“I Feel Like I’m In The Right Place”: Calam Lynch Likes Telling Stories With Danger

His latest gig – in Prime Video action-comedy Ride or Die – might be his first time bearing arms on screen, but from What It Feels Like for a Girl to a recent Brian Epstein play, the actor has long embraced high stakes. 

Some nights of Calam Lynch’s Edinburgh Fringe show, the cast would outsize the audience. “I'd say we held at a steady [crowd of] four for most of the run,” he says. Venue staff would sometimes approach them before a performance. “They’d be like, ‘Hey guys, you can cancel if you want.’ And we were all like, ‘No, the show must go on,’” Lynch laughs. 

The plucky perseverance of Lynch and his co-stars – fellow students at the time at Oxford – was perhaps down to the “intoxicating” effects of their university’s drama scene. When the extracurricular activity wasn’t taking him north over the summer, it was diverting Lynch’s attention from his studies (a classics degree). As a teenager, he had scored a highly competitive place in the National Youth Theatre: the early performing arts training ground with alumni including Daniel Craig and Daniel Day-Lewis. “But I wasn’t super theatre kid-y,” he says. “And I probably was less relaxed in that environment when I was younger.” However, by the time of his Fringe escapades, finally, “I felt like I was with my people.” 

Tessa Coates, the creator of Lynch’s new TV show, enjoyed a sold-out run for her star-making solo Fringe debut – 2018 comedy Primates. Lynch would get to prove his comedic chops elsewhere in the interim, leading him to Ride or Die, Coates’ city-hopping assassin-centred lark that sees him trying “gun acting” for the first time. He’s realised in recent years that projects with a comical current are his favourite. “And I found Tessa’s tone of voice really funny.” 

We’re sat on a bench, balancing iced coffees, on a Thursday afternoon in London’s Bow, midway through the first of a triptych of heatwaves in the capital in 2026. Lynch is notably breezy nonetheless, having just shot for Man About Town. His upcoming weekend will be spent mainly outside – attending LGBTQIA+ pop extravaganza Mighty Hoopla and observing the Premier League championship parade of his beloved Arsenal. Lynch played football six times per week growing up, and had a career in sports journalism loosely eyed when he realised his on-pitch skills wouldn’t lead him to the Emirates dressing room. He’s resigned to simply watching in adulthood. “I get a bit nervous [to play] because I can't mess up the career,” he laughs, gesturing to his visage. “In case someone gives you an elbow or something.” 

Tonight, he’ll perform the penultimate show of a six-week run at North London’s Kiln Theatre, as Brian Epstein, in Please Please Me, a play reflecting on The Beatles’ manager’s underexplored personal life as a gay man in 1960s Britain. It’s Lynch’s second appearance at Kiln, following 2019 study of sexual identity, Wife. Stage turns in both London and Dublin have punctuated his screen exploits since his graduation in 2017. His parents, Niamh Cusack and Finbar Lynch, also actors, spent much of their careers performing before live audiences. So too did Ride or Die co-star Hannah Waddingham, whose present chapter as an international TV lead was preceded by a decade-plus run as a West End luminary (Spamalot, A Little Night Music, Kiss Me, Kate). Because of that, “She felt really familiar to me immediately,” he explains. “And I just think she's such a good screen actor. It makes total sense that she's having a massive screen career now, because she's so skilled at it. She looks incredible and has this aura of power.” 

In Ride or Die, Waddingham’s Judith, an insubordinate, freestyling assassin, can indeed command a frame. After 29 years of duplicity, killing for a living while her loved ones – including best friend, lawyer and politician’s wife Debbie (Octavia Spencer) – believed she was a forensic accountant, her behaviour is starting to run off-piste. Her green, oft-bumbling boss Sam (Lynch) puts it down to her turning 50 (or at least one of her aliases marking their half-centenary), and suggests retirement. However, refusing to discard her duties, she embarks on a fresh pursuit of criminal Billy Donovan (Ed Skrein), only this time, somehow, with Debbie in tow. 

