From childhood actor to budding rapper - Stewkley star thrills judges on ITV's The Voice
When Olivier walked on stage for his blind audition on The Voice, this was not the first time he had appeared on primetime television, nor was it his debut on ITV.
Over a decade stands between his emergence as the newest name on the rap scene and the time he was a fresh-faced youngster eyeing a whole different career.
Once a childhood actor, Olivier starred in productions such as the BBC film Lost Christmas (winner of a kids Emmy) and the ITV drama Lightfields. He has acted alongside the likes of Eddie Izzard, Jason Flemyng and Kris Marshall, only now to be rubbing shoulders with Will.i.am and LeAnn Rimes.
Searching for both Lost Christmas and Lightfields unmasks Olivier as Larry Mills - he is named after the actor Laurence Olivier - from Buckinghamshire, where he grew up in Stewkley, a village between Milton Keynes and Aylesbury, with dreams of winning Oscars, not Grammys. Reality proved an obstacle, however.
“I’ve always been interested and involved in performance and the arts,” Mills says. “I had a choice to make. Which was either try be the next Benedict Cumberbatch or get some grades. And I got pointed in the right direction of the examination papers.
“So, when you come back [to acting] as an 18-year-old, suddenly you’re over six foot, your voice has broken and you’ve got a beard. And everyone thinks: ‘Okay, this is not the child actor we employed’. The ship has sailed.”
With a career on screen on the backburner, Mills was encouraged to channel his creative spark into music. “At 17, I suffered quite a bad patch of mental health. The therapist says: ‘You need to do something to distract your mind from all these repetitive thoughts.’
“The only thing I could find and that was useful was an app called GarageBand on my phone. I used to sit in the early hours of the morning making instrumentals, playing around. They were absolutely awful but I would go to school the next day and try and show everyone, who were nice enough to humour me in some instances.”
Having gone off to university to study drama, ultimately dropping out to take up a politics degree instead, Mills began to produce music on his laptop to make money, but there was always a hitch: “I would send off the instrumentals and get the vocals back and I just used to think: ‘You’ve killed my song, you sound really bad.’ So I thought: ‘I’ll just do the whole thing myself.’”
The transition from playing around with beats on a laptop to performing on stage came more naturally to Mills than most, especially now he was fully in charge of his lines, compared to the regimented rehearsals of acting: “If I can connect with you with something I have personally made, rather than someone else’s script, then I like that.”
Going solo and writing his own lyrics has given Mills a freedom to express himself but also to relate to his audience. “The song matter changes quite a lot,” he says. “It could be anything from topics such as having a little bit too much to drink on a Friday to having no confidence when it comes to talking to women.
“I don’t have one muse that we use. It’s everything. I can be on the tube and see something and think: ‘That’s quite funny.’ And two weeks later I’ve got a full song about it.”
The desire to put on a show runs in the family for Mills. His father, a keen actor and director himself in amateur theatre, championed his son’s creativity, while his mother ran after-school drama classes and owned a costume shop: “She is the earliest memory I have of performing. She would always be pushing me to perform anywhere I could.”
When Mills was eight, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, with doctors confirming that it was something terminal but that she could live for another three or four years. However, she passed away after just three weeks.
“It’s all very tough,” he says. “But I think, as you get older, it makes you more resilient to things around you. You grow up quick as an eight-year-old kid. It teaches you a lot.”
Resilience, of course, is an important trait to have if you are going to succeed in the public eye, particularly when you are going against the grain. Few rappers have the same privileged, middle-class background as Mills.
“Not everyone is going to like it,” he says. “As long as people are reacting in some way, I know that I’m doing what I should be doing. It should provoke some sort of reaction. And let’s be honest, to succeed these days in music, it’s all about how many eyeballs you have on you.
“If people want to tell me I’m the worst rapper in the world, I’d more than happily shake their hand because, as long as they’ve seen me, I win.”