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The comedian-turned-writer’s BAFTA-winning account of mental health and grief has made for one of the most poignant, progressive comedies in recent memory. As he says farewell to the show, he talks the personal onus to get the finale right and whether a stateside version could ever be on the cards.
Words ANDREW WRIGHT
*The below article features reference to suicide and spoilers for Big Boys Season 3.
The late Princess Diana is referenced eight times, Jack Rooke tells me, in Season 3 of Big Boys — the final outing of his lauded Channel 4/Hulu comedy-drama released earlier this month. “The ice-creams in Margate are to Princess Di for,” one character exclaims. Another names her baby Diana-Camilla in a double-barrelled statement of sisterhood. Rooke has a theory that if the late Princess was alive today, she would watch the raucous but affecting look at university years, friendship, identity, and mental health on her sofa, alongside George Michael, as participants on Celebrity Gogglebox.
Rooke dedicated the first episode of Big Boys’ latest season to Michael’s infamous 2011 tweet on the merits of gay sex. “I couldn’t write a show where a character loses their gay anal virginity in Greece without mentioning George Michael,” the 31-year-old laughs. “That would have felt like blasphemy.”
He's right. We agree also, on a weekday afternoon in Soho’s Dean Street Townhouse, that Diana would have adopted a more progressive celebrity-esque profile in the 21st century, beyond the confines of the insitution, à la Harry and Meghan or Fergie. “Diana and Victoria Beckham would have done a line of clothes together,” Rooke posits. What about a tell-all, blockbuster Netflix documentary? “Yes, but it would be directed by Danny Boyle or something. I think Diana would have been really classy with what she said yes and no to.”
Rooke can afford to apply the same selectivity as he journeys beyond Big Boys, the show that has marked him out as one of the most perceptive TV writers of his era, winning him a BAFTA last year, and fans in the form of Graham Norton, Kylie Minogue and venerated screenwriter Russell T Davies. I find him in the vortex that is the final season’s UK release week, intensified by the fact the show’s conclusion has been heartily embraced by critics (four and five-star reviews all-round) and that fan outpourings of love are engulfing social media. In short, Rooke's everywhere. But he’s also in a central London branch of Soho House expeditiously eating a Caesar Salad when I arrive, his publicist sat opposite him, as if dutifully observing he’s remaining nourished as events reach boiling point.
Rooke’s astute assessment of Diana’s could-have-been career direction is of the calibre you would expect from him, given niche pop culture references have been shaded throughout Big Boys – a semi-autobiographical portrait of an unlikely friendship between two university students — since its 2022 debut. Rooke’s fictional-ish counterpart, played by Dylan Llewellyn, originates in Season 1, set in 2013, as a slightly dweeby but endearing fresher, obsessed with The X Factor and owning a fish named after British daytime TV royalty Alison Hammond. He’s not only navigating his first year at the fictional polytechnic Brent University but also the realisation that he’s gay and the aftermath of his father’s untimely passing. Arriving at halls of residence, he meets Danny (Jon Pointing), an older, Jack-the-lad with a soft centre, who becomes his flatmate and soon-to-be best pal, and the pair end up by each other’s sides as they weather the rudiments of early adulthood, from Jack’s enduring grief and coming-out process to Danny’s mental health struggles and familial volatility.
Ample parties, a Grindr misadventure, a lads’ mag internship, and a holiday to Greece are also all among the greatest hits of their time in the arms of education. But like most English undergraduate university stints, it’s a story in three parts, or in this case, three seasons. “It was almost my dream for [Big Boys] to mirror the three years of uni,” Rooke says. “I just like the symmetry of a three-part story. And I think, in terms of scripted comedies, it's a good amount of story to tell. If we were to start venturing into Season 4 or Season 5, I'd have been putting a lot of filler in there.”
