Louis Rees-Zammit

At sixteen he was told he wouldn’t play for Wales. At seventeen he played for Gloucester and trained with England. At eighteen he was called up by Wales and, at nineteen, he scored for them.Now, at twenty, he’s about to become a British & Irish Lion.By 21, Louis Rees-Zammit might just be completely unstoppable.

Mikey Rayer, the mid-90s Welsh slayer of the Scots, looms large over Louis Rees-Zammit. Literally. The name is on a plaque on the wall; emblazoned on the t-shirts of people working around him; engraved in glasses piled next to him; and on beer kegs by his feet. 

It’s what happens when you choose a Cardiff brewery for a shoot location. Their most famous beer is the Mikey Rayer All-Dayer, named after the one-time Cardiff and Wales full-back, hence the excessive paraphernalia of the Bedford boss. Cardiff people love their local heroes and Mikey Rayer is definitely one of them, and not only because of his rhyming slang moniker.

It’s not something that’s going to concern the easy-going Louis though, for starters, he’s not really sure exactly who Mikey Rayer is. Not to take that as a slight on the Cardiff and Wales full-back who also found fame for scoring two tries against Scotland in what was then the Five Nations; Louis isn’t the type to do that. It’s just all of this happened before his time, 1994 to be precise – seven years before this modern-day Welsh hero was even born.

And seven years is a really long time in the life of Louis. Seven years ago, he was thirteen years old and making his first rugby transfer from his local Cardiff club Llandaff to the mighty Rumney, another Cardiff club, albeit slightly further from his parents’ Llandaff home. He was still doing then what he’s doing now, just from a different position. “Yeah, I was scoring a lot,” he says, “although purely because I was just running around people, it wasn’t footwork or anything. I was playing at nine then, so every time there was a scrum, I’d be picking blind and going on the outside, just trying to gas myself to the corner.”

Before we continue our conversation, his first proper sit-down, face-to-face interview, Louis still has the brewery photoshoot to complete. He’s had a flurry of them of late – not in breweries, just the photoshoot bit – following his confirmation as the youngest British & Irish Lions tourist in more than sixty years. He’s happy to do them, but that doesn’t mean he’s entirely comfortable with the ‘cast of a thousand’ media environment he’s been subjected too. 

Luckily, for our shoot – in a venue just a short drive from his Cardiff home – it’s a cast of two, photographer and writer, to contend with, so he’s completely at ease. 

Even when faced with a barrage of chatter from our photographer, which seems to also double up as a quick-fire Q&A, a warm-up to the main interview, he’s still beaming due to his Lions-induced high. “How cool is it to be a Welsh international, Six Nations winner and going on a Lions tour and to be just 20?” asks our photographer, inadvertently crossing the first question off my list. “I can’t stop smiling, I’m super proud.” “Who’s your favourite player?” “Mark Atkinson.” “Who would you hate to face?” “Nadolo, he’s massive.”

That his favourite player is a current team-mate, says a lot about Louis. He loves Gloucester, his closest friends play for the club, and some of his rugby heroes play for them, simply because all of his heroes come from basically the past four years. “I wasn’t a massive rugby nause or anything until I went to Hartpury, so I didn’t really know the players or the teams,” he says, “but once you get there that’s all they talk about, all the good players, the internationals, the Premiership, that’s where I got the knowledge – that’s when I decided I wanted to play in the Premiership.”

Before that, heroes instead came from football and specifically his favourite team Man Utd. “Ronaldo, Tevez, those kind of players,” he says, before answering our next question about his own footballing skills. “I was alright,” he responds, quickly adding, “obviously I wasn’t amazing though.” 

His speed seemed destined for rugby. “I was always quick, I’d never done athletics though, I was just, like, naturally quick,” he says. “Every time I got the ball I’d just try and run round everyone – it worked most of the time too.

“There was one sports day though, not just for my school but, like, for the whole of Cardiff, when I did compete in the sprint,” he recalls. “There were some boys who were actually in the Welsh athletics team that I was trying to race, and they had all their spikes and blocks and stuff and I was literally in my Adidas trainers trying to run on a track – I finished miles behind them. It actually made me think, ‘maybe I’m not that quick’. 

