In an age where social media can turn self-proclaimed gurus into modern-day idols overnight, the line between empowerment and manipulation has become increasingly blurred. Written and directed by Sai Karan Talwar, I AM THE PRIZE explores that uneasy space through Anthony Selvon (Russell Tovey), a charismatic self-help figure whose carefully constructed persona begins to unravel as his personal life is brought into the spotlight. Examining masculinity, influence and the seductive power of self-help culture, the provocative short asks what happens when a man becomes so consumed by the identity he has created that he can no longer separate the performance from the person beneath it. Following its successful festival run, including a Best UK Short nomination at Raindance Film Festival and a Best Performance win for Tovey at HollyShorts Film Festival, I AM THE PRIZE has also qualified for the 99th Academy Awards. I spoke to Talwar about the film’s exploration of masculinity, the online influence of the manosphere, the construction of Anthony’s persona and why he wanted to pull back the curtain on the people selling us the answers to our lives.
What was the initial spark for the film, and what made you want to explore the self-help industry through the character of Anthony?
Well, I guess it started with a spec script I was writing when I was part of the BBC Writersroom. You write a pilot TV episode with the BBC over about a year and a half as part of their emerging writer talent scheme. Anthony’s character was in that particular story, which was an ensemble drama.
For the short, I essentially took that character out, took about half of his overall arc and story, and put it into the short.
The original character came from when I was coming out of university. I graduated during COVID, so it was a strange time. You saw all these guys looking towards random influencers online because they had nowhere else to go. When I was graduating, Jordan Peterson was probably the most prevalent, although it wasn’t quite the manosphere that it is now. That grew a year or two later when Andrew Tate and all these other guys started appearing and trying to capitalise on it.
I think that culture, and seeing people slowly become indoctrinated by these figures, is what sparked the original idea. From there, it was about creating a character who could coexist within that atmosphere.
You can’t do an Andrew Tate rip-off. You can’t do a Jordan Peterson rip-off. What you can do is create a character who could exist within the manosphere and use him to deconstruct that world, while understanding where these people come from and how they become the way they are.
Anthony presents himself as an empowering figure, but the film gradually exposes the manipulation behind the persona. What interested you about that line between empowerment and manipulation?
I would say it’s really his need for validation.
Whatever his true identity was, and however he was before, has been long buried because he’s pursuing something else. He’s pursuing the validation and power that come from being in the position he’s created for himself.
He’s now reliant on that image and the persona he’s constructed, and he’s profiting from it. But he also has nothing else to fall back on. That’s all he has.
He’s stuck in a cycle where he has to be performative all the time. He has to create a completely new identity. What happens with a lot of these guys is that they end up living the lie. When they live the lie, the lie becomes reality, and that’s the situation he’s put himself in.
The film feels particularly interested in the performance of masculinity. What do you think Anthony’s carefully constructed persona says about the pressures men face to appear confident, successful and emotionally in control?
With this particular character, he’s done that to himself. My interpretation was that all those pressures are external, and it’s very easy to succumb to living a life in which you’re told how you should be living.
But all he’s really done is what con men throughout history have done: taken advantage of a situation that they know is open to them.
That’s what L. Ron Hubbard did with Scientology. It’s what people like Roy Cohn did, and Roy Cohn was a big influence on the film and the character. That’s also why we wanted Russell, because he played Angels in America, and there’s a connection there with Roy Cohn.
A lot of these guys, especially now, follow a very similar trajectory. They think they need to go down a particular avenue in order to get the support they need. But because they have no guidance around them, they don’t really know where else to go. Once they’ve gone down that path far enough, they can’t go back. They’re stuck in the situation they’ve created for themselves.
I think that’s also what was interesting about the Louis Theroux documentary that came out recently. I thought it was very insightful. I don’t think it went particularly deep because he’s speaking to so many different people and doesn’t have the space to explore each one properly. If it had been a miniseries, I think it could have been more interesting.
But his conclusion was interesting because he suggested that the absence of a father figure was a lingering connection between many of them. I think that’s true to an extent, but I also think there’s often some kind of buried trauma in their lives.
What’s interesting about Andrew Tate is that he has spoken about being beaten by his father as a child, but he frames it as something positive or empowering. That’s strange to me. He’s taken something traumatic and given it a positive spin, and then decided to live his reality in that way.
There are lots of cases where something comes from buried trauma, an absence of guidance or an authority figure who could steer someone in the right direction. When they become misguided, they funnel all these ideas into their minds about how they’re supposed to live.
Because nobody is holding them accountable, they continue down that path. That’s how the incel culture rises, and how these extreme right-wing agendas develop. People are able to create an echo chamber around themselves, and that eventually becomes the way they live.
“What happens with a lot of these guys is they end up living the lie. When they live the lie, the lie becomes a reality.”
We’re living in a time where social media has made self-proclaimed gurus and online influencers more accessible than ever. Did the current influencer landscape influence how you chose to portray Anthony and his world?
Absolutely. The Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world, and those manosphere influencers, were definitely the opening spark for where the character came from.
But again, I wanted to create someone who could coexist within that atmosphere today. If you plucked Anthony out of the film and put him into real life, he would be able to exist because he has his own unique selling point.
He’s the kind of masculine intellectual, which there aren’t many of. So it’s almost about combining different traits from all these figures to create a character who could genuinely exist and have an audience.
That’s where it started, but having Russell on board was also important because I was heavily influenced by Roy Cohn as an individual and a character. Russell plays opposite a Roy Cohn-type figure in Angels in America, so there was a clear connection.