The pressures of wrapping up Big Boys at this juncture surpassed merely a drive to avoid over-padding proceedings, however. Since Season 1, Rooke has doubled as the show’s writer and narrator, contributing witty reflections on the friends’ student blunders from the smoother plains of one’s late 20s/early 30s. But there’s a melancholy also in the fact he directs his narration directly at Danny, a character that collages a few of Rooke’s real-life mates, including Olly, his university friend who died by suicide in the years following their graduation. Such a fate for Danny has been a looming possibility in the gaze of Big Boys fans also au fait with Rooke’s previous accounts of the story — 2017 Edinburgh Fringe show Happy Hour and 2020 memoir Cheer the F**K Up: How to Save your Best Friend. Wrapping up the device of Rooke’s meta narration, in the show’s final episode, was an opportunity to say goodbye in the way the sudden finality of suicide deprives those left behind. “Often I think when you lose a loved one, especially when you lose somebody really young, and especially to suicide, you feel this sense that you've just not been able to say goodbye properly. So it's really nice to have a moment where the narrator leaves Danny and says goodbye.”
“The show sort of becomes a musing on suicide and tries to be a very funny but still a warming and heartbreaking commentary on how you remain optimistic and confident that you can support your loved ones and see them through it.” Comic relief is supplied, as ever, by one of the show’s standouts, Jules (Katy Wix), who’s established in Season 1 as a hapless university rep with no dearth of zeal, but finds herself intrinsic to the poignancy of the show’s final notes. “She's been a joke for, like, three series,” Rooke says. “But I think that's why I really wanted her to be the hero in the end.”
“She's always silly, always wacky but actually, if you ever re-watch the series, she always looks out for Danny. In Season 1, she gets him a birthday cake on his birthday, because she knows that he's not got much family at home. And in Season 2, she's always checking in on him. In Season 3, she gets him a laptop. She's always kind of actually safeguarding him.” Centering her in the show’s finale in the way Rooke did meant that, in a similar fashion to, say, how Bravo head-honcho Andy Cohen is known for ‘pausing’ his Real Housewives… to distribute their impact among series most dexterously, Rooke consciously lowered Jules’ visibility in Season 2 in anticipation of the show’s later stretches. “I didn't want people to guess that she was going to be the hero,” he explains.
Jules is just one of a six-strong core ensemble who accompany Jack and Danny throughout. The pair are flanked by flatmates Corinne (Izuka Hoyle), the principled, dependable cornerstone of any student social milieu, and Jack’s gay mentor-of-sorts, fashion student Yemi (Olisa Odele). The group’s aforementioned Greek escapade is courtesy of a bingo win from Jack’s cousin Shannon (Harriet Webb) in Season 3, who appears alongside his mum Peggy (Camille Coduri) and grandma Nanny Bingo (Annette Badland). They all form a set of supporting characters who, by Season 3’s culmination, swell to so much more. “Everyone's left somewhere where you believe they would be and that's right for them,” Rooke says.
Rounding out the stories, in particular, of the latter women at the heart of Jack’s family was a priority this season. It was a decision perhaps owed to the no-nonsense matriarchs Rooke was surrounded by in his working-class childhood near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. “It felt really important to me for there to be characters who were older and women and working-class,” he explains. “Older women who were having just as much of a new chapter and just as many new experiences as the boys at uni.” In Season 3, Nanny Bingo opens up to Jack on her own queer history. Peggy ventures into dating for the first time since Jack’s dad’s passing in his teenage years – an arc with particular significance for Rooke given his mum was widowed when he was 15. “That’s something she’s dealing with,” he says. And in telling Shannon’s story, came an opportunity to evade the myopic tropes that until recently regularly plagued representations of plus-sized characters on-screen. “I’ve lived my whole life as a larger person, and I wanted her to be a plus-sized character who was daft and silly and funny but was never the butt of her own joke. She still had ambition and a want to have a family and a job.”
The process of tying the final bows on any of the plot lines the show played host to, one might imagine, would be an unhurried, “take as much time as you need” artistic affair. But in actual fact, Rooke had weeks. Three weeks per episode, to be precise, following the end of Season 2’s production. If he didn’t complete the writing within that time frame, the chance of coordinating the cast’s schedules to allow the final season to materialise was slim. “It's not very healthy to put your body and mind through the stress of that,” he admits. “I don't want to ever do something like that again, but I also know that if we hadn't done it like that, the show would never have been made.”