“But every time I went on the rugby field it was different.” 

Talent such as Louis doesn’t get missed in a place with as many chimney pots and rugby pitches as Cardiff. In his teens he was on the pathway to Cardiff Blues and Wales age-grade honours before, aged sixteen, he made the big decision to move to England, taking up a place at Hartpury College. Inspired by the stories of his brother’s friend, Syd Blackmore, a former captain of the college who was signed by Bath, one glimpse of the facilities, plus its international honours board, made the decision seemingly straight-forward. But not everyone agreed.

One of the coaches responsible for his development didn’t take it too well. “He told me I would never play for Wales,” recalls Louis. “It was when I was sixteen and had decided to go to Hartpury, and he said I couldn’t go to Hartpury and play for Cardiff Blues and he was like, ‘make a decision’. 

“As a sixteen-year-old kid I was like, ‘oh my god’, but I made the decision to go to Hartpury because I didn’t want to go to a college in Wales. I did go and look at a few colleges around Wales, but there was no comparison – it was the facilities, the social side...

“Then I went to a Cardiff Blues game and he was there, and he walked up to me and said, ‘that’s going to cost you a Welsh cap’, and walked off. 

“I was a sixteen-year-old boy,” he repeats, emphasising the impact. “I just thought ‘oh my god, have I made the right decision?’”

Events of the past year or two suggest he had. “When I was in the Six Nations camp later, he [the coach] came to two sessions and was shaking everyone’s hand and I just avoided him – I’ve not spoken to him since.”

For a homebody such as Louis, moving to England was a big step though, something that hit him hard on the very first night. “Before actual college started, there was a two-week block of pre-season with the rugby boys,” explains Louis. “And first night, I was crying my eyes out, ringing dad, saying ‘sorry for wasting your time, I need to come home’.

“He was like ‘stick through it tonight’,” he continues. “The next day, I met everyone, we did initiations and we all got so close – I’m just so glad he told me to do it, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened.”

In Hartpury coach Wayne Thompson, he found the kind support that would take his game to the next level. “He said he believed in me from the start, said a few good words, and boosted my confidence so that I felt every time I went on the field I could do something special,” he says. 

“Luckily, I had a few boys from Cardiff that went up too,” he adds. “So, it wasn’t just like I was on my own, stranded. And then when you get into the rugby team you just meet so many friends. Isaac Marsh, I had no idea who he was before I was sixteen, but we met a couple of weeks into Hartpury, and now he’s my best friend.”

The commitment of his friends also rubbed off on him. “They were all so dedicated to rugby,” he says. “Marshy was so dedicated – at sixteen he was getting into England age-grade camps and coming back, saying how amazing it was.”

Like most Hartpury sides, they had a knack for winning. “There were a lot of Gloucester boys in the team so we were very good,” says Louis, who himself got onto Gloucester’s books within weeks of moving. “We were one of the best teams in the world. AASE had been going for something like ten years and Hartpury had won it eight times.

“If you lost it, it was like a massive upset – Hartpury would never lose,” he explains. “Thankfully I won it both years, and was top try-scorer, but it’s not as if you smash everyone, there were some tough games.”

The try-count was also helped with a position switch. “When I got there, I didn’t know what position I was really, I arrived as a 13,” explains Louis. “But Wayne thought I’d be good on the wing, and I’ve been there ever since. 

“That was when I started looking at all the other wingers, like Jonny [May],” he explains. “I’d be analysing them to see what they’re good at, to see how I could be better than they were.

“Gloucester trained at Hartpury too,” he continues, “so even from the dorms, you could see the Gloucester pitches and every Wednesday we had off, we’d go down and watch them train, just thinking ‘hopefully, that could be me in a couple of years’.” It didn’t take even that long. His first international training camp soon followed, but with England, not Wales. “I’d had no contact from Wales,” explains Louis. “I was playing in England so I guess it was harder to spot me, so I did this two-day camp – I couldn’t play first team anyway, you can only play age-grade – you don’t have to be English to play age-grade.”

