by “I’ve been playing sweet teenagers all my acting life,” says Dylan Llewellyn, sitting across from me in a busy London restaurant. “But really, I’ve reached a stage where I’ve started to grow out of it. I’m coming to the point, at 31 years old, I want to play some real adults.”
Picking up a plate of prawn toast and pork dumplings at lunch, Llewellyn is smiling, only half-serious in his assessment. Certainly, he has no complaints about the fact that playing cheerful, gentle and sometimes restless teenagers helped him to achieve a great career. All three seasons of the smash hit Derry Girls were the well-mannered and charming schoolboy James Maguire, his breakthrough. Most recently, he played shy and tender 19-year-old Jack in the critically acclaimed Channel 4 coming-of-age comedy Big Boys, which returned to our screens in January for season two.
It’s not hard to see why parts like this keep coming. Fresh-faced and soft-spoken, his personal energy brings much of the kind and gentle nature of his best-known role. “And I will lose that youth and innocence in character when they stop,” he assures me, “it’s always fun. It’s just that I want to play a really terrible git to test myself afterwards.”
A second installment of Big Boys could at least mark the next stage of Llewellyn’s on-screen adolescence. While Jack will start university and begin to explore his sexuality in the first season, the show begins with post-freshmen as he navigates the perilous life of sophomore year: student housing, changing friendships, anal tenderness The difficult themes of season one are nicely handled with humor and elegance still central to the storylines – coming out, volatile mental health and the long shadow of grief are still very much at the warm heart of the show.
Created and written by Jack Rooke, it is a semi-autobiographical series. Llewellyn and Rooke met on the outskirts of Edinburgh for the first time, when they were introduced by fellow Derry Girls star Nicola Coughlan. “Jack wanted to get Nicola to play a drug dealer in the pilot,” says Llewellyn, “then my agent called to ask if I wanted to audition.”
Rooke soon knew that Llewelyn was fit. “Dylan has this wonderful, kind quality at his core,” Rooke tells me, “and he’s also a great physical comic. Writing content for him is a joy: I can draw up scenes with silly slapstick stuff – like getting an old man’s cock in the eye or quitting drinking poppers – which still gives me so much heart. “
A pilot film was made for the BBC, but it went nowhere. More than a year later, he was picked up by Channel 4. “When he was commissioned, Jack gave me a lot to research about his life,” says Llewellyn. “I listened to the audiobook of his book Cheer the F**k Up, and Jack telling his story in his own voice really helped me understand it.”
Series one was shot immediately after the lock was removed, but Llewellyn managed to squeeze in quality time to get to know the real Rooke family. “On set, me and Jack spent a lot of time together. I would always ask, ‘Should I do it this way?’ After a difficult scene, the staff would come over and check how I was doing. And I’m like, ‘More importantly, is Jack okay?'”
And then, of course, there is to hair. Curly locks are amazing and messy in iterations both on and off screen. Today, Llewellyn’s looks a lot slower than in the show – what’s the secret? “We shot the first season right after the lockdown, so I had gray hair,” he tells me. “It was very long, all natural. For season two I grew it out, but it’s not far from us, so yes, I had to wear extensions this time.” Llewellyn was brought up in Reigate, Surrey. He still lives in the area. “I was nine years old when I moved from my local primary school to More House School, specializing in supporting pupils with autism and dyslexia,” he says. It is the largest school of its kind in Britain. “Before that, I struggled a lot because of my dyslexia. I was leaving it behind; I could barely read and write.”
Pre-diagnosis was an extremely challenging time. “Honestly,” he says, “I thought I was dumb. That is not the case, I now know. When I was told I had dyslexia, it was very positive. No, I’m not stupid.” His new school was on the other side of Surrey, the journey was worth every second. “The classes were smaller, the teachers were patient and took their time. It was transformative. I felt at ease, where I could express myself.”
In photography Llewellyn envisioned his future: “Being behind the camera was what I wanted.” There were a few parts in school plays through his teenage years, but acting was never on his radar anyway. “I fell into it by accident,” he says. “At GCSE, I chose media, photography and drama. Honestly, it was meant to be a dose thing.”
Her drama class entered a competition through the National Theatre. “Ours was a play within a play, and my character was introverted with a stopper, really shy. But when he read lines as a stand in, he came out of his shell. He found it perfectly; it really touched him.” This spoke to how 16-year-old Llewellyn felt. “Like my character, I was shy at the time and struggled with my confidence. Acting let me put on this mask, just like that character. On stage I did things I never thought possible.”
His group won the competition, going on to play at the National Theatre. He was then scouted, then signed by an agent. However, he enrolled in a photography course at college. “But I was getting auditions – and it was a lot to juggle. My parents thought acting was worth a try, so I dropped out of college for a few months.”
Today, Llewellyn knows how dyslexia shapes his approach to acting. Learn online – it has a method. First, he writes all his lines on an iPad, and puts each one in order. “Once I have all my lines down,” he says, “I record my voice doing all the other parts, leaving gaps for mine. And then I press play, doing my lines live, so I learn the cues.” He’s confident in telling casting directors what he’ll need to do his best. “But when I was just starting out at 16 , there were definitely difficulties. It was tough. There would be times in audition rooms where I would be given a fresh script and asked to read another scene, or try another part, with no preparation time. I would try take it off, but I would have panicked: it took me everything to try to even read the script properly, it didn’t go well.”
When he spoke about his dyslexia, not everyone understood: “People were not so sensitive. They didn’t know much about dyslexia, thinking I was just lazy. Other times I wasn’t even confident to tell them, for fear it would affect the result.”
Already struggling with anxiety and shyness, these early experiences in the industry began to mess with his morale. “I wasn’t confident at first, so this was all a huge knock. I realized I needed to learn a bit more, so I went to drama school.” At 17, Llewellyn auditioned for Rada; he was accepted on a basic course on his first attempt.
The gigs started coming, including an 18-month stint on Hollyoaks playing six-year-old Martin “Jono” Johnson and a stage breakthrough in the West End production of War Horse. Then auditions started to dry up and he took a job in a cafe making sandwiches.
“It was at least a year of nothing,” he remembers. “I was so close to hitting him. But I dropped out of college – I didn’t know what else to do.” Lucky for him, he refused to let himself get carried away by Derry Girls’ early auditions. “I was at work when I got the call. I pulled out my Pudding and replied.” He was cast. “It was emotional, really. I was about to give it up. It really meant the world to me. He saved me.”
He was not alone. Set in Northern Ireland in the early 90s during the Troubles, the show cemented itself as a comedy classic in just 19 episodes and is now a global sensation after making its way to Netflix. He was a launching pad for the whole team: his co-stars have gone on to land major roles in the likes of Bridgerton, Barbie and DC’s The Flash. “I love the girls,” Llewellyn says of the gang bond, “they’re like my sisters. It was a big part of all our acting careers to go through it together.”
With two highly acclaimed major shows under his belt, it’s no surprise that Llewellyn is regularly recognised. For now, at least, he says that wouldn’t change the world. “Through Derry Girls and Big Boys my confidence has increased,” he says. “That’s why I love talking to people about the shows, taking pictures and signing things. You might think it means a lot to the person looking for a selfie, but really, considering how I got here, all this? It means the world to me too.”
• The second series of Big Boys is available to air on Channel 4 now.
