Ewan Mitchell Conversations

If you’re here, you already know who Ewan Mitchell is. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about him for someone who has, by all accounts, made it his personal mission to reveal as little as humanly possible. Fair play Mitchell. It has, however, done absolutely nothing for my ability to keep my thoughts to myself.

This blog is first and foremost a discussion blog about Ewan. His career, his roles, his interviews, public appearances, upcoming projects, the wider film and television industry, and occasionally whatever thought has decided to set up camp in my brain that week. Sometimes we’ll deep dive into an episode of HOTD. Sometimes it’ll be a film. Sometimes it’ll be a single interview. Sometimes it’ll be one sentence from one interview that absolutely did not require the level of analysis I’m about to subject it to. And sometimes, about Ewan himself.

So… why does this blog exist? Because I genuinely think there’s a gap.

The main fan pages keep almost everything centred around the work. Then at the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got gossip accounts that in my opinion have wandered so far off the map they’ve forgotten there’s an actual person involved. Anonymous messages become evidence, speculation becomes certainty, and people’s lives become entertainment. Personally I think that’s a horrific direction for a fandom to head in. Somewhere along the line, nobody with any sense of proportion really stepped up to occupy the middle ground. I wanted to try.

This isn’t a gossip account. I have absolutely no interest in digging through accounts, hunting for information that was never meant to be found, or encouraging anyone else to do it either. Leave people alone. If something was clearly intended to stay private, I don’t think it’s my business, and I don’t want this blog to become somewhere that rewards or encourages that kind of behaviour.

The reality though is that not everything stays private. Sometimes things escape into the public conversation completely without your involvement. You open TikTok and there it is. You scroll X and there it is. Once that happens I don’t think it makes much sense for everybody to stick their fingers in their ears singing “la la la la” and pretend they haven’t seen it. People have seen it. Naturally they’re going to have questions. I sometimes have questions, and I wanted to find space and people to talk about this stuff with.

I’d much rather those questions were asked here than in corners of the internet where complete strangers treat another person’s private life like a sport, where anonymous asks are elevated to fact, and where the next outrageous theory is always more exciting than the most likely explanation. People are too afraid to ask these questions elsewhere because it results in a block from the main accounts. This pushes people towards the gossip accounts. It’s a vicious circle that doesn’t need to exist.

If something has already entered the public conversation I’d rather we could talk about it. Share how it made us feel. Ask whether it actually makes sense. Add context where we can. Challenge our own assumptions. Sometimes reassure each other that we’re probably reading too much into something and need to calm the fuck down. Sometimes conclude that actually, we just dont know. Not because every conversation needs to end with a definitive answer, but because I think a little perspective and a little humanity go a very long way.

That way of thinking extends well beyond discussions about someone’s personal life. It’s how I approach interviews, performances, press tours, career decisions and the wider industry generally.

The rule I try to hold myself to is incredibly simple: would I say this to Ewans face? If the answer is no, it doesn’t go up. It’s not a perfect rule, but it’s served me pretty well so far. That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree, criticise, question or have difficult conversations. It just means trying not to be dicks in the process.

So that’s what you’ll find here. Expect long posts. Expect overanalysis. Expect me to become disproportionately invested in one sentence from an interview that everyone else forgot about five minutes after it was published.

"Next Newall will play the lead in Yutong Bai’s debut feature The Way Of The Runner, based on racist attacks on foreign students in London. “I play the nationalist who does the attacking,” says Newall. “It’s hard to portray someone who would do stuff like this and you want to make sure you do it right.”"

Great find!

Interesting he is listed as the lead when he doesn't feature very heavily in the clips on IMDB,

You know, this may be it.

Many of us do not want to engage in many of the spaces for a myriad of reasons, which is why I started this little blog in the first place.

I am nosy af! I want to know where? And who? Lol. Cause I am only floating here ✨

HA!

I am not sending you their way, but they know who they are. Because they read here.

Hey friend.

I’ve somehow carved out this weird little pocket of the internet where basically nobody claims me. The wives don’t love me because I talk about him outside the very specific box they’ve decided is acceptable. Talking about his private life, no. Talking about bouncing on his dick, apparently yes. The gossip hate accounts aren’t fans either mostly because I keep debunking their stuff, which I’m told is very rude of me for someone who won’t just let a made up lie breathe. And then the big proper Tumblr blogs side eye me over how I use hashtags, which is somehow the third front of this war I didn’t sign up for.