Louis was always going to play for Wales, presuming he was given the opportunity. The camp, under then England age-grade coaches Peter Walton and John Fletcher, did at least give his home country a bit of a nudge. “Two weeks later, I got a Wales under-18 call-up to play against England,” he says, “that was a huge day, it was the first time I’d been called up to play for my country at any level.

“Then I went to South Africa with Wales for the under-18s and it was amazing,” he continues. “We played England, France and South Africa and we went to Table Mountain, and a zoo, because we couldn’t go on safari. 

“It was good though,” he says, sensing our disappointment at his lack of safari time. “I got to touch a baby leopard.”

On that occasion, like every rugby occasion beforehand, his parents also travelled to see their boy. “Yeah, my parents come everywhere with me, they’ve never missed a game of rugby, well apart from those since covid,” he says. “Wherever I go, they go; they went to South Africa – they got to do a safari though.

“It’s funny, on that tour all the parents had a WhatsApp group and it’s been quiet for literally two years or something and then suddenly, when the Lions happened, Mum got loads of messages on it – everyone was getting in touch saying congratulations.”

Family is everything. As soon as college finished, he moved back to Cardiff. First to the family home in Llandaff, then into a place with his brother in Pontcanna – less than two miles away. “Me, Mum, Dad, brother and cousin are really close, we do everything together,” he says.  

“I couldn’t live up in Gloucester and see my family once a week. I see them every day, every night Mum cooks our dinner, unless we go out or have a delivery.”

Stories about Mum Maxine, Dad Joe, and brother Taylor continually pepper the conversation. “Dad played American football in the UK, he never played rugby,” he says, “he’s like 6ft tall but he’s not big. 

“I think he played in the 80s, or sometime,” he adds, with all the date recollection of a boy aged twenty. “He was rapid though,” he continues, “when I was sixteen, he would beat me in races.”

How old was he? “Well, he’s 55 now, I think. Hold on, it’s Mum’s 52nd birthday today so he might be 57 this year. Which would have made him 52.”

Impressive. But for Louis, dad has always been impressive. “He’s into property now but he started from the bottom and he’s pretty much an inspiration,” he says. “He left school at fourteen doing labouring, then got into cars, and then eventually got into property.

“Mum was running a bed and breakfast,” he adds, “we lived in that when we were young, but now they’ve knocked it down and turned it into flats and that’s where me and my brother live now.”

His relationship with Taylor, a financial advisor who famously put a bet on his younger sibling making the Lions, is watertight. “My brother has been my rock,” he says. “He’s watched every game, same as my mum and dad, and we decided to move in together, which shows how close we are.

“When I was playing age-grade, I could hear every parent scream and shout,” he says, seemingly changing topic completely. “But it gets harder when there are big crowds, and so my brother’s got this thing where he whistles when they get to their seats – and I always know it’s him. So I look to where they are, because they’re always in the same seat, and I give them a look so they know I know they’re there.”

Do they give him feedback on his game? “Yeah but not to a point where they’re being critical, Dad is more of a motivator,” responds Louis. “It’s funny, before the Scotland game [when Wales won 25-24 in this year’s Six Nations], he said ‘don’t forget to chip and chase’, because I always forget, and when the ball came to me, I did a chip and chase and scored. 

“He messaged me straight after to say, ‘I told you so’. He always thinks I should do it more, and thankfully, it paid off in that one game.”

And Mum? “In the game last week [against Northampton, a 31-7 win] there was like a little scuffle where someone held me down with his elbow,” he says. “And Dad was saying that my mum was shouting at the TV, really scared in case I got hurt. 

“Whereas Dad knows it’s a physical sport and that, yeah, injuries are gonna happen, Mum’s like, ‘oh my little baby I don’t want him to get hurt...’”

The story sparks talk of his other family, the Gloucester one, as the pressing elbow of Piers Francis caused a rush of his team-mates to come to his rescue. “[Billy] Twelvetrees, Santiago [Carreras], all of the boys jumped in thankfully, it’s amazing,” he says of his team support. 

“We’re such a close group as well that if anyone,like, tries to do something like this, it’s a done deal that everyone’s gonna jump in.”

