'Islands' Cast and Crew Interviews: "Brits Abroad" meets "Freaky Friday"

At the Edinburgh Film Festival, we spoke with actors Sam Riley, Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing, and co-writer and director Jan-Ole Gerster about the vision behind Islands. Set against the windswept volcanic landscapes of Fuerteventura, Islands tells the story of Tom (Sam Riley), a washed-up tennis pro now coaching tourists at a Canary Islands resort. What should have been a paradise of endless summers has calcified into monotony until the arrival of Anne (Stacy Martin), her husband Dave (Jack Farthing), and their young son. When Dave suddenly disappears, Tom becomes entangled in a mystery that is less about crime than about longing, identity, and the uncomfortable truths people carry with them on holiday.

For director Jan-Ole Gerster, who rose to prominence with Oh Boy, the film was an opportunity to make his first English-language feature but not in the way one might expect. “I actually only learned about the term ‘Brits abroad’ a couple of months ago,” he laughs when i bring up the phrase. “It was never something I wanted to emphasise. For me, it was always supposed to be a timeless, universal kind of character. Because let’s be honest, Germans and Brits on holiday? Pretty much the same thing. But when I started exploring Fuerteventura, I realised there are as many Brits on the island as Germans. There are British supermarkets, sports bars, live music pubs that it felt like neutral ground. English didn’t feel like an add-on, it felt natural.”

Best known for his breakthrough performance as Ian Curtis in Control and collaborations with Ben Wheatley, Riley has built a career across European and independent cinema, often playing introspective, complex characters and the role of Tom felt like an irresistible opportunity. “I actually read the script on a beach,” he recalls. “And I just thought, ‘This is a brilliant role.’ So many lead roles are already locked down by studios, and an opportunity like this doesn’t come up often. I got the script before it went out to people like Michael Fassbender or Robert Pattinson, who I’m sure would have jumped at the chance. I’m a lot cheaper, though, and I had the opportunity to meet Jan-Ole straight away for a coffee in Berlin. I think he wasn’t sure about me at first. So we met, we played tennis - though I’d never played before, so no, I didn’t score any points," Riley laughs.
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For Gerster, that first encounter confirmed what he had suspected for years. He had long known Riley as a “mystery figure” in Berlin’s film scene but had never met him in person. “I knew he’d been living in Berlin for a while, but I’d never bumped into him, not even at the usual film parties. When I finished the script and started approaching actors, I thought, ‘Now’s the time to finally meet him.’ From the moment we met, I knew he was perfect. Directors sometimes ask: can I believe this person as a former tennis pro? Do they have the physical features? But with Sam, it was everything else - his fragile smile, soft eyes, smoky voice, body language, vulnerability. That was what mattered far more than physicality. It was love at first sight for the role.

What hooked Riley was the familiarity of Tom’s malaise. “Without oversharing, I do have some experience of that sort of behaviour,” he says. “I don’t drink, but I understand it. And the idea of never quite living up to your potential well that wasn’t exactly a million miles away from my own experience. Honestly, the tennis was the hardest part. The washed-up, dishevelled forty-something? Piece of piss.”

For Gerster, Riley’s urgency was what sold him. “Usually, actors tell me how much they want a part, but with Sam, it felt different. There was an urgency, like he needed to play Tom because he could pour so much of his own life experience into the role. That’s why the character works. In the wrong hands, Tom could have turned out rather banal. At the start of the film, you couldn’t care less about him but because of Sam, he becomes someone you end up feeling for.”

Riley relished the script’s refusal to spoon-feed the audience. “When I first read it, I thought, ‘This could go anywhere.’ At times it felt like maybe it was heading into a Patricia Highsmith story, or something Antonioni-like - The Passenger or those sun-drenched vacation noirs. But the ambiguity is much more fun to play. Exposition is when you really earn your money, because you’re saying things no one would ever naturally say. Ambiguity lets you play, listen, react.”

He also saw the film’s exploration of envy between men as relatable for viewers. “Dave looks at Tom and thinks: ‘This guy’s living the dream - drinking, sleeping around, playing tennis, the eternal holiday.’ Meanwhile, Tom looks at Dave and thinks: ‘He’s affluent, has a beautiful wife, a son, he’s built something.’ They’re both envious of each other, both wrong. There’s almost a Freaky Friday element - they want to swap lives, but neither is really happy.”