So that's the scorecard. Three separate camps, three separate reasons, one me, stuck somewhere in the middle not quite fitting any of the boxes.

And then this morning I find out people have been lifting stuff straight off this blog and posting it elsewhere like it's theirs which I don't know what to do with. Part of me is annoyed, obviously. But another part of me is sat here thinking, well, you're still reading it closely enough to copy it while telling everyone you can't stand me. Make it make sense.

Grain of salt from me yeah. I can totally see him giving off flirty vibes purely from the eye contact thing and I get it because I'm a huge flirt myself. It's harmless, it's fun, it makes people feel nice for the rest of the day. But also I once made eye contact with the bassist from Kings of Leon at a gig and spent a solid week convinced he was going to propose. So make of that what you will.

That said i’ve never actually come across a lovely wholesome fan story that specifically mentions flirting, not on any other platform, not in all the time I've been in this fandom. So if this has come from where I think it's come from, I'd be questioning the motive and the intent behind it rather than taking it at face value. There's a difference between an excitable cute fan story where he might have had a wee little flirt with someone, and a story where you have to stop and ask whether there was actually a good reason for it being told in the first place. Do you know what I mean?

Oh it’s a HUGE self insert and I find that really interesting. Psychologically when a fandom decides on someone’s “type” is, it’s just self insertion dressed up as observation. They’re reverse engineering a “type” that happens to line up suspiciously well with what they think they could be. It’s less “here’s the evidence” and more “here’s the fantasy, now let me build a case for it.” It’s dead easy to look at his interests, the video games, the metal, and go “well he’d obviously hang about with alt or goth girls so he must be into them too,” even though as far as any of us can actually see he’s never dated one. Nobody’s out here going “I reckon he’s into six foot two models with legs up to their armpits,” because that doesn’t keep anyone’s fantasy running. The whole point of picking a type is that it feels reachable something you could theoretically be or already are. Keeps the crush alive that bit longer.

I don’t think the goth thing is a total reach btw. It’s not wildly out there given what we know about his interests. Where it stops being a reasonable guess and starts being self insert is when people go very very VERY specific about a hypothetical future girlfriend. Job, personality, whole backstory, or Jesus, how much pubic hair they have. At that point you’re not theorising about him anymore you’re just writing your own biog and giving it his name at the top. Some of those, yeah, that’s a no from me.

None of this is shade btw, there’s no real harm in any of it. That’s just how a crush works when you don’t actually know someone and you were never going to date them. It’s kind of the same energy as the shipping conversation we had the other week. It’s about having some sense of control over a story you’ve got precisely zero actual control over. Deciding his type, deciding who he’d end up with, all the same impulse. You are the author of the fantasy instead. There’s no harm in it, crack on, just maybe don’t present it as established law when the one real data point we’ve actually got says otherwise.

This is why I think it’s such a clever move when the big fic writer on here does it on purpose. She (?) never gives her reader insert characters physical descriptions, no hair colour, no build, nothing. That’s not laziness that’s deliberate because it keeps the whole thing wide open and accessible so anyone reading can slot themselves right in without the door being quietly shut on them.

I follow Connor Newall on Instagram and he always posts his upcoming projects. He hasn't done it yet for The Way of the Runner. Which makes me think they haven't started their marketing yet and maybe in the festival submission phase right now.

It would also explain the strange summary on IMDB and why Ewan still isn't in the credits. I assume once press releases (each time they're accepted to a festival) start being released, the IMDB will start looking more polished and it's when Ewan will be added.

Totally. Budget wise this thing clearly does not have a marketing team yet, and I don't think anyone involved sat down and thought "better brace ourselves cos a fan is going to be combing through the IMDB credits like she's solving a murder." Most people don't go digging through an actor's filmography for sport. We are not most people. That one's on us. None of this was built for an audience yet we've just gone snooping early. It'll get tidied up eventually, nobody's polished it because nobody expected us to be looking this hard this soon.

Please send in your story! Or feel free to share and link others you have seen.

Thanks so much! It’s a real labour of love (and the ultimate procrastination device!).

Intel!

Very interesting. Also looks like the company is registered in Bucks where Ewan was spotted a few weeks ago.

But I have a masters degree in film, thats why I wrote as long of a message as I did, personally I can see what the director is going for but it just doesnt have it to make it there.

