JOE CORNISH

SELECTED SCREEN CREDITS: The Adam and Joe Show (1996-99), Attack the Block (2011), The Adventures of Tintin (2011), Ant-Man (2015), The Kid Who Would Be King (2019), Lockwood & Co. (2023)

Joe Cornish appears on Zoom from the cool refuge of his Stockwell basement while London bakes outside in a 2025 heatwave.

“It’s so hot in this house. It’s like a brick oven,” he says. “When it gets hot, everyone comes to the basement – and the basement is my terrain. I’ve got my projection room and my office. So everyone turns all my special places inside out. A fiveyear-old is going to sleep down here tonight to escape the heat.” His daughter, he adds. A five-year-old in a projection room sounds… hazardous? “She’s not in there, luckily; she’s in the office. But I’ve thought about waking her up in the middle of the night with The Exorcist on a huge screen.” He’s (probably) joking.

We’re here to talk aliens, scary pop culture, and – especially – the force of nature that is Jodie Whittaker. “I think it’s fantastic you’re doing a big Jodie celebration,” Joe says. “She deserves to be celebrated. She’s such a lovely and talented person. That combination of talent and humility is rare.”

That’s lucky, then, because Joe ticks both those boxes, too. Master of film, television, comedy, radio – you name it – he’s come a long way since nineties cult hit The Adam and Joe Show, the smart, daft, late-night Channel 4 series that launched him and his frequent comedy partner – and childhood friend – Adam Buxton. As Empire magazine once put it, Joe has “been unerringly excellent at pretty much everything he’s turned his hand to.” A multi-hyphenate, yes, but he wears it lightly.

By 2011, Joe was writing and directing his debut feature film, Attack the Block, a sci-fi-action-comedy that turned a south London inner-city estate into a war zone – and a cast of newcomers into stars. The story pits a teenage gang – led by Moses (John Boyega) – and Sam (Jodie), the trainee nurse they’ve just mugged, against a horde of feral, inky-furred alien beasties with iridescent teeth. Little White Lies called it “Close Encounters meets The Football Factory with a liberal dash of The Warriors and a hint of Predator.” Empire saw shades of John Carpenter: “combining the siege-movie mindset of Assault on Precinct 13 with the grimy sci-fi edge of, say, Escape from New York.” Joe himself put it more bluntly on Richard Herring’s podcast: “Attack the Block is a bit like ET, if Henry Thomas [who played Elliott] kicked ET to death in the first five minutes!” “From the outset, Attack the Block was supposed to be a combination of high genre and kitchen-sink realism,” Joe tells me. “We wanted to take the thing you expect British cinema to do – the Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Nil by Mouth kind of grittiness – but combine it with the aspirational fantasy of an American genre movie; all the movies we loved. They’re all played very straight, so we wanted to keep it real – realistic reactions – and it takes a really good actor to do that.” Which is where Jodie comes in. “We knew most of the cast would be newcomers, because the characters were so young, so we had to be really thoughtful about casting Sam and Ron [the block’s cannabis dealer] with names – names that would give investors confidence; actors audiences wanted to see. Nick [Frost] was a shoo-in for Ron, because I knew him already, and Jodie had recently done Venus [2006] with Peter O’Toole, then St Trinian’s [2007 – and its 2009 sequel, St Trinian’s 2], and some TV. She was a very in-demand, up-and-coming actor. She’d already held her own opposite one of the greatest actors in the world – O’Toole. Venus is an amazing showcase for her.