Sex Education actor Asa Butterfield interview: 'It's important to see a straight white guy and a gay black guy being best friends'

The star of 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' and 'Hugo' speaks with Alexandra Pollard about playing a schoolboy sex therapist in the new Netflix series alongside Gillian Anderson

‘I’ve read a few things from people who’ve genuinely learnt more from watching this show than they did from any sex education they had at school’ (Sam Taylor/Netflix)

In the new Netflix drama Sex Education, Asa Butterfield makes three furious attempts to masturbate. The actor – who as a child starred in the Scorsese fantasy Hugo (2011) – also guides a lesbian couple through the sexual act of scissoring, accompanies a friend to an abortion, and talks the school bully through a particularly painful Viagra overdose. It’s the sort of role that might have screamed, “I’ve grown up, and I want you all to know about it” – but with Sex Education, the 21-year-old isn’t out to shock anyone. At least, not for the sake of it.

Butterfield, so convincing as an autistic algebra whiz in the 2014 drama X+Y, plays Otis, an awkward, sexually repressed 16-year-old. His mum Jean – a steely, glamorous Gillian Anderson – is a sex and relationship therapist, and his gay, gregarious best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) spends his time obsessing over their position in the school food chain. Otis, though, would rather be “that guy in the corner that no one knows”. Until he’s persuaded by Maeve (Emma Mackey) – an enigmatic loner who corrects the grammar of the toilet graffiti slut-shaming her – to become the school’s sex therapist. “You’re like some sort of strange sex savant,” she tells him. “It’s weird but impressive.” It’s a bizarre, implausible premise, but the show uses it to deftly explore themes of consent, peer pressure and sexuality.

Mum’s the word: Butterfield and Gillian Anderson in ‘Sex Education’ (Sam Taylor/Netflix)

Today, dressed in a green tartan suit, his hair bleached blonde, Butterfield is noticeably – perhaps a little self-consciously – cooler than Otis. Though he left school three years ago, he walks into the room with the air of someone reluctantly arriving to class. “To be totally honest,” he says, lowering himself into the chair furthest away from me, “I’m still waking up a bit.” Still, once we get talking, he is – poorly stifled yawns aside – polite and engaged.

“I sort of thought it might be quite divisive in its themes and its tone and its content,” says Butterfield, his gangly legs draped over the table in front of him, “but people really seem to be getting it. I know it’s in the title, but I’ve read a few things from people who’ve genuinely learnt more from watching this show than they did from any sex education they had at school. There’s various issues that my character tackles, like vaginismus for example, which I didn’t know existed – so there’s that kind of education, but also the education in the normality of sex, and how weird it is as a teenager, and how no one’s normal.”

He relished, too, the dynamic between his character and Eric. “I don’t think we’ve really seen a relationship like those two’s before. Even when I first read the script, I didn’t quite grasp the significance of it. To see that in a TV show, where you’ve got a straight white guy and a gay black guy being best friends, and for there to almost not be a commentary on it – that’s how it is, and no one draws attention to it – I think is important. Hopefully it’ll inspire other kids, whether they’re gay or their friend’s gay, to be more accepting and be more confident.”

Butterfield clearly lacks Otis’s wince-inducing awkwardness, but he related to him in other ways. For one thing, “he’s a bit of an outsider but he’s very observant, he’s very patient, he’s a good listener, and I think those are traits I like to think I have”. For another, his own mother is a psychologist. “My mum’s obviously nowhere near as overbearing and sneaky and invasive as Jean is,” he smiles, “but I knew [growing up] that if I’d say something, I’d have to… not be careful, but she’d often ask me why I thought something, and sometimes I didn’t really have an answer. There was an element of knowing that she was analysing – because you would if you’d studied human psychology. You sort of can’t help it.”

Child star: Butterfield aged 14 in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’ (Paramount Pictures)

And how did Butterfield’s school experience compare with that of Otis? “There were similarities,” he says, “like school assemblies, listening to the headmaster rambling on.” OK, but what about his personal experience? Did he also want to be “that guy in the corner that no one knows”? “I was sort of in the middle,” he shrugs. “I was never the loud one in class, nor was I the quiet one. I was average.” That’s about as much as he’s willing to disclose. Butterfield is careful with his words, sometimes to a fault; he’s unwilling to say anything vaguely contentious. If he veers towards doing so, he tells himself, “No, start again,” as if he’s on set and he’s just fluffed his lines.

He’s similarly reticent when I ask if he discussed some of the female experiences the show tackles – abortion, revenge porn and slut-shaming – with his female co-stars. “Um, we didn’t have deep conversations about it,” he says. “There were obviously things that came up. We all became very close on this shoot, as you can imagine in a show like this, very quickly all the secrets come out and you get to know each other very well.”

It’s hardly surprising he’s like this – Butterfield has been in the spotlight since he was very young. At 11, he starred as the son of a Nazi officer in the Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), and he’s been working ever since. He even managed to seamlessly navigate the transition from child star to teen actor, playing a young military genius alongside Harrison Ford in 2013’s Ender’s Game, and a drug-addled adoptee in 2015’s Ten Thousand Saints. Throughout it all, he stayed at the same state school in northeast London.

For many child actors, going back to school after landing a major role is traumatic. Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams recently admitted that after being cast as Arya Stark, school became an “awful experience”. “I could see how it would, especially for young people, be really f*** you up,” says Butterfield, “but I was lucky enough that it never changed the way people treated me. In fact, more than anyone, the teachers were the ones that treated me differently. They were the ones that wanted to talk to me after class and give me special treatment. I was like, ‘Come on guys, just give me detention, give me homework!’ I enjoyed being able to have that mundaneness. It all gets a bit wild when you’re filming.”

Given that he revels in mundaneness, and describes himself as “average”, I wonder how Butterfield is finding the attention he’s got since Sex Education landed on Netflix. Before now, he’s been operating at a level of fame – the kind where you’d probably recognise him in the street, but he’d be long gone before you’d managed to place him – that seems to suit his low-key personality. But a successfully bingeable Netflix show can change an actor’s life overnight. Just ask the stars of 13 Reasons Why, or Stranger Things.

He is characteristically casual about the whole thing. “I don’t take it too seriously,” he says. “The last week has been a bit mad in that regard, in terms of the attention on me, but I don’t let it get to me.” I hope that’s true – because he won’t be able to insist on being average for much longer.

Sex Education series one is available to watch on Netflix now