8 Wednesday June 8 2022 | the timesarts
day, I became convinced I’d been
invited as a joke”, he says. He was sure
that the prank would be revealed in
the speeches, and when it wasn’t he
made a note of the “out-of-body”
anxiety he’d felt and told Palmer about
it. Palmer, as old friends do, laughed at
him. Then they got to work.
“From his perspective it was a
terrifying nightmare, but from my
perspective it was funny because it was
so narcissistic,” says Palmer, also 34.
“I said, ‘This is someone else’s wedding
and you’re making yourself the
protagonist in your own little horror
movie.’ That’s something we tried to
hold on to, how little things from
different perspectives can seem
laughable or utterly horrifying.”
As the weekend goes on,
Pete’s anxiety spirals. He is
simultaneously disappointed that
his friends haven’t changed and
that he never seems to be in on
the joke any more. No one is
interested in his painfully
sincere stories of working with
refugee children. And then
there’s Harry (Dustin Demri-
Burns), a local man the gang
have picked up in the pub, who
seems to be vying for his position
as alpha male and keeps jotting
things down in his notebook.
“It seemed like a good starting point
for tension: what should be a happy
occasion, feeling really threatening,”
Stourton says. “The idea that there’s a
paper-thin divide between complete
loneliness and the safety net of a
group of supposedly old friends.”
The resulting film, directed by
Andrew Gaynord (Stath Lets Flats), is
something like Kenneth Branagh’s
reunion comedy Peter’s Friends mixed
with Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel,
and the Bullingdon Club satire Posh
with lashings of upper-crust millennialA
t the beginning of
All My Friends Hate
Me, Pete, played by
Tom Stourton, sets
off to Devon to
celebrate his 31st
birthday in a manor
house with his old
university friends, Archie, Fig, George
and Claire. “They’re really not
stereotypical posh people,” Pete tells
his girlfriend, Sonia. “They’re cool, I
promise.” On the way, there are
worrying portents — he gets lost, of
course, there’s a whimpering dog and
he is chased across a field by a sinister
figure — and when his friends finally
turn up, hours late, things get steadily
worse. As Pete goes to bed that first
night, he crosses Fig (Georgina
Campbell) on the stairs. “Listen, Pete,
you’re not doing too well,” she says,
icily. “This weekend so far, you’ve been
a bit crap, haven’t you?”
It was the first scene that Stourton
and his co-writer Tom Palmer wrote,
asking themselves the question,
“‘What if there was a world in which
your friends didn’t say the nice thing?’
How surreal, how much like a horror
film would that feel?” Stourton says.
All My Friends Hate Me pushes that
thought to its deliciously disconcerting
limit, as a nostalgia-fuelled rural
reunion turns into a drug-fuelled
baroque psychological horror.
Stourton is 34 years old, blond, tall
in a slightly awkward way and has the
unmistakable aquiline nose of his
father, Edward, the BBC broadcaster.
He is quick to cringe and very polite,
the kind of polite you imagine might
get him into social scrapes. Indeed, he
tells me the film was partly inspired by
a wedding he went to six years ago of
two friends he hadn’t seen for a while.
He hadn’t had much sleep the night
before — “and over the course of thejust a really expensive therapy session
for me.’ ”
It was, at the very least, an exercise
in writing what you know. Stourton
is the son of the Radio 4 presenter
(a descendant of the 19th Baron
Stourton) and Margaret McEwen, the
daughter of Sir James Napier Finnie
McEwen, a baronet. “All I can say is
that it helped write that story, the fact
that I experience class guilt.” There is
no Stourton country pile — “No,
absolutely not. I think that’s all long
gone. Cromwell took it, I think” — but
his parents enjoyed the film. “My
mum was upset that I didn’t have a
nicer haircut,” Stourton mumbles. And
his father? “I know my dad finds
something funny when he starts
vibrating, the shoulders start shaking.”
