feel like I’ve been told about it years ago,” he paused. “It feels like some sort of fever dream memory, and I don’t know if it’s genuine or if it’s just fabricated; something I made up in my head.” He eventually made up his mind, though. “No, I didn’t know about it. It seemed familiar, but no, I didn’t know about it.”
“It’s like a little bit of a cult following, the people that know about it,” the 24-year-old reasoned. “It’s a bit underground, innit? Not a lot of people really knew about it. If it wasn’t true, you’d think, ‘This is a little bit too far-fetched to be a film.'” You can say that about some of the most memorable biopics, and that’s why they say the truth can often be stranger than fiction.
Obviously, California Schemin’ is a Scottish story about a Scottish act. Its director is Scottish, and the two actors Bottomley shares the most scenes with, McLean Ross and Lucy Halliday, who plays Boyd’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Mary, are Scottish. Most of the film was also shot in Scotland, which begs the question: how did the Bradford-born star end up auditioning and landing the part?
“I’ve got a great relationship with my agent: I’ve got a great agent as well,” he smiled. “She’s always sending me for some really, really, really cool stuff. So luckily, I’ve got a foot in the door, which is such a privilege. I don’t really know how I managed to bag it, to be fair, just sort of fluked my way through every audition!”
He’s joking, of course. “I feel like when you’re auditioning for stuff, and when you’re reading scripts, it’s not only about performance, it’s about understanding what it is that you’re making.” To that end, he pointed out the difficulties California Schemin’ had in casting the role of Tessa, the record executive played by Rebekah Murrell, who stakes her career on Silibil N’ Brains succeeding.
“There was a struggle to find Rebekah’s part,” Bottomley explained. “To a point where they thought, like, ‘Have we made a bad character for people to play?’ And then Rebekah comes in, and she absolutely smashes it. I’m sure a lot of great actresses went to audition for the role before that, but she had the understanding, probably the same with me and Séamus, really.”
Whereas Bain falls deeper and deeper into his American persona, Boyd doesn’t fall into the same trap, and that habit of never taking himself too seriously gave Bottomley “a nice little default place to fall back to when things got quite stressful,” never mind that it felt “quite daunting” to be the only Englishman among a core team that was predominantly Scottish.
“You’ve just got to go in there with the same confidence and brashness, almost, as your character,” he reasoned, which helped him land the job. As mentioned earlier, he’s a hip-hop fan, too, and being connected to a story set in that world informed the way he approached both the audition process and his performance in the movie.
“Once I knew that I would get into the later stage of the auditions, and then, the early stages of filming, I always had the boys playing in my ears, just to get myself into the world of it and to try and soak it up as much as possible,” the actor offered. “And I do love hip-hop anyway, so it’s pretty easy. That was a pretty seamless connection to make.”
“We had, like, two weeks of rehearsals,” Bottomley continued. “But not only were we rehearsing, we’re skateboarding, and we’re making the songs, and understanding how to make a song. Séamus, I suppose, grew up around it a little bit more, being in studios and stuff. But I was so buzzing to have that week or two learning how to rap, really, and then watching people cut it up and put it together into a song. It was proper ace!”
As it turns out, McLean Ross was born into the music business as the son of Deacon Blue vocalists Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh. That means he’s not unfamiliar with the ins and outs, but with California Schemin’ marking his first feature-length outing as an actor, the more experienced Bottomley was on hand to dispense advice and words of wisdom, as and when required.
“I feel like he was very, very anxious about the whole thing,” came the honest response. “And you can imagine, because it’s his first feature, and it’s such a big thing. I’ve been very lucky that I started it from a young age, and as I’ve gotten older, my characters might become more prominent, and the things I’m doing are more important. And he’s been thrust into this big, massive job that he’s got to do straight out of drama school.”
“Very much in the same spirit of Silibil N’ Brains, he was very much panicking, and I was chilled and relaxed,” Bottomley pointed out. “That’s not to say that I wasn’t also stressing, but I was telling him not to worry as much not worry as much. I turned around to him once, like, ‘Forget everything. You know everything, you know your lines, you know where your performance needs to go’. Stuff like that.”
With a decade and a half of experience under his belt already, he’s in a position to give advice to a less experienced co-star in the same age range, even if he doesn’t think it was entirely necessary. “He doesn’t need it,” the Silibil of McAvoy’s Silibil N’ Brains clarified. “He’s amazing. He doesn’t need my advice, man.”
