Oli Higginson doesn’t talk like someone trying to manage two separate careers. He talks like someone following the same instinct through different forms.

We caught up after the shoot, while the final selects were still being retouched. The set had already told me a little about him. He was open, spontaneous, down to experiment. There was no stiffness to him, no over-calculated sense of image. He just moved like someone who trusted the process. That mattered more to me later, once we got on the phone and started talking about music.

Because for all the attention around Bridgerton, what became clear pretty quickly is that music sits even deeper.

He said when he was three or four, he had a little tape recorder he’d walk around with, humming melodies into it. What struck me wasn’t just how early it started, but how little that instinct has changed.

“What’s so crazy is, it’s exactly what I do now,” he said. “Digitally, things have upgraded, but the process has remained pretty much the same since I was three or four years old.”

That tells you almost everything. Music is not a side lane for him. It’s not a polished extension of visibility from acting. It is the original language. The thing underneath everything else.

Film came after, but not as some clean second act. More like another way of searching.

“I turned to film as a means by which to process what kind of person I wanted to be,” he said. “Film was a kind of mirror up to myself.”

He talked about going to the cinema young, about loving intense dramas, about being drawn to stories that helped him understand himself through other people’s lives. That part made immediate sense to me. Some people use art to escape. Other people use it to locate themselves. Oli feels like the second kind.

“The crossover between music and film is so, so close,” he said. “What excites me so much about music now, and what’s really important to me with Modern Oli, is that it’s so heavily driven by visual storytelling. It’s about inhabiting a world.”

That word, world, kept coming up. Not just songs. Not just scenes. A world. A place you can step into and feel around inside.

When I asked him why he wanted to release under Modern Oli instead of just using his own name, his answer got to the center of the whole thing.

“Give a man a mask and he’ll show you his true face,” he said. “That’s kind of the reason why I wanted to release music under Modern Oli and not under Oli Higginson. I think only through some form of character, some form of costume, some form of mask, can you be truly honest and reveal yourself.”

That’s such a beautiful contradiction, and also a real one. Sometimes distance is what lets people tell the truth. Sometimes character is not hiding, it’s access.

He described Modern Oli as a shape-shifting character. One song might come from joy, from love, from that careless high of being fully inside a feeling. Another might come from depression, identity struggles, drifting, alcohol, uncertainty. Another might come from peace. Simplicity. Acceptance.

Then he gave me the line that probably unlocked the whole article.

“An album is like a collection. Each body part is a different song, and it makes a human being.”

That feels exactly right. It also explains why he’s resistant to being flattened into one note. One of the things he kept coming back to was how often artists get told what they are, what lane they belong in, what kind of work people expect from them.

“I feel like every single day I wake up and I go, what do people not know that I can do,” he said. “What do people not know about me. What do people not think I’m going to do. And I’m going to do that.”

I didn’t hear that as rebellion for its own sake. I heard someone protecting his own complexity. Someone refusing to let other people finalize him before he’s had the chance to keep unfolding.

That same instinct carries into how he approaches acting too. I asked him what changes when he moves from the studio to set, what overlaps, what stays the same.

“Truth is truth,” he said. “You can fuck around as much as you like, but if it is not coming from somewhere quite deep inside you then I think it’s very hard for people to connect to that.”

That line could sit at the center of everything he makes. In Bridgerton, he wanted his character to feel recognizably human, not trapped behind period styling or polished distance. Someone who could still feel like a person you’d meet now, in a bar, in real life. In music, the process starts from the same place.

“My first port of call is just to be like, what am I feeling,” he said. “What am I grappling with in my own life.”

Then he described the actual process in a way that only someone this self-aware could.

“I try to get out of my own way, accept myself for who I am, accept my flaws, and sort of vomit it all up and spit it all out on the cutting room floor. Then you’ve got these raw materials that you can piece together into something that maybe feels more cohesive.”

That’s not branding. That’s not polish. That’s revelation first, arrangement second. It’s a very different relationship to making work. And I think people can feel the difference when they encounter it.

At one point I told him something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, that being a creative isn’t really about making something from nothing. It’s more about revealing something people overlook, avoid, or don’t yet know how to name. He seemed to agree, then widened the idea even further.

That may be the clearest statement of purpose for Modern Oli. The songs are personal, sure. But not in a way that traps them inside his life. They’re personal in the way all the best work is personal. Specific enough to become shared.

And that’s what I think makes this project feel compelling. Not just because it’s honest, but because it feels like an invitation. Not “look at me,” but “come in here with me.”

By the end of the conversation, I asked what excites him most about putting the music out. His answer had nothing to do with metrics or expansion or momentum.

“I’m just really excited to connect with people through my work and through my art,” he said. “Every day I’m paying homage to the teenager who would skip classes to go and write songs and watch films, who felt like his community and his people existed somewhere.”

Then he said the thing that stayed with me after we hung up.

That’s exactly what Modern Oli feels like. Not a pivot. Not a vanity project. Not an actor trying on another medium. A meeting point. Between music and film. Between character and self. Between the person making the work and the people still waiting to find themselves in it.

Oli Higginson isn’t balancing two lives.

He’s following one instinct through two doors.

And if you’re paying attention, you can feel it in both.