Louis has been a starter with Gloucester ever since marking his senior debut in the A-league with a try. “It was against Bristol in an A-league game,” he says. “I scored a try and it exploded from there. Luckily it was in front of the first-team coaches. Two weeks after that, I made my Premiership debut.”

At 6ft 3in, 13st 10lbs, he’s not exactly a small unit, but as he highlights with his nod to Nadolo at 6ft 5in and 19st 5lbs, there are far bigger, something that could be intimidating for many young players. But again, beneath the completely affable nature of this immensely likeable 20-year-old, is a determination to not just match his peers, but beat them. “At the start I was nervous because obviously I was an eighteen-year-old playing against these men, and they were big men and big names,” he admits, “so it was like ‘wow, I’m actually playing against these at such a young age’. But now I’ve played them, it’s more about knowing that I need to try and perform and be better than them. My kind of mentality is to have no fear, and don’t be nervous. Otherwise, if you’re nervous, you’ll just get trapped and you won’t be able to play as well as you can.”

His desire to beat his rivals, includes those closest to him. “It’s class playing with Jon [May],” he says, “because I used to watch him when I was younger. He was the England winger and you honestly don’t ever think you’re going to play with him, you just think ‘wow, it’d be a dream to be in the same side’. And he’s a class bloke as well.”

And a ‘class bloke’ that, as the infinite wisdom of YouTube will tell you, is not as fast as the man they called ‘Rees Lightning’. “All the boys bring that clip up,” he laughs, referencing the videos of him outpacing his fellow Gloucester wing during the Six Nations. “They’re always trying to get a reaction out of him.”

So, who is faster? “It depends,” he says, diplomatically. “We all see the GPS results, so you can see who’s running faster at any one time, but even that’s not reliable. Sometimes, in a game, you won’t get the opportunity to have a full sprint, but he will, so it varies [who’s faster]. Unless you do like a full-on, 100-metre athletics-style sprint – with spikes – you’re never going to know.” 

Adidas, we have your next ad campaign.

Even before Louis turned nineteen, his name was being penned into a Welsh squad. “I was on a car journey home from Gloucester training and I got a phone call from Wayne Pivac,” recalls Louis. “He just said, ‘hey, it’s Wayne Pivac here, what would it mean to get picked for Wales?’ I just said, ‘It’d mean everything.’ He didn’t tell me I’d been picked, he just said I’d been playing well. And then a week later I found out via Twitter I was in.”

He’d played in just four Gallagher Premiership matches, one of them from the bench. Handily though, the most recent two had included a hat-trick against Northampton and a brace against Worcester, which was enough to show the Wales coach he needed Louis in his squad. “Owen Williams, another Welsh lad at Gloucester also got picked and we’d been playing in Toulouse, so we flew home early – like five o’clock in the morning or something. Thankfully he was with me, so I didn’t have to do it on my own; if that had happened I’d would probably have got lost or on the wrong flight or something. But, yeah, we flew back early, got a rented car at the other end and drove straight to Wales camp for an 8am start.”

Owen helped break the ice for Louis with the introductions. “But since then I’ve tried to get to know everyone and they’ve done the same,” he says. “Everyone in Wales is so close though, there’s no one that will like sit on their own. 

“My best friend there is Dan Biggar, but everyone is so close,” he repeats. “Everyone bants around with everyone, everyone’s your best friend in there, especially since the autumn. I think that was when we got really close and that’s what kicked us on to the Six Nations.”

Pivac had bided his time in releasing Louis on to the international scene. After keeping him away from the action for his first Six Nations, he waited until he’d amassed thirteen tries in eighteen games for Gloucester before unleashing him from the bench against the French in the Autumn Nations Cup. In his first start, against Georgia, he scored his first try, and has been ever-present since. “When you go into Wales camp first and see players like Alun Wyn, you do think, ‘I shouldn’t be here’,” he admits. “And even when I was just training in that first Six Nations [in 2020], it was so intense and you realised the quality of it. And even when I got to play – you just run so much more. I probably wasn’t as fit as I should have been at the start, but the more you play and train, I just had to get used to it. 

