Janet Christie. Debra Hurford Brown
Yeah, you said the name!,” says Jessica Barden, laughing, when I ask the Yorkshire-born actor about her new series The End of the F***ing World out on Netflix and Channel 4 this week.
It wasn’t intentional, but asterisk, asterisk, asterisk is kind of hard to say, so I’ve just cut to the chase.
“So many people don’t say the name,” she says, “and because Netflix is American they have different rules on swearing and some people are really funny about saying it. I do wonder how they will announce it on Channel 4 when it comes on,” she says.
There’s a bit more than swearing to contend with in The End of the F***ing World, a darkly comic series based on Jonathan Entwistle’s hit short of the same name, which also starred Barden. Developed from the award-winning graphic novels by Charles [Chuck] Forsman it’s an unconventional coming of age love story that is by turns funny, violent, uplifting and totally screwed up.
Channel 4 commissioning editor Roberto Troni says, “if David Lynch made a romcom road movie about a pair of teen misfits in British suburbia, it might look something like The End of the F***ing World”.
“Yeah, totally true,” says Barden. “The comics are set in Middle America but we translated it to be set outside London, and filmed it in Surrey, but it’s about the really weird offbeatness and eccentricity that’s found in the mundane everywhere.”
Now 25, Barden stars as 17-yearold Alyssa, a confused teen outsider alongside Alex Lawther, who plays James, and who thinks he might be a psychopath. Ready to graduate from killing animals to humans, he has someone close in mind, as the pair embark on a journey to find Alyssa’s absent father and things take an increasingly surreal, menacing, yet strangely comic turn.
“I’ve played a lot of teenagers and I think sometimes they tend to make them a bit too mushy, because you’re not actually connected to yourself at all really when you’re a teenager. I love playing Alyssa because she is like me and my friends when we were younger,” says Barden, “where you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing in your life. You make terrible decisions and one minute you are horrible to your parents and your friends and feel like the entire