“I never look on prison as a bad time. It made me more powerful. It made me who I am today

Ashley Walters really wishes people would stop asking him about jail.

- Ashley Walters

It was almost a quarter of a century ago that the Peckham-born rapper and actor was arrested by armed police for waving a firearm at a traffic warden. Half a lifetime ago. Back when So Solid Crew had No 1 singles and home secretaries gave speeches about the dangers of gangster rap. “It's a distant memory,” he says of the nine months he spent in a young offenders’ institute. “I didn’t want to be there. Obviously. But it was a moment in time. It happened.”'

Since then, of course, Walters, 42, has emerged as one of Britain's most successful actors, five seasons playing Dushane in the Hackney drugs drama Top Boy having brought him international recognition. He has eight children, a house in Kent, a small dog, he is a granddad for goodness sake. He is, in other words, a successful grown-up with responsibilities and a glittering career. So, he politely suggests, it might be time to draw a line. “It was something I had to go through to be sitting here now, talking about the projects I’m doing,” he says. “Other than that? I’m over it. I have no regrets because I’m a better man for it.”

And it’s not as if there isn’t anything else to discuss. There is prolific. And then there is Ashley Walters in 2025. He just released his first music in years, an EP, Test the Walters 2. His Victorian boxing drama, A Thousand Blows, from the creators of Peaky Blinders, dropped last month on Disney+. He has written a memoir, Always Winning, due in May. He has just finished shooting Animol, his debut directorial feature film set in a young offenders’ institution.