This was us with #itsasin director @pjuk when we shot the final scene. Looking at it will always bring tears to my eyes - happy, happy, HAPPY tears! I feel so honoured to be part of this shattering production and I will be forever grateful to Russell, Peter, Andy, Ri, Ray, Nicola, Phil and everyone at Red Productions and Channel 4 and HBO Max for what, I know, will be the gift of my life.
Olly is a King, Lydia is my guiding light, Omari is an angel on earth, Nathaniel is an endless source of strength and Callum is a pain in the arse (but also the greatest - and funniest - man you’re ever likely to meet).
I think the show is a masterclass of acting and writing and cinematography and artistry from every dept and I’ve learned so so so much from everyone I’ve met or had the pleasure to watch work! It’s had an amazing impact on #hivawareness and education, testing and amazing people have come up with inspired ways to raise money for charities like the incredible @thtorguk. I’ll always do my best to keep this brilliant tidal wave going and keep the show’s values in my heart - kindness and love and joy!
Olly and I always needed to be touching when filming scenes together so we’d touch little fingers and say…set this is why we treated the after show which is on tonight after Ep 5 () at 10pm on YouTube and All 4 as our unofficial wedding, so thank you
the final episode of #itsasin is being shown on Channel 4 tonight it’s been an emotional journey guys! thank you everybody who’s been sending messages and spreading the message about the show, I’m so happy to see so many people talking about HIV and the progress made !! Thank you to Russell T Davies and every member of the team and crew and of course the most gorgeous cast ever to exist- Iu. I’m so grateful for this experience and to have played Ritchie in this story!!! I’ve loved it so much! I’m never getting over it… La! x
Like the character he plays in “It’s a Sin,” the actor and singer struggled with being gay. Now, he tells the world everything.
By Anna Leszkiewicz
Feb. 19, 2021Updated 9:22 a.m. ET
LONDON — When Olly Alexander burst into tears shooting a scene of “It’s a Sin,” no one was very surprised.
Making the show, which came to HBO Max on Thursday and follows a group of friends embracing the gay culture of ’80s London under the shadow of AIDS, was emotional for many of the cast and crew — and Alexander is as comfortable showing his vulnerabilities as the character he plays, Ritchie, is at deflecting them.
“I was a complete mess after the first take,” Alexander, 30, said in a recent video interview. “I was sobbing.” Peter Hoar, the director of “It’s a Sin,” paused filming.
The scene in question, which comes after Ritchie and his friends are arrested protesting the British government’s inaction on AIDS, is one of many in the show that explore how the epidemic devastated gay men’s lives.
When we meet Ritchie, he is an impishly confident but naïve 18-year-old who has just moved to London, with dreams of becoming an actor. Alexander also moved to the capital from rural England at 18 and scored his first movie role, but today he is better known as the lead singer of the band Years & Years. “It’s a Sin” is his first acting gig in six years.
Years & Years’s music often explores the relationship between desire and shame, and is heavily influenced by ’80s bands like Pet Shop Boys. (“It’s a Sin” takes its title from that group’s song of the same name.) So when Alexander heard Russell T Davies, the show’s creator, was interested in him for the lead role, the opportunity “made poetic sense,” Alexander said.
In an interview, Davies said the show was “cast gay as gay, which is my policy.” For Ritchie, he added, he wanted an out actor who already had a big profile in Britain. “That almost narrows it down to a field of one,” he said. “It was the simplest audition of my life.”
Alexander’s arch performance as Ritchie suggests that the character’s ambition and bravado are reactions to fear and self-loathing. “I realized straight away, ‘Oh, I know who Ritchie is,’” Alexander said. “He’s trying to get onstage and shine and dazzle: I’ve done that.”
But whereas Ritchie masks his vulnerabilities, Alexander has spoken frankly in interviews and onstage with the band about his experiences of bulimia, anxiety, self-harm and depression.
“I’ve said just everything about myself,” he said. “My life is kind of out there now.”
Alexander grew up in Gloucestershire, in western England, where his mother founded a local music festival. His father, an aspiring musician, worked in amusement parks.
It was a creative household, Alexander said, but his father had mental health problems and substance abuse issues that led to a difficult atmosphere at home. When he was 14, his parents separated; he’d only seen his father a handful of times since, he said.
