photography RICHARD DOWKER
When the actor Ellis Howard first read the script for What It Feels Like For a Girl, the riotous and necessary new series from the BBC, “it felt so dangerous and anarchic,” he says, “like a real, rallying cry from a council estate.” Based on the writer and activist Paris Lees’ memoir about her own teenage years, it follows a working-class schoolkid in Nottingham as they dive headlong into the unknown world of their own queerness (and, eventually, their trans identity). There’s robbery, sex work, cheating, bitching, guns, nights out, fallouts, toilet brush dildos, anger, abuse, family trauma, and betrayal. It’s a no-holds-barred take on the overly polished coming-of-age story. Like Skins but more button-pushing. Euphoria with the glitter rubbed off.
It’s no surprise that its young cast—among them Howard, Laquarn Lewis, Hannah Jones, Jake Dunn, and Calam Lynch—all jumped at the opportunity to play a part in it. Turning up on set in the English town of Nottingham to shoot it together for the better part of half a year felt like “how everyone feels when the sun finally comes out in England,” Lewis says. “Which is: fucking amazing.”
Perhaps that’s both due to an appetite for the material and how scarcely we come across it. If British TV’s been defined internationally for the last decade through its austere period dramas and umpteen Jane Austen takes, it feels like we’ve turned a corner recently. I May Destroy You and Baby Reindeer have both felt like global breakouts that thrived on their unique subject matter and sensitivity. What It Feels Like For a Girl feels like its own white peacock: full of sass and pomp, but beautiful in its strange and singular nature.
We meet this gang at the dawn of a new millennium in Nottingham. Byron (Howard), a 14-year-old council estate kid, is contending with the fact that their queerness sets them apart. People their age are out misbehaving, while they are mostly housebound, hanging out with their meek best friend. That is until—after they wander into a web of underage sex work and meet Max (Lynch), an older groomer they fall hard for—a new world reveals itself. Wandering into the unexplored gay clubs, where they come under the wing of Lady Die (Lewis), they meet a troupe of Fallen Divas, the bitchy Sasha (Jones) among them. But when Liam (Dunn), a troublemaker, comes into their orbit, their life will change irrevocably.
“It humanizes a lot of the queer experience, like being a cunt because you want to be a cunt.”
hannah jones
Its supercharged energy, going into the ugly parts of Byron’s life, largely stems from the fact that what you’re seeing is a true-to-life version of what happened to Lees herself. When it seems overtly provocative or dangerous, that’s never a work of fiction but a reflection of her past. That also means that the majority of the people in the show have real-life counterparts. (A few, like Sasha, are a handful of people in Lees’ life rolled into one.) For Lewis, that meant playing the “Beyoncé” of the story, a channel for “authenticity, love, and charisma” for a lost young Byron, who also dealt with her own issues at home. “I could tell she was someone who knew herself and wanted to let the world know it’s okay to be yourself too,” Lewis says. All Dunn learned about who Liam was based on from Lees was that “he used to get off on winding someone up ‘til they’re about to explode,” he says. “If you know that these events happened—which they did—those beats are sort of laid out for you already,” he says. Playing him “becomes less about Liam’s motivations,” he adds, “and more about his impulsivity.”
Where it feels like the show differs from recent queer media (“We’re holding space for that,” Jones says with a laugh) is that it’s often deeply unpalatable—either in subject matter or in the ways its characters choose to act. It’s an queer-hetero equalizer, Jones thinks, “and it humanizes a lot of the queer experience, like falling out with your friends, or just being a cunt because you want to be a cunt.” The characters are given the permission to be unpleasant and make terrible decisions, even if it makes them look like bad people. “We have to share real stories to open people’s eyes to what goes on in a lot of young people’s lives, trans or not,” Lewis thinks. “The downs are really down. The highs are really high.”
