Madfabulous director on working with It’s A Sin star Callum Scott Howells: ‘He’s a generational talent’

Celyn Jones peers over his shoulder at the film board behind him, featuring the Grade-1 listed house and gardens of Plas Newydd. “I’m from Anglesey,” says Jones. “I’ve known that house in the poster all of my life.”

He knew less about the man in the middle of the image, Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, here embodied by It’s A Sin star Callum Scott Howells in a plush pink suit. It’s a shame; Paget, a real-life aristocrat with a penchant for the extravagant, was a man who liked to make his presence known.

Jones is in the basement of a BFI venue in London to talk about Madfabulous, the new historical drama movie he’s directed about Paget’s outlandish existence. Paget, nicknamed “Toppy” and subsequently dubbed “The Dancing Marquess”, swanned into the family-owned Plas Newydd following the death of his father in 1989, decked in lacy robes, reams of pearls and lavish headpieces. 

The finer details of his life are sketchy – his remaining family are believed to have destroyed his letters and diaries – but what is certain is that alongside the estate, Paget inherited a gargantuan amount of cash, roughly £11million in today’s money. Yet his adoration for flamboyant costumes, fine jewellery and putting on lavish balls and grand theatrical displays for the locals saw him far exceed his inheritance. He died of tuberculosis in 1905 in Monaco, aged 29, bankrupt, having spent the equivalent of £60million. “That line is in the archives: ‘I have an attraction to jewels that I am powerless to resist,’” says Jones. “He said that, and I feel like he really did mean it.”

The kernel for Madfabulous came to Jones way back in 2014, after he wrapped up filming Dylan Thomas drama Set Fire to the Stars, which he co-wrote and starred in alongside Elijah Wood. He came across perhaps the best-known photo of Paget, in which he’s sitting posing like a pop star – “looking like David Bowie or looking like Mark Boland, staring at the camera” – while donning one of his eccentric garments. On further inspection, he noted the date and location of the photo: 1890, North Wales. “Then my imagination went…” Jones mimes his brain exploding. “That was enough,” he says. The film began piecing itself together.

Madfabulous didn’t begin filming until 2024, with production taking place on location in Plas Newydd. By then, Jones had formed his “super group” of cast and creatives. Ruby Stokes, Rupert Everett, and Paul Rhys joined. Francisco Rodriguez-Weil, who makes costumes for operas, hand-crafted elaborate outfits for Howells. Lost Boys and Fairies production designer Keith Dunne came onboard. “I was getting my Beatles. I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got my John and Paul,’” Jones jokes. Nadia Stacey, who had just won an Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling for Poor Things, joined too. “She is a genius,” he adds. “With Nadia, it was like, ‘Well what notes am I really going to give you? I can’t hear you over your Oscar!”

All these pieces make a puzzle, but it is Howells who is imprinted on the final product. As Paget, he offers a commanding performance, filling every scene – and he is in almost every scene – with madcap élan. It’s his first time leading a feature film, but the offers will likely fly in after Madfabulous gets out there (He is already set to play Holly Johnson in Relax, a Frankie Goes to Hollywood biopic).

Like most of us, Jones came to know 26-year-old Callum Scott Howells through his BAFTA Cymru-winning performance as timid queer man Colin in It’s A Sin, a performance he delivered while still in drama training. This was Jones’ first indication that Howells should play Paget. The second was that, despite having met on numerous occasions at the BAFTAs and other events – “‘cos, Welsh you know, we huddle together” – Jones saw Howells as the Emcee in Cabaret, but didn’t know it was him.

“Weirdly, [Cabaret] was on the Royal Variety performance and specifically my daughter was obsessed with it and was watching it on loop all the time,” Jones recalls. “I was thinking, ‘This is incredible.’ And I swear to you,  I didn’t know it was Callum.” When he found out, “I thought, ‘This boy is extraordinary. The transformation, the physicality.’”

Then it came to casting for Madfabulous. “We need an actor who challenges us, who pushes us. We need to fall in love with [Paget] and he will push us away with his behaviour and we need to forgive him. They need to be able to be funny and charming and delicate and fragile. The whole range,” Jones says. Howells was the only actor he asked. “He’s a generational talent.”

Getting to watch Howells transform into Emcee was mesmerising enough, but to see it in the flesh left Jones’ mouth agape. He recalls a scene in the film in which Paget, at this point drunk on his own profligacy, peers helplessly into a shop window, eyeing up more jewels. “It was great, but we needed a little bit more tension,” Jones remembers. “I just said to him, ‘You’re an addict. He can’t help himself to buy all these things in the window. This is addiction’. And he went, ‘OK’. All of a sudden, his face changed. His eyes sunk back, his demeanour changed and I watched this [transformation], the face, the eyes, with no makeup, no hair. This was just purely acting. Extraordinary.”

“I am an actor still,” says Jones, who won a BAFTA Cymru Award for playing serial killer Levi Bellfield in ITV’s Manhunt. “I always think you’ve got to find the man in the monster and the monster in the man.” While Henry Paget was no cold-blooded murderer, he was a peculiar, complex man, arriving in the late 19th century like a “lightning bolt,” Jones says, “from the future”. He prioritised pleasure, defied authority, held everyone around in similar regard regardless of their social standing. He was reckless, leaving a trail of chaos and dishonour in his wake. 

“The challenge is finding sympathy for somebody who spends all that money and brings all that kind of pressure and all that scandal but yet you love him,” Jones says. “I think well, they must have loved him.” One line in Madfabulous, read out from accountant Mr. Jones to Paget, reads: “Despite your idiosyncrasies, you’re very well liked.” It’s a real line Jones found in the archives, addressed to Paget.

Today, it’s his idiosyncrasies that have rendered Henry Paget a quiet, queer cultural icon. His sexuality wasn’t clear, though it’s known, and referenced in Madfabulous, that he didn’t consummate his marriage with his wife (and cousin) Lily (played by Bridgerton’s Ruby Stokes). He was frequently adorned in typically female clothing, is cited as an influence on Harris Reed, the creative director of fashion brand Nina Ricci, known for dressing Harry Styles and Olly Alexander. In modern parlance, Paget would probably be deemed genderqueer or gender non-conforming.

“Yes,” agrees Jones. “And [he] means so much to so many people. I think that’s what’s fabulous, that the ownership that people can have with Henry is really tangible.” It is fabulous. Mad fabulous, you might say. “That’s why we use: ‘Be yourself, everybody else is taken,’ the Oscar Wilde line. It’s such a good message for everybody, isn’t it?”

Madfabulous is screening at BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival on 25, 26 and 29 March. A UK theatrical release will follow on 5 June.

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