Sam, frantic, keeps tabs from afar. “There is a part of him which is quite naive and gauche,” Lynch reflects, “which is quite a fun thing to play. But over the course of the show, he is forced to examine himself and think about the job he's doing. So when you take this funny, odd guy and put him in more serious situations, really interesting stuff can come up. And that’s a dream for an actor, because there is a really clear arc.” 

Perhaps Lynch’s academic background lends itself to his ability to study his characters from all angles. Ahead of embodying Epstein, he read Some Men in London, an anthology of postwar gay life, collating letters and diary entries from men in the city between 1945 and 1959. Alan Downs’ The Velvet Rage was also on his reading list. The 2005 self-help book, in part, looks at the way internalised shame can mutate into a bid for professional perfectionism as gay men strive for acceptance. “That was a way into looking at Brian's life,” Lynch says. “It is guessing. Maybe Brian would say none of that was to do with his professional life, but I thought it was an interesting idea to put on stage.” 

It’s no surprise Lynch had his head in the books ahead of tackling the role, however. It was, after all, his first project with his name at the top of the bill. “I’d wanted to play the lead for ages,” he explains. “I've had such a nice run of playing lovely supporting characters, but I wanted to experience that pressure.” The milestone is a neatly placed culmination of almost a decade of graft since leaving university, which, onscreen, began with a minor appearance in Dunkirk, before a recurring role in Bridgerton Season 2 put him on the mainstream map. He’d then become a romantic lead when Sky/Starz’s Sweetpea debuted in 2024. 

However, it was a year later that audiences would find him in his “favourite ever job” – What It Feels Like for a Girl – playing morally-intricate, frosted-tips-sporting Max in the volatile, heady coming-of-age drama based on trans author and journalist Paris Lees’ memoir of the same name. It proved among the most vivid British representations of queer adolescence in TV history, receiving five BAFTA nominations in March. “Part of the reason I loved doing that so much is because it felt like we were doing something that was new and urgent and a bit dangerous,” Lynch says. 

Please Please Me offered a similar draw – beyond merely the lead-role prestige on Lynch’s CV. “It feels like we’re doing something important in telling this story of this gay man in the 1960s. Living in a time when homosexuality was illegal. Of course, there was more going on with Brian than just his sexuality… but the other part of his life – The Beatles – has been so extensively covered.” Lynch notes the parallels between the vocabulary directed at queer men in the era and that aimed by politicians and the media towards today’s trans community. “It is really dehumanising, aggressive, angry vitriol.” 

After years of being recognised in the street for Bridgerton, the passion that work like Please Please Me or What It Feels Like for a Girl can engender in passersby has been refreshing. “Bridgerton was such a great opportunity. But when people stop you and are like, ‘Are you in Bridgerton?’ and you go, ‘Yeah,' there's nothing else to say. Whereas for What It Feels Like for a Girl, people will be like, ‘I loved it,’ or they say something specific, which is always nice.” 

At the moment, Lynch gets recognised around once a week. “It’s really nice because I don't have to change the way I live my life at all. I'm not great with change.” When he left university, he thought that success was tied to playing Hollywood leads. However, the spot he’s in just now is proving optimal. “I feel like I’m in the right place,” he concludes, “and maybe that will change, maybe life will present something different.”

It doesn’t mean he’s averse to aspiration, however. He bonded, in particular, with his Ride or Die castmate Skrein (Deadpool, Jurassic World) during filming. “Ed and I really get on. I think Ed's maybe 10 years older than me, and I was like, ‘I kind of want to be Ed in 10 years,’” Lynch laughs. But, like in his Fringe days, Lynch is happy carrying on with what’s immediately in front of him. “I kind of trust – I know it's a cliché – but what’s for you won’t pass you,” he muses. And, “I really like my life right now.” 

Ride or Die is out now on Prime Video. What It Feels Like for a Girl is available to watch on BBC iPlayer (UK) and Prime Video (US). Sweetpea will return for Season 2 later this year.