School was an even more fraught environment, and Alexander experienced homophobic bullying from age 9. “I had long blond hair, and I acted quite feminine,” he said. “That made me a target. And kids can be so cruel.”
As Alexander recalled his younger self, he started to cry. It took many years until he could look back at the child he was with compassion, he said. “But that’s the biggest thing I’ve tried to do,” he added. The impact of his childhood is something he’s still processing in weekly therapy, he said.
When Alexander’s high school classmates went to college, he moved to East London and became a jobbing actor while babysitting and waiting tables. A pale, skinny teenager with a nest of tight curls, he landed roles as the tuberculosis-ridden younger brother of Ben Whishaw’s Keats in the film “Bright Star,” and an anguished drug user in Gaspar Noé’s trippy art movie “Enter the Void.”
Alexander had been living in London for a couple of years when he met his Years & Years bandmates, Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Türkmen. Though they started out making high-minded, Radiohead-inspired electronic music, Alexander pushed the band toward synth-pop, with big, melodramatic choruses full of longing.
In 2015, the band’s exhilarating but anguished song “King” — about the strange thrill of being treated badly in a relationship — reached No. 1 on the British singles chart, and its debut album, “Communion,” topped the album charts, too.
“His songs are his life,” said the producer Mark Ralph, who has worked with Years & Years from the band’s earliest days “If you want to know what’s gone on in Olly’s life, then you just read all his lyrics.”
“Love takes its toll on me,” Alexander sings in “Sanctify,” a song about a secret liaison with a straight man. “And I won’t, and I won’t, and I won’t be ashamed.”
When the band performed the song at the Glastonbury Festival in 2016, soon after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., a rainbow-clad Alexander told the crowd, “I’m here, I’m queer, and, yes, sometimes I’m afraid.” But, he added, “I am never ashamed, because I am proud of who I am.”
The speech caught the interest of TV producers, and, in 2017, he fronted a BBC documentary called “Olly Alexander: Growing Up Gay.” In it, he returns to his family home and leafs through teenage diaries full of references to bulimia and self-harm. On camera, he tells his mother about the bullying at school for the first time: Through tears, they discuss how it led him to mental health problems in his teenage years.
“It’s a lot to ask someone to bare their soul on national television,” said Vicki Cooper, the TV movie’s director. “But those difficult conversations created the best moments in the film.”
That documentary, and Alexander’s openness about his own mental health, mean he gets a lot of messages on social media from fans who are struggling themselves. He used to try to respond to them, he said, but the quantity has become impossible to keep up with.
Through those messages, though, Alexander had “seen a really emotionally vulnerable side to a lot of people,” he said. “That’s a precious thing, actually.”
Alexander had also been humbled by the positive response to “It’s a Sin” in Britain, he said. The show broke records for the streaming service All4, where it aired, with 6.5 million streams.
“It’s a Sin” first appeared on All4 during National H.I.V. Testing Week; on social media, the show’s cast encouraged viewers to get tested. The Terrence Higgins Trust, an H.I.V. nonprofit, said that the number of people taking tests through their service had almost quadrupled in the weeks afterward.
“People living with H.I.V. now can live normal, healthy lives: It’s so important to get that message out,” Alexander said, adding that treatments for the virus had transformed since the ’80s. “I’m really grateful that these conversations are happening, because, honestly, lots of people really didn’t know what was going on in this period of history. They’re shocked to learn about it now.”
That era is also having an influence on Alexander’s music. He is currently recording new material with Years & Years, inspired by the ’80s dance anthems of the “It’s a Sin” soundtrack and beyond: Donna Summer, New Order, Pet Shop Boys.
“During the pandemic, I wanted to listen to super upbeat club music that made me dance around,” he said. “I found myself wanting to create the fantasy and the energy that I haven’t necessarily been experiencing.”
As well as working on new music, Alexander said he had spent the lockdowns in England watching “Real Housewives” episodes, and playing Animal Crossing. “I used to be so, so driven,” he said, but now he was putting less pressure on himself.
He was happy, he added, to think back on what he’d already achieved, and how much has changed since he was a little boy who wished he wasn’t gay.
“I’ve kept a diary since I was 13 years old,” he said. “Sometimes I look at it and think I can tell this kid: ‘You’re going to do amazing things. You’re going to get to where you are now. It’s OK. You got this.’”
