“I see characters aesthetically at first, through body language,” says 22-year-old Anders Hayward, his forceful hand gestures serving every word. “You can say so much with just your body, and that’s what helps me, I think, to really be a character.” The south Londoner’s total body literacy, he maintains, is down to years of character-based work at a contemporary dance school. Balancing a string of modelling jobs with choreography projects, Hayward quickly found a knack for scripted roles, making his debut in recent comedy drama series Gap Year. “The perfect way to describe (his Gap Year character) Dylan is that he’s the type of person who’d watch David Lynch and think, ‘What a great film, that was… Woah, yeah, really got to me, powerful!’” he laughs. “But actually on the inside he would much rather watch Transformers or X-Men!” As for his next move, Hayward reveals a series of independent projects, the first being a hypnotic, emotionally charged dance short made with his close friends and funded by his work on Gap Year. “It was something I found so liberating, that I could do whatever I wanted to do. It was one of those moments where you sit down and think, ‘We just made something that was ours,”’ he enthuses. “I can’t wait for the next one.”