Stourton attended Eton, where he
and Palmer were in the same house.
The two bonded over learning Ali G
sketches off by heart and making
snarky, self-referential films on
Stourton’s camcorder. When they were
students — Stourton studying history
of art at Bristol, Palmer history at
Oxford — they uploaded one of their
sketches to YouTube. High Renaissance
Man follows a posh history of art
student at Bristol as he DJs at
drum’n’bass nights and basically,
tragically, attempts to be cool. He is
not terribly dissimilar to Pete. “After
ten years, we’ve come back to that joke:
someone posh trying to be something
they’re not,” Stourton says. “It just
seems like what we’re destined to do.”
The sketch led to them getting an
agent and forming a comedy double
act. They were nominated for best
newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy
Awards with their debut show in 2011,
and in 2014 they played Vladimir and
Estragon in a contemporary
interpretation of Waiting for Godot.
Palmer appeared in Posh on stage
while Stourton has become a go-to for
sneery, obnoxious lads in shows such
as Pls Like and Stath Lets Flats. “I
remember initially thinking, ‘Oh God,
I’m going to be endlessly typecast as
the posh idiot,’ and then work started
drying up and I thought, ‘I really wish
I was being typecast as anything.’ ”
The film was the product of
frustration at not being able to get
their scripts on television. “We’d been
pitching endlessly, and it just felt like
we were trying to be something we
weren’t, be what the commissioners
wanted. You have to have a pretty
thick skin, be very patient, and
probably also not be two posh white
guys,” Stourton says. “It was just
liberating to say, ‘OK, let’s not worry
about any of that. And just write what
we know, really specifically.’ It’s
authentic, at least.”
He and Palmer are already writing
their next film — a Christmas disaster
movie. “Anywhere where there’s a
bunch of repressed British people and
a lot of alcohol,” Stourton says, “feels
like good territory.”angst. Stourton and Palmer say they
were inspired by Force Majeure, the
2014 black comedy directed by Ruben
Ostlund about a family skiing holiday
marred by a disagreement. When All
My Friends Hate Me screened at New
York’s Tribeca Film Festival last year,
Variety said it captured what might
happen if “the protagonist of a
Richard Curtis film woke up on the
morning of whichever wedding or
funeral they were to attend, suddenly
cursed with self-awareness”. Certainly,
Pete is a Hugh Grant character
without the charm, and the opening
and setting — it was filmed at Sidbury
Manor in Devon — give it the look of
a frothy British comedy of manners,
which makes the tonal shifts all the
more disconcerting.
The menace is meticulously
controlled. There are drugs, guns,
a feeling of simmering chaos.
Alongside horror tropes — axe-
wielding mad men, dead ducks,
nooses — there are the social
horrors of being accidentally
rude, a disastrous grouse shoot
and a comedy roast that goes
wrong. “The film is about
exploding small moments for
someone who’s suffering from
chronic overthinking,” Gaynord says.
“Making them a much bigger deal
than they are in reality.”
The world of the film is
unashamedly upper class. The manor
house is George’s ancestral home, and
the gang shoot, drink champagne and
have a tradition of bringing wild card
(read lower-class) “randoms” to their
parties. “I was worried people might
say, ‘Why do I need to see a film about
a guy whose biggest problem is his
rich mates don’t like him?’ ” Stourton
says. “But it’s satisfying to see that guy
get gaslit for once.” He sighs. “The first
time I watched it, I thought, ‘This isThe fact
that I
experience
class guilt
helped me
to write
the story
All My Friends Hate
Me is in cinemas from
FridayStourton with his
father, Edward, the
BBC broadcaster, at
Tom’s 30th birthday‘This is just a
really costly
therapy
session
for me’
Tom Stourton tells Alice Jones about
the social anxiety that inspired All My
Friends Hate Me, his comedy horror
about posh millennials in the country
Left: Tom Stourton, and above,
starring in All My Friends Hate MeZACK DEZON/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY