TANYA REYNOLDS

Plays Lily Iglehart

What is the most rewarding thing about playing the wonderful and defiantly odd Lily?

It’s a rare, gorgeous thing that not only do I love her, but she’s so inspiring to me. I want to take pieces of her and have them in my own life.

Do you identify with Lily in any way?

I really do – particularly in this season – because she battles with feeling selfconscious for the first time, or the first time that we’ve seen, and feeling like everyone’s looking at her and laughing at her. To film those scenes was hard because I just – I’ve felt very much like that. I don’t know, there was a lot of myself in her, because she is going through the anxiety of feeling really aware of how much she doesn’t fit in with everyone else, and she’s suddenly seeing herself through other people’s eyes: oh God, am I weird? That’s something I can personally identify with.

Lily has gone on quite the journey, from being a boy-obsessed virgin to her bubbling romance with Ola (Patricia Allison).

I was thrilled. I didn’t see it coming, but I also thought it made so much sense. With Lily in season one, her obsession with boys is almost anatomical. She was really obsessed with the penis, and penises were so prevalent in her drawings, [but] it wasn’t sexual attraction, it was more like scientific exploration; she wanted to know what this magical thing was and what it could do to her. Her and Ola seem to work really well. I’m just so glad that she’s now with someone who she can explore her sexuality with very freely and unjudgementally. They can show each other a good time, which God knows, they’ve both been craving!

How does it feel to be part of a storyline that isn’t just joyously queer, but joyously queer for young women? We don’t see as much representation of that as we do for queer men.

A hundred per cent. It’s great. There’s more now, but when I think about when I was growing up and I was a teenager, there wasn’t even close to this much representation, for queer women in particular.

Lily likes to write erotic alien fiction – who doesn’t? Do you believe there is something out there, and if so… are they sexy aliens?

[Laughs] Yes, there obviously are aliens. It’s absurd ignorance to assume that we’d be the only life in the entire universe. There’s definitely aliens, but I don’t think we could even fathom what the aliens would look like… even if they were sexy, we wouldn’t be able to recognise them as sexy. When I think about sexy aliens right now, I think of a very human– [spoiler alert] OK, so in one of the later episodes, you see some of Lily’s work come to life and it is extraordinary.

Was it like, ahem, The XXX Files?

[Laughs] Yes! That was great.

Why do you think Sex Education has struck such a chord with younger and older viewers alike?

I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a loser, but it has just made it ‘cool’ to know shit about your bodies, and to know shit about sex… It’s getting certain topics into the living rooms and mouths of people who otherwise would have really shied away from them.

I recently had a conversation with a friend, specifically about foreskin, a matter we probably should have spoken about when we were 14/15.

I’ve had similar experiences with some of my guy friends when we were in our mid-20s, just not having a clue about periods, or how they actually work, or how often you bleed for, things like this. I was amazed that he didn’t know, and it’s like when we were at school, the girls were taken off and talked to very secretly, hush-hush, about periods and pregnancy, but we were all taught so much about male ejaculate and semen. I knew so much about fucking scrotums than, I don’t know, about my own clitoris. It was not good.

If you could give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Stop worrying so much about what everyone else is thinking. That’s been the bane of my life for probably forever. That’s one of those things that is so much worse, that is perpetuated by social media, which is why I don’t think I would have coped with it now. I couldn’t have coped with Instagram at 16, because I would just be obsessed with what people thought of me.

“Lily battles with feeling like everyone’s laughing at her — I’ve felt like that”