As both the Dundonian version of Boyd and his Californian fabrication, California Schemin’ requires Bottomley to use two different accents, neither of which is his own, and he’s often required to switch between them within the same scene. It was a challenge, but one he was eager to get to grips with.
“I love doing stuff like that. I didn’t realise how much I loved accents, because I did a couple when I was younger, and before I did this film, I’ve not really done one for a while,” but it’s something he clearly enjoys. “One of the things that really drew me to the character, I thought that would be so cool, just being able to swap from one accent to another. I don’t really find it too difficult, because I’ve got a good ear, to be fair.”
He even did it in his first audition. Bottomley put himself on tape performing one scene in Boyd’s native tongue and another in his adopted brogue, but in the second, he switched between the accents to show that he could. “It’s almost like a CIA agent,” he laughed. “Sleeper agents that are Russian, but American.”
The star was even more impressed that Silibil N’ Brains hoodwinked their way to nearly making it as rappers, too, since they weren’t actors. Still, film and television history is littered with terrible, terrible attempts at emulating a Scottish accent, but Bottomley does a bang-up job as a Dundonian.
“It was definitely daunting, because it’s a place I’ve never been to, and Dundee was a place that I’ve not heard much of,” he acknowledged. “So I had to do a load of research. I got gifted a book of all the sayings and stuff, watched documentaries about the town, and listened to people who are from there.”
He did admit to struggling for “about a month” to master his new accent, but he got it to a place he was happy with, and it’s one of the better adoptions you’re likely to hear from a non-Scot this year. Another pinch-me moment for Bottomley was shooting a packed Silibil N’ Brains gig, with the duo opening for D12 in a sequence that was shot in Glasgow’s iconic Barrowland Ballroom.
“Yeah, ticked something off my bucket list I didn’t even know was on my bucket list!” he concurred. “It’s amazing. I actually went to see The Libertines a week or so before that, knowing that I was going to be up on that stage. That was a weird experience. It’s mental. One of my biggest passions is listening to music and finding out about bands. So to be at that legendary place, man, is so cool. It’s a pretty cool thing to say I’ve done.”
Some actors go out of their way to speak to the real-life subject before they play them onscreen, and others prefer to keep their distance. While Boyd has long since moved on from his Silibil N’ Brains days, Bottomley had several opportunities to pick his brain to try and get a grounding for his performance.
“He was just really open and honest with everything that I asked him,” he recalled. “There was a flood of questions, and he answered really honestly and openly. It was really weird, I wanted to get his take on how he felt about someone playing him, and he’s just a really nice, really likable guy. I got him with him. He’s a nice guy.”
With Bottomley’s first film being Considine’s Tyrannosaur, and his latest being McAvoy’s California Schemin’, a pattern might be emerging. Funnily enough, he does indeed have his eyes on moving behind the camera eventually, but it doesn’t sound as though that’ll be happening for a while yet.
“I’d love to,” he declared. “It’s like, all my eggs are in this acting basket, and I’ve liked that because that’s where I’ve always been. I’d be a bit scared to have other eggs in other baskets, really, but I’d love to direct. I think, probably when I get a bit older, though, because there’s still a lot of shit I don’t really know about!” It’s on the agenda, but he’s nothing if not self-aware: “I’d love to think I’d be a decent director, but everyone does, don’t they? But I’d be better than everyone. I’m joking!”
Bottomley might only be 24, but he’s packed a lot into his career already, including awards season recognition and a who’s who of esteemed co-stars, with 2022’s Channel 4 drama, Somewhere Boy, earning him a Bafta nod for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, a major moment of validation.
“You’re second-guessing yourself all the way through your career, being a child actor, not being trained, and sort of just finding your way through doing it,” he suggested, speaking from his own experience. “There’s a lot of imposter syndrome, and there’s fear of not being good enough, not having a blueprint to fall back on, or a mentor to draw back from what they’ve said. So it was really nice.”
Despite his tender years, Bottomley made his screen debut in 2011, and his shortlisting was “a really nice acceptance into the industry, or a nod, that people said my performance is worth looking at for something like a Bafta nomination: it’s massive.” He’d been at it for over ten years at that point, but it only reinforced his desire to keep rising up the ranks.
“It’s a confidence boost, definitely,” he concurred. “And realigns you. Sometimes, when I’ve been growing up, you can definitely feel like you don’t belong here when everyone’s, I don’t know, proper actors, you know? I thought I grew up being normal, going to school, and then having these great opportunities, and then you go on to another set with a lot of other kids that are born to do this. So you’re always thinking, ‘Am I meant to be here or not?'”