Hugo Yangüela contributed additional camera operating for photographs.
Stardust (2007)starringAmita Suman as Yvaine, Jessie Mei Li as Tristan, Nathaniel Curtis andNaveen Andrews as Dunstan, Lucy Liu as Lamia, Joe Taslim as Septimus, Anya Chalotra as Victoria, Regé-Jean Page as Humphrey, Sean Baek as Primus, Elaine Tan as Una, Lil Rel Howery as Ferdy and Jaime Camil as Captain Shakespeare
huwgwyther From The Durrells and Honour to Bodyguard and Line of Duty,@misskeeleyhawes has made her name as an actress who delivers poise and nuance to every role she takes on, whatever the genre or medium. Over the next month she’s set to star in three new highly-anticipated dramas, exploring the complexity of loss in Finding Alice - premiering tonight on ITV - and the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Russell T Davies’ It’s A Sin, as well as portraying Roald Dahl’s wife Patricia Neal in the upcoming biopic To Olivia.
Covering the SS21 issue ofrollacoaster, Hawes connects with her The Durrells co-star and The Crown actor Josh O’Connor over Zoom. Reflecting on these roles and the universal themes that link them, Hawes and O’Connor talk everything from navigating production through a pandemic to starting her own production company, and why they’d love to work together again.
ps - I decided to try to get Keeley for the cover after watching her performance in the final episode of @russelltdavies63 ‘s “It’s a Sin” - she’s astonishing and electrifying - I urge you to watch - an award winning performance if ever there was one…. mark my words @bafta - thank you Keeley for agreeing to do our cover - I’m truly honoured
The BAFTAs were held yesterday and the big upset (to me) was that Russell T. Davies’ IT’S A SIN only won two of its eleven nominations: one in editing and one in direction. It garnered null wins in their five acting categories, best mini-series or the fan favourite category.
Who were the winners in the big categories?
Leading Actress Denise Gough (TOO CLOSE) Emily Watson (TOO CLOSE) Kate Winslet (MARE OF EASTTOWN) Lydia West (IT’S A SIN) Niamh Algar (DECEIT) Jodie Comer (HELP)**WINNER
This role for Comer and her costar Stephen Graham was an example of sheer actor audacity as, unbeknownst to each other, they both reached out to writer Jack Thorne (HIS DARK MATERIALS). Comer slid into his Twitter DMs to say she wanted to work with him and Graham (who had worked with Thorne on THIS IS ENGLAND and THE VIRTUES), saw Thorne at a party and asked him to write a role for he and Comer - who years earlier - he (Graham) introduced to his agent who quickly took her on.
Leading Actor David Thewlis (LANDSCAPERS) Olly Alexander (IT’S A SIN) Samuel Adewunmi (YOU DON’T KNOW ME) Stephen Graham (HELP) Hugh Quarshie (STEPHEN) Sean Bean (TIME) **WINNER
Drama Series The Night Stalker Unforgotten Vigil In My Skin **WINNER
Comedy Programme Joe Gilgun (BRASSIC) Samson Kayo (BLOODS) Steve Coogan (THIS TIME WITH ALAN PARTRIDGE) Ncuti Gatwa (SEX EDUCATION) Jamie Demetriou (STATH LETS FLATS)**WINNER
*Demetriou may have taken home the BAFTA but Ncuti (pronounced Shoot-ee) Gatwa gets to have the Tardis. Gatwa was named the new Doctor Who.
Gatwa has had to keep the role under wrap since February.
The coolest Doctor Who actor IMHO.
Female Performance In A Comedy Programme Aimee Lou Wood (SEX EDUCATION) Aisling Bea (THIS WAY UP) Anjana Vasan (WE ARE LADY PARTS) Rose Matafeo (STARSTRUCK) Sophie Willan (ALMA’s NOT NORMAL) **WINNER
Supporting Actress Céline Buckens (SHOWTRIAL) Emily Mortimer (THE PURSUIT OF LOVE) Jessica Plummer (THE GIRL BEFORE) Leah Harvey (FOUNDATION) Tahirah Sharif (THE TOWER) Cathy Tyson, Help **WINNER
Supporting Actor Callum Scott Howells (IT’S A SIN) David Carlyle (IT’S A SIN) Nonso Anozie (SWEET TOOTH) Omari Douglas (IT’S A SIN) Stephen Graham (TIME) Matthew Macfadyen (SUCCESSION) **WINNER
Macfadyen was not present. Their writer Jesse Armstrong accepted on his behalf which included a note from Nicholas Braun who recalled wanting to repeatedly do a scene where MacFadyen’s Tom kisses Braun’s Greg on the forehead.
