The first time I met award-winning actor and film director Otto Baxter, he told me that I was a “very old Hoover”.
The comment was made in an upbeat, friendly tone after his first film’s London screening in 2023 – and it took me aback while also making me laugh.
To this day, I’m still not quite sure what Baxter meant – but he delivered his verdict so warmly and with such confidence, it was impossible to take his words as anything but a reflection of his off-the-wall sense of humour.
So, as I approach his Oxfordshire home to meet him a second time, I expect him to be just as engaging and offbeat.
Richard Curtis is also a yes. There is no shortage of big-name support for Baxter in the future
Baxter’s home certainly feels both welcoming and a whirl of activity as he and his three brothers all have support workers coming in and out throughout the day.
Baxter has Down syndrome as do his three brothers – all were adopted separately by Lucy, so are not blood relatives – and all live together in the family home.
Baxter won a 2024 Bafta Breakthrough award as an emerging creative talent. This was for his first film as a director, 2023’s The Puppet Asylum, made with backing from Sky TV. The film is a surreal reimagining of Baxter’s own life transposed to a horror movie set in Victorian times.
The film shows Baxter’s birth – of a blood-soaked monster-baby who is rejected by his parents and sent to a frightening asylum.
He is rescued and adopted by a woman (called Lucy) before going over to the dark side himself and becoming the movie’s baddie.
The movie’s official synopsis on the Bafta website is “an allegorical horror biopic set in Victorian London charting the life of a monster baby on the rocky path to escape incarceration and become his own master”.
The actor and director’s mother tells me that she learnt more about him from the film because his adoption involved “things he has never ever spoken about”. The film clearly provided a way for him to explore this.
When I watched it, at the screening where I first met Baxter, I thought it was a powerful reimagining of his life – taking his biographical details and presenting them in completely different era.
The Puppet Asylum was screened in selected cinemas and is still available on Sky.
It was shown as a double bill at the premiere along with a powerful documentary about its making, Otto Baxter: Not a Fucking Horror Story, directed by award-winning directors Peter Beard and Bruce Fletcher.
Baxter wrote The Puppet Asylum in collaboration with Beard and Fletcher, both of whom were instrumental in turning the creative’s ideas into reality.
Baxter tells me he loved directing the film and says the achievement he is most proud of is having his work shown in the Odeon’s flagship cinema in London’s Leicester Square.
He gives me an amusing mock impression of the directorial approach he used with the 70 people who were on set: “You, shut up! And you, get me a bacon sandwich.”
Joking apart, he clearly managed to get them all to work on bringing his vision vividly to life.
As for his Bafta Breakthrough award, 21 people in the UK were chosen for the 2024 award. They all receive career advice and support including on matters such as pensions and mental health. They also get the chance to pick a wish list of 10 potential mentors.
Have any of Baxter’s ideal mentors said yes yet? Baxter tells me that he has so far got agreement from David Tennant and James Corden. “From Dr Who and Gavin and Stacey,” he reminds me.
His mother later tells me she has also just heard that Richard Curtis is also a yes. No shortage of big-name support for Baxter in the future then.
Lucy Baxter also finds her son’s life can appear to exist in two places. In one, he is treated like anyone else, for example by family and friends and almost all the professionals he has met in the media industry. But then he is also sometimes mistreated or discriminated against.
Mother and son give me one surprising example – the village pantomime.
This, they tell me, is a typical local production with, for example, the owner of the village shop playing the wicked witch and the local brownie pack getting a spot where they can show off a dance routine.
So, there is something for everyone? Not quite. Baxter was always given the same kind of parts, over several years. “Non-speaking parts,” he adds.
One year, all he had to do was bring a wheelbarrow onstage. Another time he was given the job of making horse-shoe noises with coconut shells.
Most recently, at the village pantomime in December last year, Baxter was in a scene where the main characters are on their way to a castle and stop to ask a local man for directions. Baxter was
not even the local man; he just walked on with the local man who gave the main characters the directions.
Baxter’s mother calls this “just appallingly awful” and says it happens year after year, before giving way to exasperation: “I bet he was the only Bafta-winning, Emmy-winning short film awards, Cannes film festival-awarded person there.”
The duo gave the pantomime producers Baxter’s showreel – a video of his work – but it made no difference.
Baxter is clear about how the discriminatory experience made him feel: “Not very nice.” He has decided not to take part in the shows again.
This is unlikely to dent his impressive CV. In recent years, for example, he has performed in Shakespeare plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet (he was Romeo) and in Waiting For Godot in various London theatres.
A photo from the show is on the front cover of the 2022 book Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance by author and researcher Hannah Simpson.
If Baxter looks familiar, it is because he featured in the 2009 BBC documentary Otto: Love,
Lust and Las Vegas, when he first met directors Beard and Fletcher.
The coming-of-age film dealt in part with the young man’s wish to have sex for the first time or, as the BBC described it, “his search for love and adventure in a society which treats him like a child”.
In the past when Baxter has had a girlfriend with learning disabilities, his mother says the girl’s parents usually watch the couple intently and “he is lucky if he gets a snog”.
Baxter has had a few short relationships with women and, although these are rare, he has had sexual relationships; both mother and son discuss such issues with refreshing openness.
Back to movie talk and Baxter tells me he was recently invited for talks with a UK television network and is hoping for some good news about programmes he might develop for broadcast.
He is also working on another scary movie, called Satan Claus.
Baxter has performed in Shakespeare plays and in Waiting For Godot in various London theatres
He explains: “I like Christmas and I like horror movies.” He adds of his film idea: “You get a pretty scary Christmas!”
Baxter clearly relishes playing baddies. In closing, I ask him jokingly if he would ever consider playing the polar opposite, like a saintly vicar?
His reply is unequivocal. “No. An evil vicar. Villains for me. It’s much more interesting,” he grins, adding for good measure: “Heroes boo! Villains yay!”
