Scorsese’s protege star of Sex Education
Asa Butterfield is back for the second season of the taboo-busting drama on Netflix. He talks dirty with Ed Potton.
Sex Education, the globally popular highschool comedy, is back and, like the clap, it is even more eye-watering second time around. Among the litany of fresh carnal humiliations are a pupil whose semen tastes like kimchi, a wave of chlamydia hysteria (‘‘I read that I should rub bleach on my vagina,’’ one victim wails) and a moment in a car park that out-grosses anything in American Pie and the combined works of the Farrelly brothers.
The last involves Otis, the amateur sex therapist and neurotic hero played by Asa Butterfield in Laurie Nunn’s series.
To say more about it would be to undermine its ‘‘don’t-know-where-to-look’’ power. Butterfield must be delighted that Netflix didn’t let me watch the episode in question until after our interview, because answering questions about it would have been torture, even for an actor who professes himself to be ‘‘an open person and quite comfortable in my own skin’’.
Asking them would have been hard enough. The schtick of the first season was that Otis, although an expert at advising his classmates on sex, was hopeless at it himself.
In season two, he has made progress, of a sort: he has learnt how to masturbate. So well that it has become an addiction.
In a very funny montage, he nurses a constant protrusion in his trousers, surrendering to his urges in the shower, at the cinema, while cycling and running on the school track.
‘‘My body has complete control over me,’’ Otis moans. ‘‘You have discovered the wonders of your own penis, my friend,’’ says Eric, his best mate, played again with cackling glee by Ncuti Gatwa.
Gatwa’s laugh booms through the wall of the hotel room in central London – the Sex Education junket has occupied a whole floor.
Butterfield half-turns at the sound and smiles. He is wearing the hipster-geek uniform of white T-shirt, jeans, black glasses and a chain around his neck. He’s 22, but still capable of playing a teenager – a Generation-Z Michael J Fox.
‘‘I’m lucky enough to still be able to pull it off,’’ he says. ‘‘I wish I could grow a beard – sadly it’s still a bit of a pathetic attempt. But as much as I’d love to be very macho, I know that I should enjoy my young look and make the most of it.’’
Butterfield has certainly done that, having been a star for half his life. At the age of 11 he played the son of a commandant at a Nazi extermination camp in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, receiving nominations for the British Independent Film Awards and the London Film Critics Circle.
At 13, Martin Scorsese cast him in the title role in Hugo, which went on to win five Oscars. He has since starred for Tim Burton in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and opposite Harrison Ford in Ender’s Game.
Moving to the small screen would once have meant smaller audiences, but the worldwide reach of Netflix means that Butterfield is recognised more for Sex Education than for any of his Hollywood forays.
Last year the streaming service revealed that the show was among its top 10 most popular programmes. More than 40 million households watched it in its first four weeks of release.
‘‘I’ve been working for a long time and before this I would occasionally get recognised, but I always managed to keep a pretty low profile,’’ Butterfield says. ‘‘I do get recognised a lot more now. Which I sort of expected, but, still, I’m not very good at dealing with it.’’
Well, you wouldn’t know. Butterfield seems ridiculously well adjusted. Single, he lives in his own flat in Hackney, east London, not far from where he grew up in cosmopolitan Stoke Newington, the son of an advertising copywriter dad and a psychologist mum.
His relationship with her has similarities with Otis’ with his mother, Jean, who is played by Gillian Anderson.
Jean, a therapist, delights in thrashing out delicate issues (‘‘I am so proud that you are at this stage of your pubescent development,’’ she says of Otis’ masturbation fixation). Butterfield’s mother is similarly keen on dialogue.
‘‘Obviously Jean’s an extreme case of an overbearing mother,’’ Butterfield says. ‘‘My mum wasn’t like that, but there was the openness of conversation that Otis and Jean have.’’
When Anderson quizzes him in a scene, Butterfield says he feels ‘‘that similar feeling: she’s asking me a question, but I can tell there’s also something else she’s sussing out’’.
Otis now has a girlfriend, Ola, played by Patricia Allison, with whom he is having his first tentative fumbles. This meant that Butterfield had sessions with Ita O’Brien, the show’s much talkedabout ‘‘intimacy co-ordinator’’. In the first season he ‘‘didn’t work with her at all because . . . I only had w...ing scenes’’.
O’Brien likes to ask actors to pretend to be animals having sex, and in preparation she sent Butterfield and his co-stars an email with clips of different mating habits. Which was the most eyeopening?
‘‘The slugs,’’ he says. ‘‘The majority of the other ones I’d already seen, out of morbid curiosity.’’
Before the session he was ‘‘curious and a little apprehensive. Because I’d heard from the other guys before what happened. I’d kind of prepared myself for anything.
