Rainbow Crew is an ongoing interview series that celebrates the best LGBTQ+ representation on screen. Each instalment showcases talent working on both sides of the camera, including queer creatives and allies to the community.
Next up, we're talking to Big Boys writer and creator Jack Rooke.
"When I was in my late teens," says Jack Rooke,"Digital Spy was clearly full of just gay guys writing about Big Brother." Now here we are, over ten years later, and Digital Spy is still writing about gay stuff, but we've moved onto Big Boys, a new Channel 4 comedy that's written by none other than Jack himself.
Set during his uni days, at a time when Jack would go on Gay Spy and look at "the naked gardener from Desperate Housewives," Big Boys takes a painfully raw, honest look at his coming-out story and how this intersected with grief over the recent death of Jack's father.
But it's not all sadness and trauma. There's also a ton of absurd, laugh-out loud moments throughout these first six episodes, not to mention a whole lot of shagging. And therein lies the beauty of Big Boys.
Like Derry Girls, which also stars Dylan Llewellyn (aka the English fella), Jack's show veers from sad to hilarious in a heartbeat without ever trivialising the moments that matter. Because it all matters, whether Jack's struggling to be honest with his mum or to recover from the poppers he accidentally drank (!) at Fresher's Week.
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Digital Spy caught up with Jack to discuss all that gay stuff and more ahead of the Big Boys launch on Channel 4.
Was it surreal casting someone to play yourself in such a personal story?
Yeah. It was a bit mad. Dylan, I'd known for a while through our friend, the "wee lesbian", Nicola [Coughlan]. What’s nice about me having known them all is that I really trust them all. I trust that they’re going to tell the story in a way that I’d love them to, and in a way that would elevate the writing, and make it better.
I certainly feel that with Dylan playing Jack, and I really feel it with Jon Pointing playing Danny. That character to me is so important, and I really wouldn't trust many people with him. Whereas with Jon, there's not an ounce of doubt in my mind that he won't just deliver it flawlessly.
I've been very lucky to be able to use people I've collaborated with before, and who are some of my best mates, you know?
Can you talk us through the narration device you used, and why it's specifically aimed at Danny?
Well, OK. I'll answer the first part of the question. I did an Edinburgh Fringe Show in 2017 called Happy Hour, which is the sort of basis of where Big Boys came from, where I addressed the audience the whole time as "you".
So the audience were coming in, and the audience were the friend I was sort of talking to. It felt like a really impactful device to do it in the room, and audience members were quite emotively reacting to it.
And also, if you think about it, nearly every pop song plays with that "you" pronoun all the time. Music, for me, is probably more of an inspiration than comedy. So I wanted to use that narrative device in that way. It's kind of like a song. It's like me recounting these memories, and letting the audience in on what you know is a nostalgic set of memories being retold. And it's leading to somewhere.
The second part of your question – it's almost something that I don't know if I'm ready yet to answer, if that makes sense? Not in a personal way. Just in a… I feel like I need everyone to watch it, series one, and I kind of almost want to leave it a bit ambiguous as to why I've done it.
Watching the show, we kept thinking,"How much of this is true?" There’s some wild stuff in there, like when you drink the poppers—
True [laughs].
The nose ring…
True [laughs]. The nose ring thing is true quite a few times, to be quite honest. Every time I get with a guy that's got a septum piercing, one of my curls sort of attaches to an ear or it curves around… I've even had it in people's ear piercings before.
Because curly hair, it so just wants to cling onto something, and that's a hook. I've caught people's earrings. I've been fully attached to people walking down the road.
All the really embarrassing stuff is true [laughs]. Which is such a shame for me.
It's really refreshing to see a friendship between two men like this, one gay and one straight, on screen. Why would you say that's important to see?
I felt like I was flipping the trope on its head. Instead of writing the gay best friend, I wrote the straight best friend. Because for me, quite honestly, the majority of gay people have a straight best friend, rather than the other way around.
Gay people are constantly negotiating the lives of straight people. If you're a gay guy, you've almost certainly got a laddy, straight mate who you're trying to let in on the world of what it's like.
