AKTA INTERVIEWS: HOW ACTOR TOM BULPETT BOOKED NETFLIX’S DEPT. Q
- Akta Photography
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa
I The Boy Who Tried to Enter the Screen
The double-beat da-doom lands, its sound low and familiar. Then the red N blooms across the screen, swelling like a sun rising too close to the horizon. A child leans closer. Knees pressed into carpet. Fingers curled on the edge of the TV stand. A voice calls from the kitchen, “Back up, it’s bad for your eyes!” He does not move. The glass holds him the way a tide holds a shell, right at the threshold, humming with possibility. If he stared hard enough, he thinks, the screen might ripple, might finally let him in.
He studies everything. The swallow before a lie. The vocal tremor in the face of fear. He doesn’t know to call it acting yet. He just knows this: inside the box, people make sense. Later, teachers will call him imaginative. Directors will call him unnervingly precise. None of them will realise it began here, face pressed to the screen, learning people by watching them.
Long before the training. Long before the Netflix debut. Tom Bulpett was him: a boy kneeling in front of a television, trying to enter a world that felt clearer than his own.
II The Audition That Changed Everything
When the audition for Netflix’s Dept. Q came, Tom Bulpett was not standing on solid ground. “I was in quite a bad place,” he says, caught in the familiar purgatory of the working actor: trained, employed enough to keep going, yet financially and existentially fraying at the edges. He had just come off a theatre tour that had cost him money rather than made it, and the questions that followed began to press with a quiet brutality. “I was feeling a bit lost in the industry. I was financially really struggling,” he recalls. “I was really feeling like, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Can I afford to stay in London?’” It is a moment many actors recognise; the point at which the work you love starts to feel like something that might not love you back.
So when the audition came through, it did not announce itself as a life altering opportunity. “I genuinely thought it was for a day player,” he says. “I didn’t think it was a big part.” What did register immediately, though, was the nature of the role: William Lingard, a character living with the after-effects of a brain injury. It was a kind of role Tom had encountered before but often in ways that felt reductive. “I had a few auditions in the past for neurodivergent roles which had really frustrated me,” he explains. “I’d gone in and they’d been like, ‘Yeah, that was great… can you look at us less?’” The shorthand, he felt, was flattening. A surface level interpretation of neurodivergence that reduced complexity to eye contact and awkwardness.
With exasperation from those past experiences Tom wonders if perhaps, because he felt he had nothing left to protect, something in him loosened. “I auditioned in that headspace… I was like, ‘I’m probably not going to get this anyway. So I’ll do my own thing with this.’” What followed was not a bid for novelty but an act of precision. He built the audition around sign language, which was not written into the script, but grounded in research and lived understanding. “People with aphasia often communicate through sign,” he explains, “but get very frustrated because it’s often mistaken for ticks… people go, ‘Oh, he’s ticking.’ No. He’s saying ‘listen,’ you’re just not paying attention.”
Crucially, Tom asked to audition in the room rather than on tape. “Because what that allows me to do is explain my thinking before putting this thing in front of them,” he says. He wanted to situate the choice. To say: this is the logic, this is the care, this is the human architecture beneath the offer. The casting team listened. “They were so willing to go where I was and hear my thoughts,” he says, describing an experience markedly different from many he’d had before.
When the call came, he was at his other job. “I started crying,” he says. “Because my agent told me what it was, and the money… It was life changing” he says, acknowledging the discomfort of naming money while insisting on its truth. The audition did more than secure a role. It reoriented his relationship to the work itself. “Just show them,” he says simply.
“Show them your version of the thing… As soon as you try to create the thing they’re looking for, it all falls apart. You’re chasing smoke.”
III How a Performance Is Built When Language Falls Away
Walking onto set for the first time, the nerves were real. “I was really terrified,” Tom admits, especially working opposite actors he admired deeply.
Booking the role was only the beginning. William is a character shaped by catastrophic loss: a brain injury, aphasia, trauma so deep it reorganises the body itself. He rewrote scenes privately, scripting what William wanted to say but couldn’t. “I’d write out my own lines that William wanted to say but couldn’t,” he explains. “Which I think really helped the clarity of where he was in scenes and what he was trying to communicate.” Acting non-verbally alongside speaking actors felt, to him, like working across mediums at once. “I was like, I’m in a silent movie while everyone else is in a normal movie.” The challenge thrilled him. “It was a really wonderful challenge,” he says, “and one that I was really, really supported with.”
Perhaps most revealing is how rarely Tom frames the work as solitary. Again and again, he returns to relationship. One of the most formative was with the actor playing William’s sister, Chloe Perry. “She called me like the week after I got cast,” Tom says, “and was like, ‘Can we meet up and go over stuff and create a brother-sister relationship together?’” What followed was extraordinary by screen standards. “I had weeks and months with an actor,” he says. “Which is very rare for a screen job.” Together, they rehearsed, adjusted, and learned how to calibrate performances for the camera. “I got to practice all that stuff of changing, adjusting a performance for screen… with an actor who had a lot of screen experience. I was so, so grateful.”
Watching Dept. Q, it can feel as though William Lingard arrives fully formed, impossibly grounded. Hearing Tom describe the process, you understand that what reads as inevitability on screen was built patiently, collaboratively, and with deep respect for the human cost of the story being told.
IV What It Takes
What sustains an acting career is rarely the visible work alone. Tom is candid about how long it took him to understand this. “When I first started, I did spend a lot of time sort of waiting for opportunities,” he says. What changed him was observation. He noticed that the people who seemed to progress weren’t necessarily the most gifted, but the most consistent. They were, as he puts it, “doing the really boring stuff really well, like writing emails or reaching out to people.”
For neurodivergent actors in particular, this backstage labour can feel at odds with the parts of the job that draw them to acting in the first place. Tom is clear eyed about that tension. He dislikes the language of “hustle,” but not the principle behind it. “That drive… it can only help you. It’s never going to hurt,” he says, even when it feels invisible. His approach is deliberately small, deliberately humane. He recalls advice passed down to him early on: “Do something every day that helps foster a connection or helps develop you in the industry.” Not everything. Just one thing. “That something can just be send one email,” he says. “Just send one email to one casting director or one agent or one director and the likelihood is they will not respond.” The value isn’t in the reply. It’s in the accumulation. “If you do that one thing every day, hard work like that compounds over the years,” he explains.
V Seeing Yourself On Screen
Tom never stopped being that child in front of that television. The screen didn’t open up because he simply wanted it to but because he stayed, through the unpaid tours and the almosts.
Staying long enough to see the screen turn from glass to a mirror. Reflecting back the time he’d given, the attention he’d paid, the craft he continued returning to through it all.
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