Honours from Gerri.
Single Drama Death Of England: Face To Face Help I Am Victoria
Together WINNER **Utterly, utterly floored that this won over HELP. Both films deal with the pandemic/lockdown, but TOGETHER is a kitchen sink drama with a gimmick in that the characters constantly break the fourth wall monologuing. HELP is so much richer character study as well as a searing look at the ineptitude of government in assisting care workers in the early months of the pandemic.
International Call My Agent! Lupin Mare Of Easttown Squid Game Succession The Underground Railroad **WINNER
Mini-Series It’s A Sin Landscapers Stephen Time WINNER **I loved TIME, another heavy-hitter this about prison life, but versus IT’S A SIN - no competition. The only think I can reason why TIME won out is because, overall, the acting on IAS was almost always panned. So if you’re thinking overall greatness of a series, acting is a factor. But, whatever, I adored IAS. It was transformative, staggeringly brilliant and gutting and heartbreaking and heartfelt.
The denizens of the Pink Palace are winners in my eyes.
Over at Twitter Owen Jones reflects on the way the history of bigotry is repeating. The new British TV series It’s a Sin reminds him of how the tactics once used against gay and lesbian people is now used against trans and nonbinary folks.
Owen Peter Jones is a British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist and political activist.
It’s a Sin is a British television drama serial written and created by Russell T Davies. It is about the queer community in the 1980′s London.
Owen writes:
One of the most important themes in ‘It’s A Sin’ was about gay/bi people and shame - caused by growing up in a society that saw gay/bi people as would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
While HIV rates remain significantly higher among gay and bisexual men, treatments now allow those with HIV to live healthy lives. Alcohol and drug abuse as a response to shame and trauma caused by homophobia is today a bigger problem in Western nations.
It’s important to make this point because the evidence suggests that mental distress is even more acute amongst trans people, who are today the most marginalised and oppressed part of the LGBTQ+ world.
Anti-trans activists use the same arguments as the homophobes
Today, anti-trans activists play the exact same songs about trans people: that they are would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
Some of those anti-trans activists responded viscerally to being called out for enjoying It’s A Sin. They are furious at being compared to the monsters who victimised gay people, even as they obsessively target trans people in the same papers that obsessively targeted gay people.
Some of them point to their past association with pro-gay struggles, or in some cases simply that they have been to gay bars before, as though any of this gives them a lifetime freedom pass to say whatever they like about other minorities.
But as It’s A Sin shows, a society which made gay people feel unwelcome - as burdens at best and as menaces at worst - inflicts terrible damage on gay people. The same is being done to trans people.
However those who, in some cases, spend a genuinely huge amount of their lives talking about trans people as would-be predators or threats to children justify it to themselves, they are inflicting the same injuries on trans people as It’s A Sin underlined is done to gay people.
The quadrupling of transphobic hate crimes, the 48% of trans people who fear using public toilets, the trans people discriminated against at work, the quarter who’ve suffered homelessness, all of this is erased from the “conversation”, such as it is.
Even the focus on contexts which don’t affect 99.9% of trans people - but which are used to attack all of them - namely prisons and sports deliberately excludes questions like ‘Why are there no trans Olympic medallists?’ or 'How do we stop trans prisoners being assaulted?’
Inflicting the same damage
The hounders of trans people may hate It’s A Sin being used to hand them a mirror. But the anti-trans faction, who operate strikingly like a cult, are not only singing the same tunes - they are inflicting the exact same damage on trans people as gay people have long suffered.
oh and I’ve set this so only people who follow me can reply because, although anti-trans activists have made a conscious decision to relentlessly and obsessively target me, and I can live with that, I don’t want trans people to have to sift through their bile.
“Gender critical” parents who are harming their kids
Some other thoughts.
One of the most powerful themes towards the end of It’s A Sin is Ritchie’s mother being confronted by Jill for the damage she inflicted on her gay son, suggesting that the shame she instilled in him helped drive behaviour that led to his infection with HIV.
