I feel lucky that it is possible to feel like that,” he says. “I miss him so much every day that I feel loved more than anything. Rooke describes his current relationship with his Dad as “the most beautiful has with anyone”.
“But you fear it less because you know you’ll survive it.”ĭylan Llewellyn as Jack and Olisa Odele as Yemi / Channel 4/Kevin Baker If she’s in the frozen aisle at Tesco and doesn’t answer her phone, I’ll jump to the worst and be like, where are you? What are you doing? Are you okay? And she’s like, yes I was buying burgers,” he laughs. “My mum always has to tell me to calm down. He says that his experience with grief has made him both fear it more and less. “I try to make sure all the work I ever do – whether it is writing Big Boys or my book, or my shows, is about trying to give people tangible solutions.” We need the tools to productively help,” he says. “Conversation has come on leaps and bounds in the last six or seven years, but our attitude has just shifted to tell people to open up and talk without offering support to the people hearing these admissions. On mental health, Rooke also thinks we still have a way to go. The first night out at uni / Channel 4/Kevin Baker It is reflective of the dynamic I have in most of my real-life friendships”.
“They’re not in competition, they’re embracing their differences and asking each other what things mean if they don’t understand them. But he is quick to say that writing Jack and Danny’s relationship has been his “proudest career moment to date.”
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In Big Boys, the best friend character Danny (played by Jon Pointing) is inspired by four of Rooke’s closest male friends– “three of them are still here, and one of them isn’t”, he says (his book Cheer the F*** Up: How to Save Your Best Friend, published in 2020, is a sort of comedic memoir-slash-advice guide that draws on his experience of having a friend take his own life). He argues that British television has so far neglected friendships between straight and gay men, “and if we are to believe statistics, there are way more straight people, so it is much more likely a gay man will be friends with someone straight than not,” he says. Something Rooke was keen to recreate was his experience of male friendship. “Sometimes I think it is better to revisit your past from the point of nostalgic writing than having to embody it physically,” he says. There is natural humour in tragedy.” Still, he is grateful that he didn’t personally have to relive the agony following his Dad’s death and all the subsequent trauma. “I always wanted the pain to be in the series, but I hate it when sadness turns into emotional porn. Rooke’s ability to find hilarity in even the lowest moments is a real skill. “I’m really grateful for having made stuff in the past that I have found too exposing or like a millennial overshare,” he says referring to his second show Happy Man (actually one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had in a theatre when I saw it at the Edinburgh Fringe back in 2017).
But, though the comedian admits that going over upsetting moments from his past was “at times difficult”, he was careful to make sure it never overwhelmed him. The role of Jack is played by Dylan Llewellyn, the scene-stealing “wee English fella” James from Derry Girls, who Rooke gushes is “the perfect comic actor to play the part”. “You know? Because you don’t see me but you hear my voice narrating the story from a kind of knowing perspective,” he laughs. Aside from being a writer and executive producer on the series, Rooke likens his role to Mary Alice’s in Desperate Housewives. An amalgamation of Rooke’s past three theatre shows, Big Boys is a broadly autobiographical snapshot of his time at university following the death of his father, Laurie, when Rooke was 15. His new Channel 4 comedy Big Boys is no less personal. “Some people might think I’ve overdone it, but grief is the thing that has shaped my identity more than anything else in my life,” he says. The jokingly self-confessed “one trick pony” (actually a comedian, writer and mental health ambassador) has built a prolific career over the last seven years writing about his experiences with mental health and loss through his teens and early twenties - he’s now 27. I’m actually quite sick of myself at this point,” laughs Jack Rooke.