Redbrick Interviews BAFTA Breakthrough 2024: Daf James and Jennifer English

BAFTA Breakthrough, supported by Netflix, is BAFTA’s flagship initiative for highlighting new talent working in film, games and TV.

Redbrick Interviews BAFTA Breakthrough 2024: Daf James

Editor-in-Chief James Richards interviews Daf James: creator, writer, executive producer and musical director for Lost Boys and Fairies and a part of 2024’s UK BAFTA Breakthrough cohort.

Bafta breakthrough

JR: Congratulations! The show is great. Funny, but sad when it needs to be. It just covers the whole spectrum of human experience; this is so well deserved.

DJ: Oh, thank you, James. That’s so nice to hear from you. I mean, I’m absolutely thrilled and delighted to be part of the Breakthrough. I’ve seen the people who’ve gone through this scheme over the years and it felt so far removed from my experience. And suddenly, this year has accelerated all of these things in a way that I just didn’t think [was] imaginable a few years ago. You know, having a show on primetime BBC One for starters, let alone being part of the Breakthrough. And with all of this incredible talent too, I think that’s what’s really special about this programme is that there’s people across the whole industry. I’m really excited. Like, people who are working in gaming, something I’ve got no experience with whatsoever, but we’re all storytellers. And so there’s this wealth of experience that I’m looking forward to being able to learn from.

JR: There’s so many ways to tell a story.

DJ: There is. And so many people participating in telling stories in so many different creative ways as well. We got casting directors and producers as well as comedians and performers and all of that. It’s just really, really fantastic.

JR: Obviously, I love your show and I want our readers to see it. Who better to sell it than you? In your words, what is the heart of Lost Boys and Fairies?

DJ: Lost Boys and Fairies is a story about two gay men going through the adoption process together, set in Cardiff… with songs! That’s the short pithy version of it, but I suppose it’s also a massive emotional roller-coaster, with a lot of twists and turns that you might not necessarily expect to happen. It’s very personally inspired from my own experience, but I wrote it because I wanted to see adoption authentically represented on screen. I hadn’t felt like I’d seen that before because when I was going through the experience, it was so dramatic, so profound, so life-changing and transformative. I just thought: this is the source for a really brilliant drama. So that’s why I wrote it.

JR: Let’s take it back to the music, because that was one of the things that struck me most about the show. I’ve seen you describe it as ‘a drama with music’. How much of that is at a script level? How much of that is you writing songs in the script and hoping they make it to the screen?

DJ: It’s a great question. So I was music director on the show as well and I actually wrote the first song, ‘Lost Boys and Fairies’, I co-wrote it with another writer called Robert Alan Evans. I come from a theatre background and I’ve always worked with compositions and music and songs and I used to do a lot of musical directing. So, music has always been part of my storytelling. Whenever I can bring music into my shows, I do. Partly because it’s such a direct art form that talks straight to your heart emotionally, but also, I find being able to write sequentially to music really, really thrilling and exciting.

Most of the songs come from the soundtrack of my life. They’re songs that mean something to me, so they’re there in my subconscious

The protagonist of the show is a queer performance artist who works in a club, Neverland. Who sings songs and the songs are almost like his inner world. They’re like soliloquies, but then they also, as the show goes on, start spilling out from the confines of the club. The show evolves musically; it almost shifts into that musical terrain in, hopefully, an exciting and thrilling way. I just feel like you can do so much more with those songs. And the songs actually offered themselves to me! Most of the songs come from the soundtrack of my life. They’re songs that mean something to me, so they’re there in my subconscious. So when it comes to writing the sequence, those songs just offer themselves without me really having to think why. And then not just because of the mood and the tone of the songs, but also the lyrics articulate what’s going on dramatically in those scenes for those characters as well.

JR: That’s very well put. Thank you. Because I heard about the show. and it’s not what I was expecting. I thought it’d be sort of worthy and serious… and it’s not!

DJ: (Laughs)

JR: There’s a real sort of playful, irreverent energy to it. Now it’s about adoption. Now the Devil’s busting out of the wall. And now it’s horny. It’s funny. And that to me is deeply queer.

DJ: Absolutely, that’s brilliant. And so thank you so much for saying that and for recognising that.

JR: Thank you for making it!

DJ: That’s part of the reason I wanted to write it. Because a lot of adoption stories that I’ve seen before were exactly that: worthy and earnest and actually not very true to the experience and the roller-coaster that we went through. And also that whole idea that suddenly a child moves in and they all live happily ever after. These are deeply traumatised children that we’re talking about and it’s a very, very, very difficult thing becoming a parent, let alone an adoptive parent. You go through an existential crisis and you have a reckoning with who you are, who you used to be, how you were parented, all of those things. So all of that went into the show, but also that stuff that you’re talking about: the magic realism, like having Satan jumping out the toilet. That’s what it’s like living in my head all the time! We live in two worlds. Well, more than two worlds, but we live in this objective concrete reality and also our internal worlds. Our internal worlds! Our brains, our minds are going everywhere! So actually, I don’t think of it as magic realism. I just think of it as realism, because that’s just the way I experience life on a day to day basis.

