Mylee Baker – Footballer and Actor

Mylee Baker, Year 10 at the Brooklands campus, has been away for two summers filming for a CBBC football drama Jamie Johnson FC and has one of the leading roles. Series One of the shows was films across summer 2022 and has just been released, with a second series recorded this year. Mylee is a talented footballer and sports person, a member of the MK Dons U16 team and has now added talented actor to her list of achievements.   

Mylee tells us: ‘I saw the opportunity advertised on Instagram and applied. I had to send a self-tape in and videos of myself playing football and showing off my skills. It was a long process to gain the role starting with a few Zoom calls and then had an audition in London, then more Zoom calls before the Director eventually came to my house to audition me. Then we got an email saying I got the part.’  

  ‘I grew up watching the original show and my love for football meant that I gave it a go and applied.’  

‘Filming was 12 weeks the first summer and 10 weeks the second summer.  It was a good experience, not I had not done anything like it before. It was the first time I had undertaken any acting, and have not even been in a school show. It was very different to anything I had done before, and I was the least experienced person there. The football was the easy bit and the most fun, as this was my strength’.

 ‘It took time getting used to cameras being in my face, but after a while it becomes normal, and you get used to it. Having a microphone on was the weirdest part to get used to.’   

 ‘The most different thing was living away from family and staying in university accommodation in Leeds with chaperones. It was not just all football, we also had to do the work set by school at the start of the filming process. My day would be to wake up, could be 6am, go to breakfast, to costume, hair and makeup, to set and then record. We would learn the lines the night before for the next day. Once recording was finished, we would do some football training and then hang out at the accommodation doing the usual things like playing video games, watching tv, or we would go out and spend time as a group socialising, going bowling. ‘ 

‘Watching TV I now know how they produced a show and I find myself thinking about how it was made as well as the story, which makes it more interesting. It has also helped my football as the training was high intensity with boys who play for Chelsea and Ipswich, so it has made me a better player.’  

Mylee was tight lipped about the show and would not share any spoilers!