Deadline has partnered with The Brit List to profile some of the emerging writers who have made this year’s ranking of the best unproduced UK film and TV projects. Launched in 2007, The Brit List has previously featured projects including The King’s Speech and Responsible Child. In this piece, we profile Robert Cawsey, who has made the list with Don’t Even Go There.
EXCLUSIVE: A disastrous Easter weekend break in the Brecon Beacons mountain range in Wales was the catalyst for writer-actor-comedian Robert Cawsey’s screenplay Don’t Even Go There, which is the most popular project in this year’s Brit List with 24 recommendations.
“I was trying to write a horror-comedy, but it wasn’t going anywhere,” recounts Cawsey. “Then I went on a trip to the Brecon Beacons with my mum and dad. When we got there, the car broke down. We couldn’t get a phone signal, so we had to hitchhike.”
They made it to a house, where a party of family and friends from London were staying, but their woes did not end there.
“They sent the wrong breakdown van and then there was a landslide, which stopped people from coming in and out, we ended up in a local pub. After struggling with the other feature script, I was telling my friend this story and they were like, ‘That’s what you should be writing’,” continues Cawsey.
The director has also tapped into the real-life family tragedy of the death of his twin sister when he was young, giving the story an extra layer.
The resulting screenplay follows protagonist Will as he embarks on a hiking trip in Wales in a bid to reconnect with his estranged parents. Everything goes horribly wrong when an ancient monster is unleashed, seeking revenge on the locals for something they did many years previously.
“It’s essentially a tale about three members of a family, dealing with grief in different ways,” says Cawsey. “I love how horror can be used as a kind of metaphor for things that happen in life.”
Sources of inspiration include the work of Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos as well as films such as The Babadook and Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 drama Don’t Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as a couple who travel to Venice following the accidental death of their daughter.
“I grew up in a small town, so I’m also drawn to those small-town stories like The Wicker Man,” he says, adding. ““I like humor in high stake situations, and I’ve also always been drawn to awkwardness and vulnerability of people desperately trying to connect and failing.”
Cawsey, who is represented by Curtis Brown, finished the screenplay over the summer and it is now out to producers.
“We’re waiting on a lot of reads,” he says. “It’s great to be on the Brit List… I’m excited.”
Cawsey grew up in the Welsh seaside resort of Penarth and moved to London in his late teens to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, followed by a stint at the comedy and clowning-focused Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris, the alumni of which include Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen.
“I was good at comedy. I was always cast in comedy roles and really wanted to explore that more. I also wanted to do some traveling and liked the romantic idea of going to study in Paris,” he explains.
Struggling to get enough work as an actor on his return, Cawsey started writing his own material, and also created a comedy double act with best friend Gabe Bisset-Smith, under the banner of Guilt and Shame.
In 2013, the duo performed at the same Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue, where Phoebe Waller-Bridge was unveiling Fleabag for the first time under the direction of longtime collaborator Vicky Jones.
They became close friends, with Cawsey starting a podcast with Bisset-Smith and Jones, who also supported his first solo comedy theater show.
“After having worked with her on that, Phoebe and Vicky then asked I wanted to be in the writers’ room for their upcoming HBO show Run and I obviously said yes. That was my first professional writing job. That was in 2020 and was how it all started,” he says.
From there, he won a commission to work with a well-known but undisclosed actor on a sci-fi comedy, being developed by J.J. Abrams’ company Bad Robot and Warner Bros. The project never got off the ground, but the experience gave Cawsey a taste of L.A., albeit during the Covid pandemic.
“It was quite a strange time… there were lots of rules in L.A. about people being in offices. So, me and the actor I was writing this project with were the only people in the whole of Bad Robot at the time. It was quite surreal,” he recalls.
Prior to getting his first writing room break on Run, Cawsey wrote and starred in the webseries Right Now about a gay hook-ups, again inspired by his own experiences.
“Basically, I came out of the closet a bit late and had a sexual awakening later in life. I dived into the world of hookups, which is something I’d not done before, and ended up with so much material,” recounts Cawsey, who collaborated with director friend Andy Hui on the show made which played on YouTube.
“We wanted it to look as high-end and filmic as possible. We treated every episode like a short film. It was all consuming. We spent a year on it and I’d love to revisit it someday,’ he adds.
As the screenplay for Don’t Even Go There looks producer partners, Cawsey has a number of other projects in development including a gangster comedy series set in Wales, and is also writing second feature set in a fictitious town where the inhabitants are only allowed to have sex one day of the year.
“I’m really drawn to dystopian or alternative worlds,” says Cawsey. “As a young queer kid, I spent so much time in fantasy worlds in my head, and still probably do, and I’m interested in work that reframes our ingrained behaviors towards sex and relationships.”