The trailer lengths itself are absurd, but thats another conversation entirely.

I do have a huge problem with the stereotyping in the film as it stands, even if the director is chinese herself, the sentiment still stands - why sell yourself out to a white audience at the expense of your culture or the parts of it that are "palatable" for the west? I don't like the weird white saviour tone its taken.

If you want to watch real asian arthouse films, I'd suggest watching some Taiwanese and HK films.

I really appreciate this whole exchange, disagreeing, learning, being told I'm wrong about a technical term on a Friday afternoon, all of it. This is exactly the kind of conversation I want happening under my posts.

I'm curious what you think about the position a director from within that heritage actually sits in here, whether there's a real tension between telling a story on her own terms and needing western funding potentially or distribution to get it made at all, and whether that pressure is what's producing the bits that read as palatable for the west rather than it being a straightforward choice. Is that a dynamic you think about with other diaspora or international directors too, or does this one feel different? Please let me pick your brain!

Like, yes they're made for artistic and aesthetic expression rather than wider commercial gain, and this film probably does run along side that idea for a good amount of the film.

However, you can't call any film that doesn't have a clear idea of what it is, an 'arthouse' film. I have no doubt it does follow a rather deep plot that means something to the director, but that doesn't make it arthouse, there needs to be a sense of social realism to them to even get to be considered an arthouse film.

The trailers are a big indication of that, two trailers totally 7 minutes isnt normal for any genre film like at all, unless the production and director know that the film they've made isn't strong. There's plenty signs its not a strong film, the acting is a very big indicator of that, both the main actress and Ewan are extremely sub-par at times even from the trailers.

To reference "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice", "the art cinema motivates its narrative by two principles: realism and authorial expressiveness". Art films (also known as arthouse) deviate from the mainstream "classical" norms of film making in that they typically deal with more episodic narrative structures with a "loosening of the chain of cause and effect"

If an art film has a story (which even from TWOTR you can tell there is a racial story line at its base), it is usually a drifting sequence of vaguely defined or ambiguous episodes. Thats what comprise arthouse as a genre.

The director is shooting for arthouse but from what I've seen isnt strong enough to be able to deliver that with the story she's trying to tell. The fact its a comedy/crime with a murder plot completely subjugates that arthouse is. Comedy and Crime are both genres, like arthouse is a separate genre itself.

Arthouse, plainly is supposed to leave the viewer asking "how is the story being told? Why tell the story in this way?" because its supposed to be vague enough that you're supposed to think and settle on things yourself from the aesthetic visuals its presenting.

All TWOTR is doing is making points and getting you to think about them, but the issue is that its telling you the points to think about; like race, culture etc. There's not enough baseline vagueness to have you start to piece together the story yourself.

If you really want to give it a genre, its literally just indie, not arthouse, they're not the same, they can overlap but in this case no, they dont.

First things first, I manage to write an absolutely deranged amount of text for this blog on a weekly basis, so I think I've earned the right to one typo between arthouse and art house without it becoming a full character reference. Grace. I am asking, begging, for grace.

That said fair play this is an actual proper reply with a citation in it, which is more effort than I put into most of my A Levels so I want to engage with it rather than just vibes block you :)

You're right that arthouse means something more specific than "low budget and a bit sad," which if I'm honest was doing a lot of heavy lifting in my usage. Bordwell's whole thing about art cinema narration loose causality ambiguity you sit in rather than get handed on a plate, that's a real distinction and I was absolutely not being that precise

Where I'd actually push back a bit is on the genre point. The paper you quoted calls it "a mode of film practice" right there in the title, not a genre. Bordwell's argument is that art cinema is a way of telling a story, one that can run alongside or inside other genres rather than competing with them for space. Plenty of arthouse films are built entirely on genre scaffolding, crime, horror, even comedy, and use that structure as the vehicle for the ambiguity rather than something that cancels it out. So I don't think comedy and crime elements automatically rule TWOTR out of the category the way you're using it, if anything your own source suggests genre and mode can sit on top of each other rather than one blocking the other.

Where we probably just have to disagree for now is whether the film achieves real ambiguity or ends up telling you what to think about race and culture rather than trusting you to sit with it. That's a whole film judgement, pacing, what it withholds, what it trusts the audience with over two hours, not something seven minutes of trailer cut together by a marketing team can settle either way. Lets come back here so you can tell me your thoughts when we have seen the film, as I really really do want to read them.