‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ Writer Calls Band Reunion Comedy a ‘Self-Contained Little Fairy Tale’ | Video

Sundance 2025: “It ends in a very lovely, warm way,” Tim Key, who starred in the 2007 short that inspired the feature, tells TheWrap

Director James Griffiths and actors/writers Tim Key and Tom Basden always meant to turn their 2007 short film “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island” — about a lottery winner who pays his favorite musician to come to his private island — into a feature film. They just didn’t anticipate that it would take 18 years.

Key, who reprises his role as the eccentric music fan Charles in “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” co-wrote the feature film with Tom Basden. “It felt like we’d missed a trick in a way, in having not done it for so long,” Basden, who once again plays musician Herb McGwyer, said while sitting in TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt.

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