JR: Because it’s often seen as this boundary. A show can be either palatable to ‘them’, to straight people, to everyone… or it’s a queer show and it’s disruptive. And I feel like you managed to toe the line.

DJ: Thank you! Oh, I could speak to you all day because you’re saying all the right, nice things, honestly! That was another aim of ours because it was on prime time BBC One as well. I wanted it to be a show that I wanted to watch, but also that my father would enjoy; people of his generation would enjoy as well. How do we tell a story that is from all of these minority perspectives? Queer, but also on the mainstream?

I like to think of myself as a kind of queer populist

I like to think of myself as a kind of queer populist. You know? I wanna stay true and authentic to that queerness. I always want to be on the edge of that mainstream, but I also wanna be able to take those perspectives to an audience who wouldn’t necessarily have seen them. I feel like that is the way: through representation. That is the way we normalise these things that I’ve grown up thinking are normal ever since I was a child… and then I had to battle to get that recognised. And we still need to battle. It’s really crucial given the state of the world at the moment and what’s happening in the States and so on. It’s really crucial that we tell these stories and celebrate authentic love for what it is.

JR: Well put. What’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to you about the show?

DJ: Oh, do you know, I think that the best thing in terms of the responses has been the responses from the communities it represented. So the queer community, adoption community, the Welsh community, but also social services. Saying that they hadn’t felt seen before, because so often, social workers are seen as the antagonists of drama. We hear about them in papers, they are demonised because we hear about when things go wrong. And the truth of the matter is the people that we came across and worked with in the care system were extraordinary human beings who were doing extraordinary work. I really wanted to write that authentically, so to have those people respond so positively to the work has made it so much worthwhile.

JR: That’s really lovely to hear. It was lovely to talk to you.

DJ: It’s really exciting! Student newspapers have changed since my day! I’ve been looking… It’s amazing! All the online stuff as well! It’s really great that we’re taking this show to a student demographic as well so I’m really thrilled that we got to do this with you.

Redbrick Interviews BAFTA Breakthrough 2024: Jennifer English

Gaming Editor Tristan Peissel and Gaming Writer Amy Crawford interview Jennifer English: performer in Baldur’s Gate 3 and a part of 2024’s UK BAFTA Breakthrough cohort.

bafta breakthrough

TP: I suppose we’ll just dive right in with the questions! Are there any differences or challenges you’ve come across as you’re working with voicing videogame characters as compared to traditional voiceover work or acting?

JE: I’m an actor that works across theatre, film and TV and I think the difference between videogames and other forms of acting is that you’re acting a lot of the time in a grey box with forty cameras on you and Velcro black skin tight suit. You’ve got headphones on and you’re acting basically to an auto cue. You’ve got to rely completely on your imagination. You haven’t got another actor there to bounce off and you have to imagine what they look like and how far away they are from you, you have to imagine what’s in your space, what you’re wearing, how you’re feeling, where you’ve just come from, you’ve got to create that within seconds and often without a lot of context. Sometimes you don’t know what your character looks like until the game is released and that is so challenging. I think a lot of actors who work in TV or film will come to a video game studio and just go ‘oh, oh no this is too hard’ whereas most actors who work in videogames work across mediums.

You can’t be anything other than truthful because you can see it in the body

It’s not like it is in America where I think there’s ‘voice actors’. We don’t ever call ourselves ‘voice actors’, especially because you’re doing mo-cap, but its significantly harder because of that. The mo-cap data means you’re being picked up and recorded from every angle, so you can’t fake it. You can’t be anything other than truthful because you can see it in the body. Thank god we’ve got good performance directors working with us going ‘um what are you doing with your arms? Why aren’t they moving?’. I’d definitely say its significantly harder than any other kind of acting I’ve ever done before, which makes it all the more rewarding!

TP: Are there any pre-performance rituals that you like to do that help you get into the head space?

JE: For [Baldur’s Gate 3 character] Shadowheart, I did a lot of listening to Billie Eilish on the way in. I’ll be honest, a lot of the time I am a late person so I wouldn’t have any time to have any rituals because I’d be trying to get onto the set, not that I advise doing that! I always made sure that I was kind of in a centred and grounded place, that was kind of the trick, to be as grounded as possible and in a professional, playful, creative mode. I’ll be honest it was mostly Billie Eilish.

TP: Did you have a particular song that you kept coming back to then?

JE: I’ve got my playlist here. It actually depended a lot on which part of the journey Shadowheart was on, but there was a certain part that I listened to, post Act Two, where there was Martha Wainwrights ‘Bloody Mother F***ing Asshole’, it helped me feel just like RAH! walking in so that was on repeat a lot. It is public if you want to have a look at it. I had Agnes Obel, Phoebe Bridgers, a bit gay innit, ‘When I Was Older’ by Billie Eilish was on a lot too. Just a lot of Florence and the Machine, you know how it is, which is very cliché. ‘You Should See Me In A Crown’, that was another one.