Bottomley was happy to accept the “massive, massive compliment” from the Baftas, but better things were right around the corner. The following year, he played Paddy in writer and director Molly Manning Walker’s searing How to Have Sex, which saw him attend the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, where the film was named the winner of the Un Certain Regard prize.
“Oh, it was amazing, man,” he reflected. “We all put so much, so much into that film. Every single one of us left a bit of ourselves in Malia out there still. Not only was it so fun to be out there for, like, eight weeks, but it was so hard as well.”
“You’re away from your family for a long time, you’re dealing, you know, real-life situations onscreen, which can take its toll, it’s mentally draining, the weight of it,” he said. “And again, it’s so nice that we all got that recognition. Molly did a great job, from start to finish, she made a really good film, and I’m really proud of her. I’m proud of all of us for that. A very, very special film for all of us.”
In Bottomley’s last film before the release of California Schemin’, he did something that virtually every actor, no matter how old they are or how long they’ve been in the business, would kill for: he shared a scene with three-time Academy Award-winning legend Daniel Day-Lewis in his comeback, Anemone.
“Mental experience, mental,” he succinctly put it. “It was a lovely way of working with him. Instead of just being around him, being on set with him, it was like two weeks; I spoke to him a lot throughout the audition process, and it was amazing. Absolutely amazing. It was something that I’ll never, ever get bored of talking about. I’m realising I’m going to talk about it for the rest of my life!”
“It was really, really special to be on set. I only had one scene with him. I’ve been for a couple of dinners with him, like, here and there, after,” casually dropping that he’s become a dining companion of Day-Lewis’. “It’s a bit surreal, really, when you’re in front of someone that’s that big. It’s massive working with him, but I only really got one scene with him, but the work I did with Samantha Morton and Ned Stark was just as valuable.”
Ned Stark would, of course, be Sean Bean, with the pair playing his parents in Anemone. More than merely a fellow Yorkshireman, Bean is an actor from a working-class background who’s been vocal in calling out the lack of opportunities for working-class talent in the industry, a subject that’s also close to Bottomley’s heart.
“I think it’s important that working-class people have access to things like agents and casting directors and auditions, everyone should,” he elucidated. “Everyone should be able to have a choice of doing something they want to do. Financially, it shouldn’t really be a problem. I feel like I come from watching a generation of actors who have had great opportunities, like Sean Bean, Samantha Morton. And I think somewhere along the way, I don’t know if this is true or not, but it feels like we’ve lost a little bit of that.”
Unfortunately, Bottomley is aware that it’s low down on the list of priorities. “I mean, the country’s in a fucking shite state of affairs, innit?” he asked rhetorically. “I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of shit to sort out first, other than the arts, but it’s definitely important that young people, especially working-class people, have got the same opportunities as everyone.”
To that end, he founded the West Yorkshire Workshop in 2025 to help provide those opportunities: “I feel like me, having so many great connections now, we’ve been able to list a lot of great names off, you know? I’ve been very, very lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the industry.”
“I feel like I have a duty of care to pass that on and to create that opportunity,” which is some amount of responsibility for a 24-year-old to take on. “We’ve got a workshop this weekend, actually. Saturday, it’ll be me and the 12 others who are there. And then Sunday, we’ve got Claire Bleasdale coming in, who’s a casting director from Manchester. It’s giving people the opportunity to be in the room with people like that.”
“I never really wanted to be a drama teacher because I’ve not done it myself!” Bottomley noted. “So the second day with the guest is just as important as my first day with them by myself, because it’s not about me, it’s about getting them in the room with other people like that, and that’s where the guest comes on the second day. But, yeah, it’s very important to me.”
In addition to McAvoy, Considine, Day-Lewis, Bean, and Morton, Bottomley has also shared a cast with Olivia Colman, Tim Roth, Jack O’Connell, Pierce Brosnan, and more. It wasn’t the kind of thing he ever found himself stopping to think about, at least not until Far Out brought it up.
“Fucking hell, that’s a flipping right line-up, innit?” he exclaimed. “It’s where you want to be, definitely.” As for where he’d like to be, hypothetically speaking, if he could switch places with any actor in cinema history and play their role, he’d opt for an icon who led one of his favourite movies.
“Steve McQueen, Great Escape,” he beamed. “I want to go Godfather, probably that as well. It’s either that, or it’d be Steve McQueen, Great Escape. There are so many great, great people on that cast of The Great Escape, so many great older actors, man, that probably takes the win.”
