Barry Sloane Returns to Liverpool for The Cage After 1999 Start
Barry Sloane has returned to Liverpool for The Cage, and the 45-year-old says the city that raised him in Garston still feeds the work he does on screen. The actor, now living in Los Angeles with his family, is playing ruthless criminal Gary Packer in the casino-set thriller, which premiered last weekend and is available to watch on iPlayer now.
Garston and Gary Packer
Sloane said Liverpool gave him the tools to break through in a hard industry, and he linked that to the city’s edge and energy. “There's something about the energy of the city. We're a city of immigrants. There's an interesting soup of energy that's lived in the city for a long time, and it's within us all,” he said.
He was even blunter about the character fuel that shaped his thinking. “Everyone should have a good amount of rage in them,” he said, adding, “I think there's a rage which can be used for positive and negative things. We don't stand for inequality. We don't stand for injustice. That fire is within us naturally as people.”
1999 and the first break
His first acting step came in 1999, when he took an open audition for the John Lennon biopic In His Life and landed the role of Ivan in the TV movie. Sir Phil Redmond later cast him in Brookside after seeing him in that performance, turning a local opening into the start of a long screen career.
That path now runs through projects such as HBO Max’s House of the Dragon and Netflix’s Sandman, but Sloane still frames Liverpool as the place that made the industry feel possible. He said the city gave him the chance to start acting, and that he wants younger performers from Liverpool to see a route into the business rather than treat it as a closed shop.
Liverpool on camera
Sloane said he loved being back in Liverpool to shoot The Cage, which he described as a production with Liverpool “at its heart.” He also said the city has become easier for film companies to recognize as a usable screen location, because time away made him notice it differently.
“It's always been an incredible city. When you live there all the time, you can get quite blasé with it and walk through town with your head down,” he said. “But it only takes a bit of time away, which I've had, to walk around the city centre and just be blown away by it. So I'm not surprised that so many film companies are walking round, having a look at it and saying this could be anywhere or any time.”
For Liverpool, that leaves the practical takeaway: one of its best-known acting exports is still treating the city as a working part of the pipeline, not just a memory, and he is using this return to argue that local talent can do the same.
