Digital Cover: Asha Banks on Embracing Vulnerability

It’s foggy in LA, but Asha Banks is feeling bright and sunny. “I’m just so, so happy… I feel full.” She’s had a busy month: My Fault: London, her new film, was quickly followed by Untie My Tongue, her first EP.  

The latter is full of songs exploring heartbreak and the end of the relationship “from its early stages to its ending stages”, encompassing a wide range of feelings. On ‘Shiver’, Asha asks an ex-lover, “Do you think about me as much as I think about you?”, while ‘Closing Time’ sees her contrasting the “sugar rush” beginning of a relationship with the realisation that “only one of us knows it’s closing time”. Fundamentally, the EP is about truth: telling it, asking for it, attempting to figure it out. “They felt like pivotal moments in a relationship,” Asha says now, “It was about telling a story.”  

Having acted from a young age after being cast as young Eponine in the West End production of Les Misérables, Asha Banks is accustomed to telling other people’s stories, other people’s truths. What was it like to speak for herself, this time? “With acting, you’re bringing to life somebody else’s creative vision, which is beautiful and which I love doing. But it was really exciting and a different venture to kind of tell my own story. It’s daunting, but it’s also so exciting to me.” As the title of the EP implies, this is Asha’s moment to speak.  

Songwriting, in fact, has long been a part of how she expresses herself. “I wrote my first song when I was six. My mum says it was called ‘Mummy Is My Darling’,” she laughs, “I loved writing songs about my family members and how much I love them. I think the next one was like, a song about my grandma.” She’s always been dependent on music, “in an emotional way”. “You can materialise something that’s happening inside you. That process really helps me. And it also resonates with other people, it can allow them to realise something about themselves.” With two shows at Omeara in London coming up, she’s excited to see those feelings reflected back at her on the faces of her audience: “I feel like I’ve met so many of my fans online, so it’s going to be so surreal to smile at people and give everybody hugs.”  

Growing up, she was drawn to her parents’ favourite music – Joni Mitchell and Nora Jones from her mum, Jack Johnson from her dad – and she feels the influence, even now, of that confessional strain of writing. “There was this initial fear of being vulnerable, and the need to be very transparent, but once you let it out, it becomes beautiful.” Genre, too, is something she’s comfortable exploring without being boxed in by it. “It was about finding something that felt really true,” she says, “When we were writing the EP, we were trying not to think too much about the exterior world… we just wanted it to sound right, emotionally.” 

In writing so transparently about her real life, does she ever feel too exposed? “I feel like you’re kind of just forced to be completely honest, whether you want to be or not, because you have to just get over the fact that people are going to listen to it. Otherwise it’s not going to hit the same. The songs that everybody loves are the ones that are truthful.” And, she says, music gives her an outlet to feelings and experiences she wouldn’t otherwise know how to handle: “If I couldn’t write about everything that happens, it would probably swallow me whole.”  

She is, however, also inspired by things that haven’t happened to her. ‘Feel the Rush’, another track on the EP, is written from the perspective of Noah, her character in My Fault: London. “It was a different approach. I hadn’t written about an experience that isn’t my own before. I wrote the song literally five days after I finished filming, so I was still very much in Noah mode. I know the character so well and it was a lovely way to [get] closure and finish the circle.”  

It was the character of Noah which initially drew Asha to the script when it first landed in her hands. “I loved that it’s kind of a surreal story, pushed to extremes, but it feels very real, and she’s just a normal girl. I cared about her, instantly, and when I did the self-tape, it just came to me very naturally.”  

Another aspect of the film which appealed to Asha Banks was its two female directors, Dani Girdwood and Charlotte Fassler. “I’m very lucky that I’ve had a lot of female-heavy teams on productions I’ve worked on. As a young female actor, making my first steps into the film and television world, it’s brought me comfort, and so much fun.” When it comes to romance plots, she loves that My Fault: London manages to be both “sexy and cool and heightened and dramatic” but still has a strong feminine perspective.  

At the centre of so much activity, Asha is feeling good about the future. Ideally, she says, she wants acting and songwriting to coexist: “I’ve always done both since I was little. So the dream would just be to be able to continue that and find ways for them to kind of collide and overlap.” She would also love to go back to her musical theatre roots: “It’s my whole background, my whole childhood.” She’s also excited to explore more versatile roles: “I’ve been lucky that the characters I’ve played feel quite similar to me and I’m intrigued to see what it would be like doing something that’s further from me.”  

Looking back at that young girl stepping on the West End stage for the first time, what advice would she give a past Asha Banks? “To carry on going and keep finding the love in it,” she says, smiling.