After swapping the rolling hills of Emmerdale for a muddy London rugby pitch in 2022’s hit sports movie In from the Side, rising star Alexander Lincoln is a name you need to know
Words Jamie Tabberer Photography Dean Ryan McDaid Styling Joseph Kocharian
Tom Ford at MR PORTER, trousers, by Rubinacci at MR PORTER, necklace (throughout), Alexander’s own
“Gay rugby drama is a scrum of sexual tension and toxic masculinity,” read the headline of Attitude’s review of last year’s In from the Side, the most talked-about movie at BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. It explored, with acute fascination, the explosive and adulterous affair between two members of an inclusive rugby team, in the vein of The London Stags RFC. Like Firebird before it, the movie’s journey has been staggering: a cinema release followed last October, as did an audience across the pond after the film received warm reviews in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Now In from the Side is available to stream everywhere, from Amazon Prime UK and Netflix to Rakuten. Not bad for a modest queer indie made for less than £50k.
At Attitude, we had our issues with the film — the bravado of the selfish, hyper-privileged characters, for example. “Brilliantly basic, XXL-frequenting swaggerers with egos bigger than their shoulders,” we called them in our review. “The kind of preening people you’ll find on Scruff’s Most-Woof’d, who live in high-rise Vauxhall flats, holiday at their parents’ Swiss chalets and make you remove your shoes at house parties.” Nevertheless, we could not look away — not least during the game sequences. Sports photography is notoriously hard to master, but under Matt Carter’s precise direction, In from the Side turns rugby into a kind of gladiatorial ballet, where hulking, otherworldly frames move in slow motion with mysterious elemental force but also haunting elegance. At the film’s centre is the almost unbearably photogenic Alexander Lincoln, who adds heartstring-pulling vulnerability to main character Mark. Who could have just been a handsome, homewrecking cliché. The performance is poles apart from Lincoln’s best-known role as Emmerdale’s James Tate.
“I love that character… although he’s a bit of a wet blanket!” Lincoln tells Attitude of James over a cup of Earl Grey in London’s elegant Dean Street Townhouse, where cold, rainy, floodlit stadiums and the simple, storybook beauty of the Yorkshire Dales are a distant memory. “I’ve ridden a horse out there and fell off of it!” he laughs of those windswept valleys, where he spent much of 2019 to 2021 filming 300 episodes