AC: So I play a lot of table top RPGs and when I’m helping new players make their first characters, I often tell them to build from something their familiar with. Which parts of yourself do you feel you’ve been able to channel into your characters?

I try and approach every script I have as a detective; my girlfriend even bought me a pipe

JE: I always try and give a lot of myself, especially with my emotions. With Shadowheart, I’m lucky in a way that I have ADHD. Part of having ADHD is having big feelings and they are always ready to burst out, so there wasn’t really a lot of hard work to access those for Shadowheart because they are just there. Every character I play is different and has come from different places and I think all I can do is try and gather as much information about them and base it on the writing and get as deep as I can with it. I try and approach every script I have as a detective; my girlfriend even bought me a pipe so I could pretend to smoke my pipe like Sherlock Holmes/have something to fiddle with. It’s a bubble pipe, I don’t actually smoke a pipe, just as a caveat, that would be stinky. I just try and get as much as I can out of the script and make as many decisions as possible because then I think you’re as able as you can to have as much truth and detail with a character. I love details and I love questions sand I love going as deep as I can with each one.

TP: In regards to BAFTA Breakthrough, they kind of position themselves as offering a turning point in a career. Do you feel like you are at a turning point in your career or is it more something you see on the horizon?

JE: Absolutely! When I was applying for Breakthrough, I realised that I was at a crossroads with my career of this could be where I peak. I could peak at Shadowheart, which would be very comfortable and very lovely and I’m sure I could make a lot of money as just existing as her, or it could be the start of something and that’s what I really want. For Shadowheart to be the launching pad for me rather than the peak. That’s why I applied for BAFTA Breakthrough. It definitely feels like a turning point and is one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me. Thank you BAFTA!

UK Breakthroughs 2024

Alice Russell, Director – If the Streets Were on Fire
Beth Park, Lead Performance Director – Black Myth: Wukong
Clair Titley, Director – The Contestant
Cobbie Yates, Costume Designer – Layla
Daf James, Creator/Writer/Executive Producer/Musical Director – Lost Boys & Fairies
Fred Hoffman, Art Director – Paper Trail
Georgina Hurcombe, Creator/Producer/Director – Pop Paper City
Harry Gilbert, Casting Director – G’wed
Jennifer English, Performer – Baldur’s Gate 3
Kyla Harris*, Lead Performer/Co-Creator/Co-Writer/Associate Producer – We Might Regret This
Lauren Sequeira, Creator/Writer/Executive Producer – Domino Day
Lee Getty*, Co-Creator/Co-Writer/Associate Producer – We Might Regret This
Loran Dunn, Producer – Hoard
Luna Carmoon, Writer/Director – Hoard
Luned Tonderai, Series Director – Miriam: Death Of A Reality Star
Mawaan Rizwan, Performer/Writer/Creator/Executive Producer – Juice
Otto Baxter, Writer/Director/Performer – The Puppet Asylum
Poulomi Basu, Creator/Director/Writer/Art Director – MAYA: The Birth of a Superhero
Rochelle Newman, Producer – White Nanny Black Child
Shahnaz Dulaimy, Editor – Top Boy
Sophie Knowles, Lead Artist – Viewfinder

*applied as a team

US Breakthroughs 2024

Angela Walker Patton**, Director – Daughters
Elaine Gómez, Creative Director – Blink Land
Erica Tremblay, Writer/Director – Fancy Dance
Hanna Park, Editor – Bottoms
Jih-E Peng, Cinematographer – Girls Will Be Girls
Joy Ngiaw, Composer – WondLa
Juliana Hoffpauir, Costume Designer – Hit Man
Karrie Shirou Shao, Game Writer/Lead Designer – Pacific Drive
Nafisa Kaptownwala, Casting Director – Dìdi
Natalie Rae**, Director – Daughters
Nava Mau, Performer – Baby Reindeer
Nicole He, Creative Director – The Crush House
Sean Wang, Writer/Director – Dìdi

**applied as a team

India Breakthroughs 2024

Abhinav Chokhavatia, Game Producer – Down and Out
Christo Tomy, Director – Curry and Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case
Deepa Bhatia, Writer/Director/Producer – First Act
Dhiman Karmakar, Sound Designer/Production Sound Mixer – Amar Singh Chamkila
Jaydeep Sarkar, Showrunner/Series Director/Executive Producer – Rainbow Rishta
Monisha Thyagarajan, Series Producer – The Hunt for Veerappan
Neeraj Kumar, Producer/Lead Developer – Artifice: War Tactics
Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy, Writer/Director/Performer – Aachar & Co.
Varun Grover, Writer/Director – All India Rank