‘‘But very quickly the ice is broken, as soon as you’re all on all fours, grunting. Ita would say, ‘Do you think Otis is more of a bonobo here? Or do you think he’s more of a cat?’ The point was to
disconnect so that when you’re in that intimate scene you’re protecting yourself. You have to just laugh,’’ he says.
‘‘You don’t want to overthink these things. As soon as you start thinking, ‘Right, now I need to be more slug-like’, then you’re done.’’
The first season set a high bar, and not just in the nooky department.
‘‘Last year was a bit of an experiment, but it worked,’’ Butterfield says. ‘‘This year I, and some of the other guys, felt that we had to live up to people’s expectations. Ncuti is, like, ‘I feel like I was way funnier last year.’ ’’
Nonsense – he is still a hoot. The show still speaks to a wide audience, from actual teenagers to former ones.
Butterfield says that some were confused by its mash-up of British and American culture – it’s set in a fictional UK school, Moordale, and shot in the Wye Valley, but is thick with nods to John Hughes movies.
‘‘Often shows, especially British ones, that talk about sex and drugs can be quite dark. But our show, with its vibrancy and colour, allowed us to give this place its own character,’’ Butterfield says.
Season two widens the nostalgic palette to include American Pie, Stranger Things (Emma Mackey’s Maeve wears a silly outfit to work in a pretzel bar) and Glee – the musical society get their teeth into Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere and, during the chlamydia ‘‘plague’’, Jermaine Stewart’s
abstinence anthem We Don’t Have to Take Our
Clothes Off.
Where the show is bracingly modern is in its depiction of how sex is for a generation who can ‘‘find out whatever they want, watch whatever they want’’, Butterfield says.
‘‘In some ways that’s good. You don’t necessarily have to go through that conversation with your parents, which is mortifying for everyone.’’
Online porn, however, ‘‘gives people a completely warped perspective on what sex is, especially if people are watching it from a young age. Sex Education shows the truth and the awkwardness and the humour in sex’’.
King of the awkward squad is Otis. ‘‘I really like playing awkward characters,’’ Butterfield says. ‘‘We can all relate to it and it can be very touching, but also very funny.’’
Otis also has ‘‘a wisdom beyond his years, which I also connected to. When I was a teenager, I felt like I was a bit like that, with all the adults I’d been working with.’’ He laughs. ‘‘Those big words, those conversations.’’
He’s not short of self-confidence, our Asa. However, it is a good point: not many actors work with Scorsese before their voice has broken. It may be no coincidence that he has played his share of prodigies: a mathematics genius in X+Y; a talented military strategist in Ender’s Game; a boy who can see invisible creatures in Miss Peregrine’s Home for
Peculiar Children. When he was cast in Hugo, Butterfield had seen only one of Scorsese’s films: The King of Comedy.
‘‘One of his very few that aren’t rated 18. It wasn’t until my mum was telling her friends, ‘He’s working with Scorsese’, and seeing their reaction that I was, like, ‘f...!’ ’’
Butterfield talks about working with Ben Kingsley – or ‘‘Sir Ben’’ as he calls him – on Hugo.
Did they insist on the ‘‘sir’’? ‘‘Yeah, they did. I think I was told that beforehand, actually.’’
Getting the part was life-changing, Butterfield says, but again it only sank in later, when he stepped on to the set, which recreated Gare Montparnasse in 1930s Paris.
‘‘They had two soundstages at Shepperton [Studios] and opened up the gates between them. So it’s like a double-size soundstage, with hundreds of extras, a huge crew, the biggest 3D film cameras that I’d ever seen. And I’m just there, in the middle of it all, kind of taken aback.’’
He is taken aback no longer.
‘‘There aren’t many actors who I would feel nervous about working with. Ian McKellen would be one,’’ Butterfield says, adding that Anderson was a pussycat.
‘‘I met her pretty much the day we started shooting, but we quite quickly just found this very natural energy between us as a mother and son. Both are sort of immature in their own ways and Gillian’s not afraid to be a bit silly, which I love.’’ There will, it is hoped, be one more series of Sex
Education (‘‘fingers crossed’’), but in the meantime he has his second career as a gamer. He competes in tournaments, playing the beat-’em-up game
Super Smash Bros (‘‘like Street Fighter, but a bit more cartoony’’) and is developing his own ‘‘fully fledged’’ game with a friend.
There is also Greed, Michael Winterbottom’s comedy film starring Steve Coogan as a crass billionaire inspired by Philip Green. Butterfield plays one of Coogan’s sons, who ‘‘sort of hates his dad, quotes Gladiator. F...ed up, as you’d expect from the child of a billionaire.’’
You could expect the same of Butterfield, a screen star since the age of 11. As it turns out, though, he is the precise opposite.
The second season of Sex Education is streaming now on Netflix.