“You can’t just tell someone to go and run for ages to get fit for it either, you have to learn from playing the games and the more games I played, the more I got used to it.”

The transition didn’t take long, as his four tries in the Six Nations proved. “You’re trying to roll with it the best you can,” he admits, “but there are moments...

“Like with the England game this year, we scored a couple of tries, one after the other, and then you’re back on the halfway and thinking, ‘I think we can actually smash them here, this is amazing’.

“So, you do have times when you can reflect a little bit, on the pitch, which is class,” he concludes with an honesty and openness that you rarely see in modern players.

With every game of the Six Nations campaign, Louis improved, even learning new tricks along the way. “It’s a lot harder to score in international rugby,” he says, “so against Ireland I had to dive out to put the ball down and I’ve never done that before – not once in my life. I’d never even trained to do that either,” he emphasises, “so it’s just natural instincts that took over, but it’s the best feeling to score for Wales.”

Given that he already has a decent collection of tries – five from nine caps – which has been the favourite? “In that Scotland game, when I chipped and chased,” he says. “That’s the most pumped I’ve been from scoring – because we were in the lead then, away to Scotland, and we had to win that game.”

He also saw his popularity grow almost instantly. “After the Ireland game I was up to about 33,000 [followers on Instagram], but after the Scotland game, I was on my phone just swiping and swiping and it’s going up and up at, like, 10,000 at a time – I hit over 100,000, so I got over 70,000 followers in that eighty-minute game. Absolutely mad. 

“I never thought you could finish a rugby game and get 70,000 followers. It was class. All the boys are like asking ‘how many you on now? How many are you on now?’.”

Despite enjoying the numbers game of Instagram, Louis doesn’t live his life by it. “It’s just rugby pics really,” he says, “there’s only about five pics of me not in rugby.”

And while all the support has been overwhelmingly positive, he’s already become adept at brushing off any negativity although, he is quick to acknowledge, the latter has been few and far between. Which is unsurprising. Even for those that haven’t witnessed his unassuming nature first-hand, what’s not to love about a brilliantly named, lightning-quick wing who tears it up in England, for Wales and is about to surely do the same for the Lions? And he loves his mum, listens to his dad, and shares a house with his brother. 

The Lions was never on his radar, at least not at first. “At the start of the Six Nations I didn’t think I’d start for Wales, let alone the Lions,” he admits. “But after it finished, I did think I might have a chance, although I still had a few games for Gloucester to play before it was announced, so I just got my head down.”

By now of course, we’ve all seen the clips of Louis and his Gloucester team-mate, Chris Harris, the Scotland centre, getting mobbed by their club-mates as Jason Leonard read out their names.

“He [Chris] didn’t think he’d get in there so when it was announced, we all jumped on him, and then I realised it would be me soon if it was going to happen,” he says. “I’ve never been so nervous in my life. It’s like, you have no idea. You have no idea what the coaches are thinking, nothing, so you’re just like, it’s just like a 50/50.”

Three picks later, his name followed that of his team-mate. “It was amazing,” he says.

“We had training five minutes later, so I quickly popped outside, FaceTimed my parents for like literally a minute and, yeah Mum was crying, Dad was going mental – they were buzzing.”

A family meal later that night gave him time to reflect again. “I just thought, ‘how cool is that? It’s mad, I’m 20, and going on a Lions tour’...”

Any players he’s looking forward to meeting? “To play in a back three with Stuart Hogg would be class,” he says. “[Owen] Farrell too, he’s amazing, but literally everyone in the squad is amazing so you just want to, like, play with them and train with them.

“I can’t wait to get there, every game is going to be so good,” he continues, “it’s going to be brutal though. 

“I have this notebook from when I was sixteen and at the bottom of it, I didn’t have any goals except for ‘international debut’ and ‘Lions’. So, yeah, I’ve now nearly got those two ticked off, but it’s now about performing and playing well and seeing what comes next.

“I might even go on a safari this time,” he concludes, before adding, “although actually, thinking about it, it’ll probably be the zoo again.”   

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 14 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.