Terry Stone plays villains the way a club promoter works a room: loud, grinning, impossible to miss. It is not subtle and it is not always good, but in the grey British gangster film it is often the only thing in the frame that is awake.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Detective Andy White in Rollin' with the Nines (2006) walk into a room. He leans on the doorframe. He grins at the people he is about to rob. He takes up more of the shot than the shot was built for. Stone plays the bent copper as a man who enjoys being bent, and in a film where everybody is horrible and every scene arrives on schedule, that enjoyment is the one thing we could not look away from. We scored the film 42 and said at the time that we were not sure the performance was good, only that it was alive. We stand by both halves. We also admit that whenever he left the screen we waited for him to come back, which in a film that poor is the whole of the compliment.
He came to it late and sideways. Before 2003 he was Terry Turbo, who spent a decade promoting raves, and he arrived in acting with no drama school behind him, through small film parts and a stint on EastEnders and The Bill. Rollin' with the Nines was also his first film as producer, and that pattern has held: he tends to produce the films he appears in, and so he tends to be cast as the man he is good at being. Rise of the Footsoldier (2007) gave him Tony Tucker, the Essex gangster he has gone on playing across the franchise as far as Origins in 2021. Around it sit Doghouse (2009), Shank (2010), Plastic (2014) and Once Upon a Time in London (2019), where he was Jack 'Spot' Comer. Asked to name his own favourites, he picked Tucker, Comer and Andy White. We have only seen one of the three, but we see why he chose it.
His own publicity calls his style naturalistic. That is not the word for what we saw. What we saw was a performer who likes being looked at and has decided to make that the character, and it works when the director lets the film be as loud as he is. Julian Gilbey, who directed Rollin' with the Nines and has worked with him twice, does. It works less well in the quiet scenes, and the one stretch of that film with any feeling in it belonged to Naomi Taylor, who underplayed while everyone around her, Stone included, did the opposite.
He has now played Tony Tucker for the best part of fifteen years. The man can clearly hold a room. The question is whether anyone will give him a part without a nickname, and whether he would produce it if they did.
Biography
Terry Stone is a British actor and film producer. Born on 13 January 1971 in Kingston upon Thames, he began his career as a rave promoter, founding events including One Nation, Garage Nation and Rave Nation, and authored the 2006 book King of Clubs about that period.
Stone started acting in 2003, with early appearances in Hell to Pay and television series such as EastEnders, The Bill and My Family. He is best known for playing Tony Tucker in the Rise of the Footsoldier film series (2007–2021) and for his role as Detective Andy White in Rollin' with the Nines (2006), on which he also served as producer. Other credits include Doghouse (2009), Plastic (2014) and Once Upon a Time in London (2019), the last of which he co-wrote.
