Overview
Since his 2018 Cannes Palme d'Or win for short film All These Creatures, the world has been waiting for Australian writer/director Charles Williams to make his feature debut. Everyone should be thankful that Cosmo Jarvis is among the cast. Already one of the best Aussie movies of the year, Inside is the sum of stunning parts. It tells a prison-set narrative that's penned and conveyed with the utmost compassion. It hails from an acclaimed Aussie filmmaker not only making his first full-length picture, but taking inspiration from details close to him. It boasts The Brutalist Oscar-nominee Guy Pearce turning in yet another powerhouse performance, plus newcomer Vincent Miller (Plum) proving a spectacular find. And it also has Jarvis, fresh from the first season of acclaimed TV drama Shōgun, portraying what might be the most-complex role in a flick filled with them — and doing so with haunting and mesmerising potency.
Miller's youthful Mel Blight sits at the heart of the film, as he's transferred from a juvenile facility to an adult prison. There, two men cast considerable shadows his way. Pearce's Warren Murfett is so close to parole that he's permitted on day release to reconnect with his son (Toby Wallace, The Bikeriders). The fact that Mark Shepard, played by Jarvis, has been dubbed "Australia's most-despised criminal" — and, after years calling a cell home, that the media still speaks of him and his crime with vitriol — sums up his contrasting chances of freedom. Incarcerated since he was 13 for a brutal act, the latter is trying to find a way to his own forgiveness, however, including by embracing faith and becoming the prison's self-styled man of the cloth.
After jumping over to acting from music — initially making his film debut by writing, directing and starring in The Naughty Room — Jarvis has enjoyed a diverse range of projects. On a resume that also includes the Florence Pugh (We Live in Time)-led Lady Macbeth, episodes of Peaky Blinders and Raised by Wolves, Irish crime drama Calm with Horses with Barry Keoghan (Bird) and Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion, award-winning Japan-set TV shows and Australian prison dramas are just two recent examples. In 2025, Inside is just one of three films starring the English actor that'll hit the big screen, in fact. Opposite Robert De Niro (Zero Day) playing multiple characters, he'll next be seen in The Alto Knights. Then comes Warfare, Alex Garland's latest, after an uncredited appearance in the Civil War filmmaker's Annihilation.
As Inside reaches cinemas Down Under, Jarvis is in production on Wife and Dog, directed by Guy Ritchie's (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) — featuring alongside Anthony Hopkins (Those About to Die), Rosamund Pike (The Wheel of Time), Benedict Cumberbatch (Eric), James Norton (Playing Nice) and Paddy Considine (House of the Dragon). When we chat, he's working on an accent for it.
Ask Jarvis about what's clearly been a huge couple of years for him — there's been nothing bigger on the small screen in the past 12 months than Shōgun, and it has a swag of Emmys, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards to prove it — and he downplays it. "It's the same as it ever was, I guess, to quote the song," he tells Concrete Playground. "It's just the same but different. It's still trying to find interesting projects, trying to find interesting characters and attempting to execute the work competently."
That start in music was a means to an end — "it was just sort of what allowed me to become an actor," he advises — but it did give Jarvis a connection with Australia long before Inside came his way. As a singer-songwriter, he achieved one of the pinnacles of Aussie music success, charting in the Triple J Hottest 100 in both 2011 (hitting number 85 with 'Gay Pirates') and 2012 (reaching number 59 with 'Love This'). On a trip Down Under during his musician days, he even performed a cover of Kylie Minogue's 'Spinning Around' for Like a Version. That history and making an Aussie film now is just a coincidence, though, Jarvis says. On the motivation for joining Inside, "it was the script. It was the script and the subject matter," he notes. "But I do obviously love the country, and I love the specificness of the culture, and I love the humour that the people have. And I've always found it very refreshing and just nice to be around."
A movie like Inside doesn't pop up often — "a really emotional, beautiful movie," Pearce told us; a film about prisons, rather than being a breaking out-style prison picture; and one that sees clearly the disadvantages experienced by people who end up in prison, and that the prison system places on them, for starters. Neither does a part like Shepard. Williams has described Jarvis as fearless in the role, noting that even if he doesn't like the character himself, he doesn't take shortcuts in bringing them to the screen. This all came up in our discussion with Jarvis, too. So did the feature's compassionate refusal to see anything in black and white, including people who've caused harm to others; the research that goes into portraying someone in Shepard's situation, where he's been in the system since he was a kid, convicted of a horrific crime, confined alone for decades, drawn his own interpretation of faith, and is attempting to find forgiveness and connecting with Mel; cultivating empathy with a filmmaker who fills every frame with it; working with Miller and Pearce; and more.
Shogun, Katie Yu/FX
On the Diversity of Projects that Jarvis Has Enjoyed Since Making His Film Debut with The Naughty Room — Which He Wrote and Directed — Through to Shogun and Inside
"I never really want to play the same person twice. I've been quite fortunate to have found, to have had scripts for things that had original ideas and original, specific characters that have come my way. And, in some cases, I've been fortunate enough to have won the job or gain the employment. So that's been good.
And I hope to continue to try to search for specific worlds, specific narratives that involve specific people, but are potentially, at the same time, archetypal in some way. And so yeah, it's sort of an ongoing thing, really."
On What Appealed to Jarvis About Inside and Playing Mark Shepard
"Initially it was Charles' script — which, at first, I was really pleasantly surprised by the situation, the setting and the kinds of people that it was concerned with, because that's not something that I often see in scripts. It's not a world that's very often explored, despite the fact that everybody, a lot of people will say they have a favourite prison movie, or they might know a prison movie, what they call a prison movie.