It felt more realistic to me to talk about the experience of having a straight best friend, and all the comedy that comes with that. I think Jack and Danny are so great, because they’re both kind of looking out for one another, and they both want to understand each other more.
And Danny, to me, is reflective of a lot of straight men who I don't think get represented. He's a straight guy. He wants to pull girls. He's still a bit of a lad. But he's also not threatened by gay culture, or by gay guys. He's going to take it in his stride. He's going to try to understand it from a point of empathy.
Jon Pointing, who plays Danny, is one of my best friends in real life, and he, too – his wife is a queer London performer who does a lot of drag and cabaret-type scene stuff. He’s always been like Danny in real life to me. I've been to Pride with him loads of times, and done loads of stuff together. It felt like I literally had a point of realism to draw from when writing that character for Jon.
And the other day, we were chatting and doing an interview with Scroobius Pip. And he was like, "Why is it that so many straight guys can't… You know, what is the barrier?"
Jon put it so nicely: "I think some straight people – and this is definitely the minority – see two queer people together, and they see sex before they see love, if that makes sense? They see the sexual semantics of… two guys holding hands is an act of sex more than an act of love and companionship."
And actually, what I think we need is more Dannys right now, culturally. We need more people who see it as love and relationships. We actually need more straight people to see gay life as boring, because a lot of it is boring. A lot of it is just the same old shit [laughs]. Yeah, we have a weekend in July, but what we should want to achieve is this sort of normality.
But obviously, the gays are always going to be more exciting.
We love how the show isn't afraid to normalise the more visceral aspects of queer sex too, like with the dark room and some of the Grindr scenes. Can you talk us through that approach?
I feel like it's because that's what my reality is as a writer and as a comedian. It's always the sort of stuff that I draw from, because it's the reality of my own life, and the reality of me figuring out my sexuality, which I still think I'm figuring out now.
I feel like I'm out as a gay comic, but actually, I mean, I'm always trying to figure out what my sexuality is. Maybe that's the most exciting part of life, really.
In the show, I've tried to put as many real, honest experiences in of what it's like when you’re trying to figure it out; what it's like when you go to your first hook-up, or you go to your first gay club that's got a dark room downstairs.
I hadn't seen that on TV before. And also, to be honest with you, I don't think it's been really allowed to be on TV before. Not in an institutional homophobic way. But in the sense of: I don't think that people have cared about niche, authentic experiences. They've wanted stuff that plays to the masses.
Now, I think that comedy, especially in the last five or 10 years, has had a real shift, and people want to hear authentic, specific experiences. People want to hear those experiences, because they are what makes characters interesting. It’s what makes stories interesting.
So I wanted it to have a real specificity, but also allowing straight viewers, and people who aren’t gay men in particular, to be able to watch it and find it fun, and find it joyful, and not to be like…
I think the whole thing is like how Jon Pointing put it. These things aren't always about sex. They're about love. They're about figuring yourself out and your identity. Very little of it is about shagging. Even though, arguably, there is some good shagging stuff in it.
Do you have any advice for queer people who are struggling to figure out their place in the world?
My advice is to firstly know that even when you're hearing all the hate in the world, there's still going to be so many people out there who are going to offer you nothing but love and support. It's impossible to drown out the good.
I also think it's really important that people look after themselves, find those allies, and find those people who are going to back you, whatever.
I think that's sort of what Big Boys is about to me. Jack never comes out to Danny. Danny, at the start of ep one, presumes Jack is straight in quite a harmless way, and obviously sees that he’s caught up in a boys' thing. I think Danny just works it out, and Danny's just like, "Tell me how you chat up guys."
I didn't even realise I'd written it like that. I didn’t write it like that on purpose. And then everyone when we we're sort of talking – it's like: "I love that Jack never comes out to Danny."
I think that's the power of a good ally. It's the power of someone who's going to help you find yourself without caring about the ways in which you want to do it, and the parameters of that.
So, yeah. Find the good allies. Find a Danny.
Big Boys will air two episodes on Channel 4 each Thursday from May 26th. The whole series is available to watch now on 4OD.
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After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.
David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.
Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends.
As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.
