My name is Matthew Barry, and I'm a screenwriter. I started out acting as a teenager, but when I hit eighteen, it became harder and harder to land roles. So, I dutifully headed off to university where I studied History and Politics and, following in the footsteps of most of my friends, I landed a job as a corporate lawyer. Though just before I started, I realised that a high-flying legal career probably wasn’t going to make me happy.  

So, I wrote a script about someone deciding between law and a career in the arts (sound familiar?) and sent it to TV Producer Nicola Shindler (Quay Street Productions) who I'd worked with when I was acting, years earlier. She said, ‘This is great. Let's make it!’ Unfortunately, it didn't get picked up in the end, but it gave me the courage I needed to pursue a career in screenwriting (the characters from that script did become the basis of my episode of Banana that we made together, with Russell T Davies, many years later).

headshot of man with brown hair and blue jumper

Fast forward to 2017, I moved to LA and started working in American writers’ rooms. I love living in LA, and I love the American system – how much of a business (showbusiness!) it is and the opportunities it offers. Post-COVID, the world has really shrunk, and it's a lot easier to work both in the UK and America, especially with Zoom. I've got British friends who’ve been in American writers’ rooms from the UK; they just start at five or six in the evening. Although American writers’ rooms are called writers rooms, there's not actually a lot of writing that goes on – it's a lot of talking and pitching ideas. That’s a completely different skill that took me a while to learn.

I’ve worked on loads of great shows, but one moment that really stands out is early on in my career, writing on EastEnders. It’s such an iconic show with the best writer’s credit of any TV show in the world; you have your big cliffhanger (the big doof, doof) and then in huge, bold letters, it says ‘written by…’, for millions and millions of viewers to see. That was my biggest wow moment because it was my first prime-time credit. And writing ‘Interior Queen Vic’ for the first time – there’s something so thrilling about that!

More recently, I created and wrote The Guest, a four-part thriller for the BBC set in Cardiff. It was another project that I worked on with Nicola Shindler. The idea originally came from my love of those iconic 90s thrillers – The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Fatal Attraction. But what was most important to me, was to tell the story from a working-class perspective. Fortunately, that was something the BBC was interested in, with backing from Creative Wales’ production funding. Eve Myles and Gabrielle Creevy play our two amazing leads.

For me, story always comes from character. I'm always asking: Where's the character coming from? What's the character doing and what do they want to achieve? I know writers who write plot first – murder, then this, then that, then the twist – and almost backfill in character motivation later. With The Guest, I always wanted to put character first.

In 2024, Sara Nourizadeh and I set up Avalanche Productions to tell non-fiction stories. We’ve been best friends since high school, and it’s something we'd always talked about. Sara had been working on a project called Finding Hope, and what drew me in – even though Avalanche focuses on non-fiction – were the character journeys. Even though the "characters" in Finding Hope are, of course, real people, the narrative building blocks (i.e. story-telling rules), still apply. It was a new challenge for me, and I Ioved it. Coming at it from a drama background, while Sara specialises in documentaries, our skills seem to complement each other.

We're working on a couple of projects, but Avalanche is about telling the stories we are passionate about. I remember saying to the BBC, we're never going to come to you and pitch a daytime antiques show with 100+ episodes a year!

For Finding Hope we were lucky enough to get development funding from Creative Wales, without which, we wouldn't have been able to make the project. As with The Guest, I’m proud to also have had Creative Wales’ backing for another drama that I made for the BBC called Men Up, which was based on the true story of a group of men who took part in the first Viagra trials in Swansea, in 1994.

What I love about Creative Wales is that it's not just a financial commitment. Because they also say: with this money, you need to bring on trainees and build pathways into the industry. It's such a great entry point.

When encouraging US producers to choose Wales, a lot of the time it comes down to money, tax breaks, and how much you can add to a budget. Bad Wolf led the way with the American version of Torchwood and Da Vinci's Demons. Wales – and Cardiff specifically in terms of the hub that's been built there – is attractive for productions. And with the support offered by the Wales Screen service, Creative Wales can make it even more of an attractive option to international productions with the funding they’re able to offer.

For upcoming screenwriters, there are a couple of sayings I’d like to share: It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And for young writers – just write. Always have two spec scripts. There are loads of opportunities like BBC Writers’ Room; that doesn't mean it's easy, but they are out there. It’s easy to talk about writing and about good ideas, but it’s very hard to write. So just write.

Enjoyed this interview? Read more conversations with leading Welsh creatives in our In Conversation With series.

It’s easy to talk about writing and about good ideas, but it’s very hard to write. So just write'

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