If Riley plays the aimless tennis coach, Stacy Martin supplies the enigma. “Stacy Martin had been on my radar for a long time,” Gerster says. “I’d followed her career through Brady Corbet’s films, Nymphomaniac, and others. To me, she was an indie queen, not yet fully discovered.”

​Known for her fearless performances in challenging, unconventional roles, Martin has built a reputation in European cinema for taking risks. “I was really excited to play a character who was extremely indecisive and extremely lost and maybe a bit more manipulative than she thinks or realises,” she says. “I wanted to push the expectations of what people see in me and the types of roles I’ve played before. When this script arrived, I thought, ‘This is an amazing opportunity to really delve into the complexities of people at a very specific crisis point in their lives.’”

Her director agrees that she embodies an elusive quality. “In reality she’s lovely,” says Gerster, “but onscreen you never quite know who she is. She has this enigmatic, mysterious quality. She embodies that classic femme fatale aura but not in a cliché way, but in a way that plays with fragility, strength, and mystery. She made her character beautifully human.”

​For Martin, Islands also felt like home turf. “European cinema has always been my home,” she reflects. “It’s where I started working, and it’s where I feel supported. It’s also where I can lose myself when I watch movies. I feel very lucky and very inspired every time because it changes and it grows, and you always have new directors coming up.”
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“Anyone who sees her work knows how fantastic she is. Incredibly brave too—you look at something like Nymphomaniac or the career she’s built in France,” Riley says having respected her career from afar. That admiration translated into their on-set dynamic as well. “On set, Stacy, Jack, and I all arrived really loving our characters, and there was this shared understanding of what the film was. Jan-Ole had written everything in the script because financiers want it all spelled out, but once we were filming, we found we could strip things away and say less, rely on looks, silences. Stacy in particular has this enigmatic, mysterious quality.” 

If Anne is the mystery and Tom the longing, Dave is the disruption. “Essentially, you’re the spoiler,” I tell Jack Farthing. He smiles. “It’s fun. Because I think if he were just that, it would be less fun. But there’s so much more to him, and I know Jan-Ole was really interested in making him feel rich and full and not just predictable. He kind of reads like he’s going to be very much one thing, but then I hope the audience sees more. He’s a really fun character.”

Farthing enjoyed the contrast he brought to the film. “He brings an energy that neither Sam’s nor Stacy’s characters bring. Even though a lot of his buoyancy and bravado is pretended, it’s still there and it’s still fun, it’s still light.”
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Dave feels like the oblivious English tourist compared to Sam Riley’s culturally attuned, quietly observant Tom. Fuerteventura becomes a stage for that contrast. “The setting is full of holidaymakers and it feels like they’ve been lifted up straight off a flight from Luton and just dropped there,” Farthing explains. “It’s such a strange lunar landscape; it already feels like another world. And then you turn a corner and it’s just bars full of European tourists. So in that context, he fits right in.” The tension between the two men’s rhythms with Tom’s measured presence and Farthing’s character’s brash energy that makes their scenes together particularly compelling and wonderfully awkward. “It was also lovely working with Sam. He’s a wonderful person and a great actor,” Farthing adds.

Warning: Contains some spoilers on the climax ​

In the end, Islands resists easy answers, both narratively and emotionally. “Tom is, in a sense, taking a holiday from his own life,” Gerster says. “He’s a tourist in this family’s world for a few days. Dave goes on his own destructive bender. Tom, meanwhile, gets to experience what it means to take responsibility, to feel fatherly emotions, and to recognise what’s missing in his own life. But in the end, everyone returns to their reality. A holiday ends at some point.”

​The film resists the pull of shock and surprise, instead moving toward the kind of ending that feels less like a climax and more like the closing of a holiday that is inevitable, subdued, and tinged with reflection. “From the very beginning, I knew the film wouldn’t end with a big plot twist or a climax,” Gerster says. “I was going for something deliberately anti-climactic. The idea was that everyone has to go back to their normal lives, more or less as they were before. Obviously, the characters learn something and they gain some awareness of their situation but it’s not as though the crime plot takes over and delivers a shocking twist. A holiday ends at some point.”
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Riley sees that as the film’s quiet truth: “Life is full of anti-climaxes. Once you’re a little older, everyone has moments where you think about potential not reached, questions never asked, paths not taken, , opportunities dodged or self-sabotaged. Personally, I’m always anxious about what’s around the corner, and nine times out of ten, nothing really happens. A lot of it’s in your head."

Islands - in cinemas 12th September 

Lee Hutchison