“The idea of theater has always terrified me, and it still does,” Asa Butterfield says from the rehearsal room of London’s National Youth Theatre.
The British star, famed for his performance as Otis Milburn in Netflix’s awkwardly raunchy teen hit Sex Education, has been in showbiz for a long time. After minor roles in ITV’s After Thomas (2006) and Garth Jennings’ comedy Son of Rambow (2007), Butterfield was cast at age 10 as the lead in Mark Herman’s Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t actually learn that much about acting,” Butterfield admits to The Hollywood Reporter about his early roles. “I didn’t learn to act until I was maybe 14. You suddenly have those inhibitions you didn’t have as a nine- or 10-year-old. You’re more self-conscious. I was starting to think about, like, ‘What am I doing with my face?’”
It was only on the set of Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted from the 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that Butterfield came to truly appreciate the world he had grown up in. “Hugo is probably the reason I’m an actor to this day,” he says of the role, which saw him playing the titular role as a young teen. “That’s really where I fell in love with film and cinema. Not just from an acting perspective, but learning about filmmaking as a craft — all the departments, all the different people working behind it.”
Fast forward another six or seven years and he lands the role of Otis, teen-turned-sex-guru, in a Netflix show alongside Gillian Anderson. All of a sudden, Butterfield’s (now adult) face was known around the world — the first season alone notched up an enormous 44 million viewers.
Why did audiences love it so much? “It was incredibly honest and I think people, especially young people, really wanted a show that didn’t pander to expectations,” the 27-year-old says of the four-season series. “It wasn’t trying to be sexy, it wasn’t trying to be hip, it wasn’t trying to be overly woke, and it was just funny and frank and relatable with really great dialogue, well-thought-out characters that didn’t shove their agendas down your throat.”
The show also became a springboard for a number of its cast members: Emma Mackey was Emily Brontë in Emily, Frances O’Connor’s 2022 biopic; Ncuti Gatwa is currently playing the fifteenth incarnation of Doctor Who on the BBC and Connor Swindells leads Stephen Knight’s SAS Rogue Heroes, among other projects. Not to mention, all three featured in Greta Gerwig’s hot pink juggernaut Barbie. “Acting with them, I was like, ‘these guys are amazing. Why aren’t they already mega stars?’” Butterfield says. “So it was so cool to see [Sex Ed] be a part of their launch pad. We’re still friends.”
So how does Butterfield feel about being solely known as Sex Ed‘s Otis Milburn? “I am absolutely conscious of it,” he says. “All down the street, people will [shout]: ‘Otis!’… So I’m trying to make a conscious effort to avoid those sorts of roles.” He teases about an upcoming film: “I’m a blond-bearded mullet man. It’s far from any character I’ve played. That’s all I can say,” adding that another Netflix show is on its way where he portrays a cult leader.
The actor is speaking from the rehearsal stage of his one-man production, running Friday, Jan. 24 to Feb. 22 at London’s Riverside Studios. Second Best, written by Barney Norris, based on David Foenkinos’ best-selling novel and directed by Michael Longhurst, is about a young man named Martin who, in the present day, is helping his partner through her pregnancy. Yet through each trimester, Martin is battling his own resurfaced trauma around his childhood and the loss of his father, which coincidentally occurred at the same time he narrowly lost out to the final contender for the main role in the beloved Harry Potter movies.
It’s a Sliding Doors-esque play, Butterfield tells THR: “It becomes an intersection of memory and trauma, about the way that these events in your life can become twisted and how the feelings from one can be associated with the other. He’s trying to figure out why all these feelings are coming back with the imminent birth of his child, why he’s thinking about his dad, why he’s thinking about Harry Potter. It’s really touching and funny, heartbreaking and relatable.”
After a 20-plus-year career, this will mark Butterfield’s stage debut. Theater has long terrfied him, he confesses. What was putting him off? “I felt very safe on camera,” he says. “I’ve never done [theater] before and doing new things is always scary. And doing new things in front of hundreds of people, live, is particularly scary.”
He continues: “But only really in the last couple years have I started considering doing theater and talking to people about theater, looking at some plays. It got to a stage of finishing Sex Ed, [which] obviously took up a large portion of my year for a few years. Now I have all this time and a desire to break out of that comfort zone and that bubble — which was Sex Ed and the jobs I did surrounding that — and scare myself. I think it’s a good thing.”
Talking to other actors, Butterfield’s instinct was validated: “Whether they’re a theater actor or not, they’ve all said, ‘You’ll love it, you’ll learn so much and you’ll bring so much of it into working on film and TV.’ So it’s about time that I stepped on stage.”
It’s a baptism of fire, making your stage debut in a one-man play. There’s no one to act or riff off, which is not exactly now Butterfield envisioned working in the theater. “I’d always imagined my first time on stage, I’d be able to learn from all these experienced other actors,” he says. “It’s been daunting because there’s not been another actor to learn from or lean on if I’m feeling worried about a certain scene.”
It’ll only be about six weeks total of Second Best rehearsal time for the actor before showtime. But not having a scene partner has unexpectedly come in handy throughout the process for Butterfield. “All of your transitions and thoughts and journey are within yourself,” he says. “It takes a much deeper understanding of the character and the character’s mind. We all have moments in our life where something doesn’t go our way,” he continues, referencing Martin’s Harry Potter heartbreak, “or we make a mistake, or someone else gets chosen, or you make a decision and your life goes one way, and you think, ‘Oh, what would have happened if I didn’t make that choice?’ That’s universal.”
Is Butterfield comfortable sharing any roles he was in the running for that ended in disappointment? “There are hundreds of parts I haven’t got,” he tells THR. “Some I certainly wanted more than others, but I find at the end of the day, the doors that open because you didn’t get that part end up being the right path for you anyway. Like Sex Ed. If there had been other jobs around the time, I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing it. And Sex Ed became such a monumental step for me in my career.”
What has Butterfield found in his character, Martin, that resonates with him personally? “I’m not a father. I hope to be one day. And my dad’s still around, unlike Martin, so for him, one of his questions is, how do I learn how to be a father without having one myself? This lack of self-worth is something he struggles with as well. He plays it off in humor and the whole show becomes a stand-up thing, which is really touching and funny and sad, because you start to see through the cracks in this performance he’s giving.”
Before the interview, one of the Second Best crew reveals to THR that Butterfield impressed by arriving at rehearsals in late December more than prepared, with every line memorized. He laughs: “When I started to learn the script, I was like, this is impossible. This is not humanly possible, to learn all of this. How do people do it? But they do and I did. The longer you do it, more of that muscle in your brain gets better at it.”
It’s theater for the next few months of his life, but what’s coming after? Butterfield ponders over the projects calling out to him next and makes a small plea to the Amazon executives behind the development of Warhammer 40000.
“I’d love to do a Western, I’ve never done one before and no one really makes Westerns often. I’m a huge fantasy, Lord of the Rings, dress up in armor and swords [fan]. I’m a massive nerd. I love Dungeons and Dragons.” He adds, “Oh my God, wait. Here we go, here we go. If any Amazon execs are reading this or Henry Cavill, for whatever reason, please, I am down on my knees. [Butterfield remains seated, but the desperation in his voice is very real.] I need to have a part in your Warhammer 40000 universe. I don’t care what it is; I’ll be a servitor. Just put me in.”
Your move, Henry Cavill.
Second Best plays at London’s Riverside Studios from Friday, Jan. 24 – Saturday, Feb. 22 2025.
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