“Actually it is your fault, Mrs Tozer,” says Jill. “All of this is your fault.“ Jill adds: "The wards are full of men who think they deserve it.”
She was right. So many of the gay and bisexual men who died often lonely deaths in hospital wards were traumatised by their parents.
Today, most gay people have gay friends who have mental trauma which often leads to alcohol and drug abuse with absolutely catastrophic consequences. Many, all too many, have had friends who’ve died from suicide. The culprits? Society in general but often parents in particular.
It’s A Sin showcased the LGBTQ family, of other LGBTQ friends filling a vacuum left by the absence of a loving family. A big role of that 'family’ is to pick up the pieces because of the damage inflicted by parents on their children.
When parents refuse to properly accept their LGBTQ children for who they are, they insert ticking time bombs in many of them. That bomb may detonate in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, who knows, maybe in their 50s or 60s. But in many of them, it will detonate.
This is why there is a genuine horror watching self-described “gender critical” parents ranting about trans people on the internet. Because I can’t help but think, oh god, what if they have trans children. What damage will be inflicted upon them.
But in other cases, transphobic parents will stick determinedly to their guns and inflict the same damage on their trans children as homophobic parents have always inflicted on their gay children. We should be clear: homophobia and transphobia are forms of child abuse.
Hiding behind the argument of protecting their children
Both traditional homophobes and contemporary transphobes claimed they were protecting the welfare of children. As anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant declared: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children”.
Today’s anti-trans activists use the language of 'safeguarding’ and often suggest that parents know what’s best for their children. This is clearly not always the case. Lots of children need to be protected from their parents. That includes many LGBTQ children.
So when this Times journalist attacked Mermaids, a charity supporting young trans people, for including an 'exit button’, suggesting it was 'a major safeguarding breach’. Many LGBTQ children don’t have supportive parents and need to hide their identity away from them.
Anti-trans rhetoric echoes anti-gay arguments
Anti-gay rights campaigners long focused on the danger posed by predatory gay men to vulnerable children, and pointed to scandals in, for example, the Scouts and the Catholic Church as evidence. Today, anti-trans activists similarly extrapolate extreme cases to make their case.
That’s why so many gay people stand up for trans people. Trans people, of course, are in our shared LGBTQ spaces, and their experiences do differ in important ways - but we see them going through the exact same things we’ve gone through.
It is, frankly, grotesque that gay people who for very obvious reasons stand with their trans siblings are then vilified as misogynists, or have obvious homophobic tropes about wanting to endanger children’s safety thrown at them.
It’s also perverse that many of the same people publicly cooing over It’s A Sin are the same people trying to hound the LGBTQ allies of trans people out of the media (they can’t really do this to trans people because there are very few trans people in the media).
LGB people attacking trans people
As for the LGB people who participate in the hounding of trans people. There have long been examples of oppressed groups who participate in oppression, often against themselves: women against the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism, right-wing black Republicans, and so on.
These anti-trans LGB activists are not only completely unrepresentative of LGBTQ people: many queer bars and spaces bar people who express their bigoted opinions for very obvious reasons: to ensure they’re safe spaces for the whole LGBTQ rainbow.
Watching straight people try and foment a civil war within the LGBTQ world by platforming these completely marginal bigoted zealots is actually completely and utterly grotesque.
Finally (!) in the 1980s, almost the whole media was anti-gay, and public opinion was overwhelmingly anti-gay. Today, almost the whole media is anti-trans, but while transphobia is rampant, anti-trans sentiment is not as widespread as anti-gay sentiment back then. There’s hope!
But it takes huge courage to speak out in support of trans people in Britain in 2021. One day, there will be TV programmes about the onslaught against trans people. Those who victimised trans people today will be portrayed in them. They’ll go down in history as hate figures.
Sadly, it’s too late to save all too many LGBTQ people who had ticking time bombs inserted into them both by society and by their homophobic and transphobic parents. They detonated. But we can save others from that fate. So speak up.
It’s A Sin was beautiful and heartbreaking. But also a very important watch. I would recommend this to everyone; all genders, all sexualities, and all allies.
Reblogging myself because it’s now on Disney+ and Netflix so watch it if you haven’t. I haven’t got it in me for a rewatch just yet.