Russell is also at a certain age and point in his career where I felt he was perfect for it. L. Ron Hubbard was another big influence, as were people like Bernie Madoff. They’re all people who present themselves as authorities in their field, but that field becomes corrupted and perverted by their own thinking.
They create a false framework and attempt to convince people to buy into it. That’s what all of these people have in common. They create a kind of false Bible for others to follow.
But ultimately, they’re con men. They’re grifters. They’re so deep in it that they’ve forgotten it’s a lie.
What’s interesting about the end of L. Ron Hubbard’s life is that, despite having created all of this, he became so convinced by it that he was still engaging with Scientology’s practices towards the end of his life, as though they might somehow save him. He’d probably forgotten that he had made the whole thing up.
He’s become so desperate and so caught up in it that he’s forgotten who he is. He’s decided, “This is my reality now. Maybe this will help me.”
That’s what happens to a lot of these people. They’ve gone so far into the persona they’ve created that they’ve almost brainwashed themselves.
Russell Tovey gives such a compelling performance as Anthony. What was the casting process like?
I emailed his agent with the script and the pitch deck. Then we met very briefly over Zoom, and that was essentially it. We just figured out when we were going to shoot.
It was very quick. I think it helped that I had one of his films in my pitch deck. I don’t think he actually saw the pitch deck, from what he told me, but his agents probably saw it and thought, “One of his films is on there. We should probably consider this.”
I’ve been such a big fan of Russell because he did The Pass a few years ago, around the same time as Angels in America, which he’s great in. I thought a combination of those two roles was exactly why I wanted him for this.
It was a straight offer. I said, “I really want you to do this. I think you’d kill it,” and he did.
We didn’t rehearse. We didn’t need to. I let him figure out the character, and if he needed me, I was there. Otherwise, I let him work it out himself.
I did the same with Faith Alabi, who plays the journalist. I’d met her before and knew she had a background in the industry, so I thought she’d be perfect for the journalist. That was also a straight offer.
We never did a table read. I wanted to have them there in the moment and let them bounce off each other. If they’d met before, there would be a certain shorthand between them, so I wanted to cut that off completely and throw them into the scene as if it were a real encounter.
Did you take any influences from other films or filmmakers when it came to writing the film or developing its overall look?
With every film, you have your own set of influences. When you’re writing something, you naturally think in a certain way.
Because this is about a con man, I was thinking about David Mamet and how he writes characters of that ilk. His characters are often con men in one way or another, so he was a key influence on the writing.
Angels in America was also a big influence, particularly on the writing side.
Visually, I wanted to do something very cold and clinical. Anthony is constructing this entire persona around himself, so everything needed to feel constructed and considered.
I was thinking a lot about Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, these Austrian filmmakers who make very tough films. They’re observational and uncomfortable, and their shots linger. You stay with the characters and watch their behaviour.
At the same time, I wanted to tell the story from Anthony’s perspective. That’s why the opening shot is a push-in. It’s the only time he genuinely has control because he’s pulling you in. He’s showing you who he is and convincing you that you should follow him, just like all these other people do.
When he’s at his most vulnerable, that’s when we hit the close-ups.
You have the close-up during the interview, and you only really have his close-up in the hospital scene. Those are the moments where he’s completely out of control and doesn’t know what to do.
Everything else is very still and wide and quite sharp. That was always the intention: to keep it observational, cold and clinical.
Haneke and Seidl probably had the most conscious influence on me in terms of visual language and how it fitted this particular character.
It’s all informed by the character because it is ultimately a character study.
“If you are able to go out there and examine them and show how broken they genuinely are, then hopefully that will be the message that goes out there that, ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t be watching these guys anymore.’”
The film asks some uncomfortable questions about the people who become modern-day idols. What do you want audiences to take away from it?
They shouldn’t be looking up to them. That’s really the point of the film.
It’s about putting the curtain behind the Wizard of Oz and trying to understand who these people are and how they operate.
A lot of them don’t believe what they’re saying. They don’t believe it. They’ve just become so immersed in it that it becomes their reality. Deep down, they might not believe any of it, but they know they’re making money from it.
They’re making money from young people who have no guidance, even though they were once in exactly the same situation themselves. They didn’t know where to go, and they went so far down the rabbit hole that it became their personality and their persona.
Then they’ve created a commodity out of it.
They’re preying on the same people who don’t have that guidance or direction because they know they were once in that position themselves. They know they can take advantage of it.
So, really, it’s an urging not to pay attention to these kinds of people. If we’re able to examine them and show how broken they genuinely are, hopefully that becomes the message: maybe we shouldn’t be watching these people anymore.
We shouldn’t give them attention because they need our attention in order to be sustainable.
By removing that attention, or by showing them in their truth and holding them accountable, we no longer need to give them our money, our attention or the audience they need to sustain themselves.
What are you looking to explore next in your work?
There’s the feature version of this, which came from that original pilot script I wrote with the BBC. I’ve turned it into a feature, so hopefully, based on the short, we can get that going.
It’s obviously an ensemble drama, so there are a different bunch of characters, but Russell’s character, Anthony, is a significant part of that larger narrative.
I’m also in the middle of making a documentary about my family, which is very different from this. It’s an archival documentary about three or four generations of my family history.
That’s the personal story that I’m working on, and it’s taken a long time to finish. I think that might be finished by the end of next year at the latest.
So those are the two projects I’m focusing on at the moment. It’s really just about which one gets made first.
Shorts have a lot of logistics, but they can be done relatively quickly. With features, it can take a couple of years just to get things moving. That’s the focus for now.
That’s the focus for now.
