Comedy is the best way to deal with the heavier stuff
AS DERRY GIRLS’ STAR DYLAN LLEWELLYN RETURNS TO OUR SCREENS IN LGBTQ-LED SHOW BIG BOYS, DANIELLE DE WOLFE LEARNS MORE ABOUT IT FROM THE ACTOR AND THE SHOW’S WRITER
BIG BOYS Thursday, Channel 4, 10pm
FRESHERS’ Week is a coming-ofage moment for those embarking on their first year of university.
Often overflowing with drink and debauchery, the onslaught of new experiences away from home can often come as a shock to many new students.
Yet, it remains an alien concept to actor Dylan Llewellyn, who shunned uni in favour of a drama school a short commute away from his family home in Surrey.
This decision served the 29-yearold well. His acting career has gone from strength to strength, with roles in Holby City and Hollyoaks before landing his big break as James Maguire in hit Channel 4 series Derry Girls.
In new Channel 4 sitcom Big Boys, Dylan plays 19-year-old Jack – a naive, closeted fresher from Watford who receives a scholarship to study at the fictional Brent University.
Describing the “LGBTQ-LED show” as a “coming-of-age” tale, he says Big Boys sees Jack and fellow fresher Danny – two students at different ends of the “spectrum of masculinity” – form the unlikeliest of friendships.
While Jack leaves behind his foulmouthed mum Peggy (played by the always delightful Camille Coduri), so that he can make something of himself and not just be stuck at home, knitting blankets to sell on Etsy, 25-year-old Danny (Jon Pointing of Plebs fame) is your typical loud-and-proud lads’ lad.
Hailing from a run-down seaside town, he’s a few years older than every other fresher, trying to live out a lost adolescence, while also confronting the demons of his mental health.
Living in an ex-classroom shed on campus, the boys are thrown together by the enigmatic Jules (Katy Wix), the head of the SU who was a student herself a decade ago and has just never left.
They soon meet Corinne (Izuka Hoyle), a sharp, study-centric Scot who’s learning to let her hair down, and Yemi (Olisa Odele), the savvy fashion kid who, at 19, has already seen it all, done it all and begrudgingly guides this gang of misfits through freshers and beyond.
And so we follow their first year at Brent Uni as they explore, experiment and try to discover themselves, helping one another along the way.
There’s also grief to deal with too. In the midst of attempting to carve out his adult identity, Jack must also deal with the void left following the sudden and unexpected loss of his dad.
“Jack in Big Boys is basically a ‘baby gay’,” says Dylan. “He’s trying to learn it all while he’s still trying to discover himself.
“It’s about young males, in particular, being comfortable in their masculinity and opening up, dealing with loss, not bottling it up.”
Dylan’s character is not too dissimilar to his former Derry-based companion. So much so, Big Boys creator, comedian Jack Rooke, insists Dylan was cast because “he’s just so fantastically good at playing this shy, endearing boy who keeps messing up”.
Born out of two Edinburgh Fringe shows – Jack’s 2015 offering Good Grief and 2017 show Happy Hour – Big Boys acts as a cathartic memoir, adapted from the original scripts he co-wrote with his 85-year-old nan.
Material that can be traced back to the death of his father when Jack was 15, the spokenword show was lifted from diary entries written in Microsoft Word using “really bad fonts that nobody could read”.
“I think Big Boys to me illustrates why the Edinburgh Fringe Festival can be an amazing place to go,” says Jack.
“I went there, nobody knew who I was, I was in the smallest room at one of the big venues at the Fringe, at the worst time slot.
“By the end of it, I’d had the whole BBC comedy team in; I’d had the New York Times in... it was just one of those Edinburgh sleeper hits.”
Jack puts his success down to “being in the dead dad club, essentially”.
Describing the humour that can be found in grief and the “awkwardness of death”, he says the extreme lengths people would go to in order to avoid talking about his bereavement was something he found “quite amusing”.
“Comedy is the best way to tackle that heavier stuff,” says Jack. “And there is nothing more narcissistic than writing a sitcom about your own life.”
Following a 2017 sit-com writing masterclass from Jon Petrie, producer of People Just Do Nothing and Stath Lets Flats, the comedian says he learned from the “comedy genius” the nuances of “how sit-coms work” – from character to plot.
The skills he learnt from those conversations formed the framework of this show.
Reflecting Jack’s own adolescent experience in the North London suburb of Watford, the show, set in 2013, sees the character experience a “period of reinvention” courtesy of new friend Danny.
With Jack acting as narrator across a “series of memories”, the comedian points out that audiences will be “very aware” they’re watching a TV show set in the past.
“I even say out loud at the start that Dylan is playing me, because ‘if you can’t cast yourself as better looking, then what’s the point?’ Am I right?” insists the comic. Having initially met through a mutual friend – Dylan’s Derry Girls co-star Nicola Coughlan, who caught Jack’s 2017 Fringe show – the stars aligned perfectly when it came to casting.
With Nicola tipping her co-star off about Jack’s show Big Boys, Dylan admits his first thoughts were “I wish I could get on that”.
“I like Channel 4 comedies!” confesses the actor.
Juggling filming commitments for Big Boys, the final series of Derry Girls and Danny Boyle’s highly anticipated forthcoming series Sex Pistols drama Pistol, 2021 was a busy one for Dylan. With 2022 marking the release of twothirds of those projects, the future’s looking bright for the “wee English fella” from Surrey.