Late-night writing shifts between 11 pm and 3 am were often his sweet spot. He wrote part of Episode 1 and the show’s finale in Paris. “This is the most pretentious thing I'll ever say… but I love writing in Paris,” he laughs. He wasn’t cooped up in a five-star hotel until he was satisfied with what he’d made, however. Rather, he snagged a cheap deal on the Eurostar via Uber and leaned on an eye for economical accommodation. “I’m working-class originally. I now live a very middle-class life, but I've stayed in a lot of two-star hotels. I know how to decipher between a two-star hotel that will be dirty, and a two-star hotel that will be clean.” The Premier Inn in Manchester’s Northern Quarter is one of his favourite hotels in the country. “It has never failed me.”
By day, Parisians would find him in the city’s co-working spots. “They get really arsey if you just whip out your laptop in a cafe [in France], but the co-working cafes are great because they’re in the centre of the city, you pay 20 euros and you've got tea and coffee all day and fruit and cheese and yogurt.” The solitude of writing has often made it Rooke’s least favourite part of the show’s creation. However, this time around, the collaborative production and editing process presented different challenges, given his attachment to the story and his vision for its conclusion. He had to leave a note-sharing session that featured in the editing stage because of his struggle to maintain objectivity. “I was like, I've got to get out because I'd had the idea for [the ending] for so long.”
“It’s not that I don't want feedback. I’m reliant on collaboration or [during shooting], the cast saying, ‘Can I try it like this?’” The actors would often do dual takes of scenes — first abiding by the script and subsequently incorporating improvisation. “But in making the final episode, I was like, ‘I do need us to hit every single beat.’ So I was maybe a little bit stricter with how much change could occur at that moment.”
He’s been far from a hard taskmaster on set, though, with the cast and Rooke a tight-knit family unit at this point. The show won him a housemate in its director Jim Archer, too. “We've sort of fallen for each other in a friendship way,” he admits. It’s a tale with parallels in the unlikely happenstance-fuelled kinship of Jack and Danny. Rooke was told, “You know, ‘Jim’s gonna direct the pilot. Do you like him?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s fine.’” The rest would be history. Archer did often stay in hotels when they were filming. At the end of other days, “Sometimes I’d be like, ‘Jim, do you want to play Monopoly? And he’d be like, I've spent all day with you it’s not happening.’” But other than that, their shared living and professional quarters never got too close for comfort.
“I do feel like I'm in a band when I'm with Jon, Dylan, Izuka, Jim, Harriet and Olisa,” he says. On one occasion, that band resembled the Spice Girls in the “Wannabe” video, specifically. It was at the 2023 BAFTAs, at which Big Boys was nominated. “We were running around the Royal Festival Hall like a pack.” They continued the party at Rooke’s hotel, where he’d booked a suite. “It was [around] the first time I ever earned any money,” he explains. “And not a huge amount of money, just public service broadcasting money, I will hasten to add.” Still, it offered optimal surroundings for partying until 9 am, which is what they did. “Nothing sordid, we were just high off of being with each other.”
Rooke’s only seen his BAFTA TV Craft trophy twice, he says, as his mum pocketed it for her own mantlepiece as soon as he bagged it. He doesn’t begrudge her though. “She wasn’t overly literate,” he explains. “I think the fact that she's got a son who's grown up to be a writer has helped her feel that a lot of those difficult experiences that we went through that are in the show, were kind of worth us sticking by each other. And I'm really proud of her too and grateful that she's trusted me to tell parts of her story through Peggy.” He would prefer if the bronze statue remained within the confines of their family home, however. “The other day, she took it down the caf. And she was right by the canal. I thought, 'this could go really wrong, really quickly.'”
Securing another BAFTA for Rooke’s own shelf doesn’t seem like such a pipe dream if his mum will let him have it. And perhaps there are in fact yet further victories to be won in the world of Big Boys. The show is released in the US via Hulu, but “It’s so British, so I wonder how much it does fully translate,” Rooke says. Would a tailor-made American adaptation ever be on the cards? “The only way I think it works is if the people at the helm of the other version are still creatively involved.” He’s not necessarily averse to the idea, though. The Office did it incredibly well. Shameless did it incredibly well. So, we'll see.”
Big Boys is out now on Channel 4 (UK) and on Hulu (US) in March
Interview taken from Man About Town SS25
Photography Lewis Vorn