But realistically there aren't that many of them. Well, I haven't seen that many of them myself. And so when this came, I was interested basically because of that, but then also I was interested because there was, between the three principal characters, there was this sort of unmistakable symmetry in the triangle of how they came to relate to each other. And the shape of that was very appealing.
It felt like something that had been really thought about and structured very deliberately. And so that was why I was really interested, was because I could tell that whoever made this had a strong, potent idea for something, and they'd taken a lot of time to structure these three relationships — the relationships between these three men."
On the Importance of Inside Clearly Seeing the Disadvantages Experienced by Its Incarcerated Characters, and That the Prison System Places Upon Them
"I guess one of the interesting things about it was about how it, despite the elements of it which are in keeping with a thriller, and despite the parts of it which you could say are archetypes of a crime thriller that is set in the prison, its chief concern — that is prominent throughout its entire runtime — is the internal capacity for rehabilitation of these people.
And that's not to say just the lead, the three principal characters, but also all the other prisoners that are involved in the film in a sense. Its concern with the person's capacities and limitations for real internal rehabilitation was something that I really hadn't seen before, and it was really ripe ground for a unique exploration on that topic."
On Whether the Film's Compassionate Refusal to See Anything in Black and White, Including Its Characters, Influenced Jarvis' Approach
"It doesn't really, because no matter what the character and no matter what the film, nothing is really, really black and white. I suppose they can seem that way in hindsight. But my main concern was trying to take Mark for what he was at the time, at whichever point he was concerned with throughout the script, and trying to make sure that there was nothing about his terrible past that was relied too much upon to cloak him in entirely — because doing something like that would have ceased to allow him to be as real of a person as the script needed him to be.
Like all the characters, all the characters within it are incredibly complex people, and they have so many — yes, okay, they are by definition all criminals, but they are all their own people despite that. And they all have very unique internal struggles despite that. And they all have their unique senses of humours despite that.
And so allowing for those things, those sort of benchmarks of character, to be allowed to breathe was quite important in preparation for Mark."
On the Research and Preparation That Went Into Playing a Man Convicted of a Horrific Crime But Now Trying to Find His Own Sense of Forgiveness
"At first it was a case of looking at people who shared or seem to share a demographic with Mark — any examples that I could find of people who seemed to share something in common with him, whether it was from where he was from or what his early years had looked like, or the kind of activities he'd been involved with, the kind of upbringing he'd had. And then also looking into people who had found a sense of moral rehabilitation through things like an interpretation of faith.
So I spent a lot of time looking through various materials trying to find examples of people that I felt had at least something in common with Mark. And then it was a case of amalgamating them all together into something that I felt, something that allowed the text to flow through.
He's a very specific case. As I said, I mean everyone, all the characters in this film are very specific cases, and that's a credit to Charles and the research that he's done, and the fact that he really wanted this to be authentic — and the fact that he really cared about this setting, and he really cared about the complexities of the people within this setting. And so ultimately that's why I liked the script in the first place, was because it was so specific.
So there was there were lots of different pieces from reality in Australia to draw on. I got lots of video materials, audio materials, lots of articles and internal information about the rehabilitation process, about the prisons, about people from severely underprivileged backgrounds and about people who have endured terrible things during their upbringing, and about people who have inflicted terrible things when they've grown up.
So there's so much to draw on — and it was a case of amalgamating that into something that Charles' depiction of Mark on paper could then pass through."
On Collaborating with a Filmmaker Who Is Just as Interested in Exploring Empathy as Conveying It
"One of the good things about Charles is he's — really, I always got the impression that the emotional core of a person is what he's really concerned with. He's very concerned with the truth of the individual.
And so that, it was actually pretty straightforward in that sense, because it was never the case that we were trying to humanise, there was going to be this effort to humanise this guy — because it was always obvious that this was a story about humans in a situation with their own plights and their own histories and their own attempts at futures.
So it was never really a case of trying hard to find the humanity within that. It was always given as a sort of explicit permission from the outset."
Calm with Horses
On Williams Describing Jarvis as Fearless — and If That's How He Tackles Every Role
"Well, yeah, I try, I suppose. That's very nice of him to say, but I suppose I try. But it's not for any particular reason — it's just because people are specific. Even the most boring, nondescript people are incredibly specific. And so every character presents a challenge to try to arrive at them, to try to find them somehow and live in them.
In a lot of ways, the superfluous trappings of any given character — where they may be from or what kind of person they might be, or their intellect, or all these things — they're irrelevant to the actual work that must go into them, because it's always the same amount of work, regardless of the character.
You just, for me, it's always a case of finding the person that the script is alleging or the script is depicting. It's very difficult to talk about — it's much easier to do than talk about."
On Working with Newcomer Vincent Miller and Oscar-Nominee Guy Pearce
"It was just great. It was just amazing working with both of them. Aside from the acting, you couldn't really hope for two better colleagues in general than the both of them. And when it came time to begin our work — and I suppose this is also partly credit to Charles — there's this environment of just wanting to work with each other and wanting to get to the truth of the matter, and wanting to strive to try to get to what's at the core of this moment of this scene.
Both of those guys were just a just a pleasure to work with and just lovely guys. And yeah, like I said, I couldn't really hope for two better colleagues.
Young Vincent is just amazing — and particularly with Vincent, some of the scenes contained some nastiness, and you really felt like he's got a really amazing energy about him where things just seem to roll off his back. But then when we begin, he's always right there where he needs to be.
And so going through those scenes with him, it was great, and I really couldn't hope for anyone that better than those guys to be working with."
Inside opened in Australian cinemas on Thursday, February 27, 2025.
Inside images: Mathew Lynn.