Hot Shots 2024: Sheila Nortley

Sheila Nortley identifies her TV breakthrough as producing the hit Netflix drama series Stay Close, working with Quay Street’s Nicola Shindler on the Harlen Coben adaptation.

That break came after more than a decade of honing her craft producing her own short films, having started out making music and wedding videos while at university. She earned her first producer credit at 23 and since then has carved her own path into the industry. What drove her to create short films, she says, was “realising how powerful it is to have a voice in a world where we are constantly told black voices don’t matter, aren’t commercial, marketable, or interesting”.

Following Stay Close, Nortley was a producer on the much-anticipated south London Netflix superhero series Supacell, created by Rapman, which launches this month.

But she hasn’t turned her back on shorts – for her latest short film, Osoro, she collaborated with Cameron Roach’s Rope Ladder Fiction, as part of a drive to create black-voiced projects to be developed into drama series.

Roach describes Nortley as “no doubt an incredible rising star”, adding: “Not only does she have a palpable passion for storytelling, but her process is also incredibly careful, collegiate and precise, which means as an exec producer and writer, she delivers brilliant emotionally truthful and compelling stories.”

Nortley is currently exec producing for Luti Media and Wall of Production.