New 'raw' BBC series What It Feels Like For A Girl was a queer education for the cast

Yahoo

2 days ago

There's a moment in What It Feels Like For A Girl, the new anarchic coming-of-age BBC series, when a 14-year-old queer working-class kid from Nottingham is cycling through conversations on Chatroulette, hoping to land on someone ready to pull their trousers down on camera.
For anyone who grew up in the early noughties, it's instantly evocative, landing us securely in the moment when the promise of the internet gave us a peek into the breadth of the world outside our small enclaves.
It's a lynchpin moment for Byron, who sees a sexualised existence outside of his rigid, heteronormative upbringing, and plants just enough of a seed to want to seek something else — by any means necessary. He dives headfirst into an underground world of partying, drug-taking and sex work, and navigates his queer, and later trans, identity with the help of a group of 'Fallen Divas'.
The show is based on acclaimed writer Paris Lees' memoir of the same name, which chronicled her upbringing in a working-class suburb of Nottingham. "I read the book, and completely fell in love. I felt like it was so unrestrained and honest and unflinching," Ellis Howard, the relative newcomer who plays Byron, tells Yahoo UK. "When I saw that it was being made, I thought, How and why are they making this? Because this is so raw for the BBC!"
The series, like the book, is unrestrained in its portrayal of Lees' experiences, from the high highs of ecstasy-fuelled nights on the dancefloor raving to Livin' Joy to the dark lows of the abuse suffered at the hands of clients, groomers and partners and the decisions she makes that eventually land her in prison. Think of What It Feels Like For A Girl as a grungier spiritual sister to Skins, the other 2000s teen series that scandalised a generation of parents.
For Lees, who was also the lead writer and executive producer on the series, it was important for young, queer, working-class actors to make up the cast of the show. Alongside Howard, Hannah Jones and Laquarn Lewis star as two of the 'Fallen Divas' who make up Byron's queer circle. In the series, the crew grow, bond and spar together like all teens navigating adolescence, all with the added threatening reality of being visibly queer and trans together. Off-screen, that experience was mirrored too.
"This is a book made by a working-class trans woman [and] I've never seen this before," says Jones, who plays Sasha, who's part antagonist, part confidant to Byron. "I think the audacity and the gumption that Sasha had, the time and that Sasha had, I was like, I'm so drawn to that, I love that. It's such an important story to tell of a working-class trans person whose story isn't just about being trans."
For Lewis, who stars as Byron's first queer friend Lady Die, starring in the series was an education as much as an experience. "It's still something that is new to me, queer culture. I'm gay, and it's all new, and I'm still learning, and I think this has been the best experience of my life. I've learned so much more and I've met so many more queer friends as well."
It's clear that, through the weeks of making this series, Howard, Lewis and Jones are now joined at the hip. They finish each other's sentences, interject with inside jokes, affirm each other's opinions and speak with the mile-a-minute urgency of people who have been patiently waiting for months to finally be able to talk about the thing that's changed their lives.
"I just felt so incredibly grateful every single day that I was on that set," says Howard, as he looks to Lewis and Jones. "I couldn't believe that we were making it, I couldn't believe who we were making it with, just like this ragtag gang of queers who liberated me on set and gave me a passport at my big old age to question who I was, and to affirm this new version of Ellis. I felt like I had my own renaissance."
The series doesn't shy away from difficult topics that, on more than one occasion, are incredibly hard to watch. The sex work that Byron does in bathroom stalls and on damp shed mattresses is dangerous and bleak, and there's a constant fear that, at any second, something truly awful is going to happen to him; and the reality of transphobia and homophobia for Sasha and Lady Die in the early 2000s is spat like acid through the screen. In confronting these scary triggers, the cast said they had to confront their own vulnerabilities as well.
"It is difficult acting-wise, because it's so raw on the page. I have no choice but to meet it, and meet it with [my] own traumas and mess and complications — and I that really cost something emotionally," says Howard. "I'm like, 'Well, if I've experienced these things, I want to reveal it on screen. I want someone to feel seen. I never felt like it was hard. I just felt like I had a responsibility to meet."
"As women and as queer people, we have a wall up, a self-defence wall," says Jones. "And I think breaking that down to come into Sasha's world of craziness and unapologetic self was a hard thing for me, and that goes hand in hand with that of reliving some trauma and getting to the nitty gritty parts of my life and going, 'It's okay that this happens, I need to bring this all to the screen'."
"I had never tucked to my penis ever before. I was in agony," says Lewis, to an immediate eruption of laughter from Howard and Jones, that's both elated and horrified. The three crumble immediately, that balancing of lightness and darkness that's so prevalent in What It Feels Like For A Girl naturally seeping through.
"A big one for me was, Am I doing Lady Die justice? Am I doing the trans community justice? And am I doing queer people justice? Am I doing things right?" he immediately adds, cutting through the jokes with the reality of the albatross that hangs around all their necks with a series like this.
There's a tricky line the young cast is aware they're having to walk right now. They don't want to represent all trans and queer people, but they also recognise that, in a time where conversations around LGBTQ+ identity are reaching a horrible and divisive fever pitch, it's inevitable that they'll be held up to some kind of standard.
"You want people to actually have empathy for what's going on," says Lewis. "We're not trying to change people's minds, but [we want to] make sure that everybody has some sort of sympathy towards people's experiences, and it's like, okay, is this hard-hitting enough to make people actually want to look after humanity?"
"Who knows about what that reaction will be, and best to not anticipate anything," adds Howard. "I'm trying to hold on to [that] I feel incredibly proud of this thing that we've created, and also the friendships that have formed as a result of it."
What It Feels Like for a Girl will stream on BBC iPlayer from Tuesday, 3 June.