Byron’s downs in the story are often shocking in their depravity. True to Lees’ childhood, she was abused as a teenager by older men, steered into sex work, and fell in love with the people she didn’t realize then were her abusers. But the show is told entirely from Byron’s perspective, and when these encounters evoke ecstasy, regardless of the circumstances, that’s what you see. It presents a headfuck for an audience, but also, you’d imagine, for those involved in it. Byron and Max feel like lovebirds, but Byron’s 15 and Max is 21. (“I actually don’t know how much he’s engaging with the difficulty in his life,” Lynch says of his character.) Liam, the more obviously coercive character, doesn’t seem fazed by the things he’s doing to a child.
“It’s not the point of art to be a penicillin for society.”
ellis howard
Howard is quick to contextualize the safety of the scenes themselves. If there’s a discomfort in watching them, “I never felt discomfort doing them,” he says, crediting the show’s “incredible” intimacy coordinator Tigger Blaize. “What I feel like is incredibly bold and incredibly honest here is that Paris, at this point, didn’t know it was abuse,” he says. What’s “incredibly bold and honest” is how Lees chose to interpret that from Byron’s perspective. “This is a power dynamic which is precarious, dangerous, abusive, illegal, immoral, you know? I don’t know if I’ve seen much [of that perspective on that dynamic] on television before.”
Dunn had to figure that out from his side. “There’s this epilogue to every job you do, which is talking about the work a year later, and asking yourself what will people think and what should they think about this material?” he says. “Honestly, I’m not sure I’m in the position to educate on the intricacies of coercion, class, grooming, and violence with any level of coherence, because I don’t actually have any answers to Liam’s behaviour. I can’t explain him. I can only present him.”
How audiences react to these scenes, rather than how it tells you to feel about them, is a key part of the show’s importance, Howards agrees. “I don’t want to chaperone what someone takes away from those moments,” he adds. “These are live acts. And so if they start a conversation, then that’s brilliant. It’s not the point of art to be a penicillin for society.”
Progress is a boomerang these days. It hurls forth excitedly before spinning back on itself, ending up right back where it started. But there are always interceptors: loud people willing to throw themselves into its path, and question where it’s heading. For the queer community, the trans community, What It Feels Like For a Girl is that interceptor: a full-bodied, fraught, and interesting portrayal of their existence. That it lands just as the Western world re-steers to the right—with the Trump administration persecuting just about every minority, and the UK Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is bound to biological sex—it feels like a balm for the disenfranchised.
For these transphobes, trans folk are a hypothesis, not people. The show might force them to confront trans people as what they are: persecuted, messy in their own way, and in need of the same shit we all need. “I just hope that it humanizes trans people,” Jones says of the show. “I hope that they see things in us that they love, and I hope they see things in us that they don’t like, but they recognize in themselves.”
Though it’s likely to become the subject of right-wing think pieces and TERF rage over the next few weeks, the show’s legacy will be long-lasting. It’s also cemented this group of people together. Though some had crossed paths in the past (Dunn met Lewis at a drama club in Nottingham nearly a decade ago, and it was “so exciting to be back in each other’s lives again,” Dunn says), making the show was a baptism of fire that bonded them quickly and forever.
Almost all of Lynch’s scenes are with Howard, “and so I got to know him really quickly, and despite his reputation as an unbearable egocentric bully”––Lynch is kidding, of course––“he’s actually really lovely.” Everyone has nice things to say about Howard: Dunn calls him “the real deal”; Jones hangs out with him every week; Lewis says they were “glued together from the very beginning.”
If the show feels monumental, it also feels like the birth of a new group of really cool, tasteful actors who are bound to do something just as beautiful next. They’ll stick together, it seems. “We all showed up every single day, buns in our hair, earrings out, ready to just go for it,” Howard says. “And I think when you’re being that vulnerable, it hardwires a connection. We all really fell in love with each other.”
“What It Feels Like For a Girl” airs on BBC Two and iPlayer from 3 June