The actor on his Notting Hill childhood, his role in Fisherman’s Friends – and the best advice he’s ever been given
Noel Clarke has grown up at Uli in Notting Hill. The actor first came to Michael Lim’s restaurant 20 years ago, along with his girlfriend, at the invitation of director Rikki Beadle-Blair who had taken a chance on casting the unknown Clarke in his debut TV role. The Szechuan chilli prawns and perfect calamari seemed good portents and he and that girlfriend – Iris Da-Silva, now his wife and mother of his three boys – have kept coming back.
During the years that Clarke was writing and starring in his landmark film Kidulthood and its sequel Adulthood– more than a decade ago, before his boys were born – he would sit in Uli with friends and collaborators until the early hours (“Michael never minded,” he says. “He just sat at the next table with a glass of wine and let us get on with it.”). And as Clarke, now 43, has developed to become a director and producer as well as an actor and writer, the restaurant has matured into sleeker middle age with him. Its original incarnation was on All Saints Road in North Kensington, a few streets away from the council block in the shadow of Grenfell Tower in which Clarke grew up. A few years ago, like Clarke, the restaurant migrated to the leafier south of the borough, nearer Holland Park. We met there for lunch on one of those freakishly warm February days.
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