The British actor opens up about life as a Netflix fave, the Amazon series he’s desperate to star in and his upcoming stage debut in a one-man play about a man who narrowly lost out on the role of Harry Potter: “It’s time to break out of that ‘Sex Ed’ bubble and scare myself.”
“The idea of theater has always terrified me, and it still does,” Asa Butterfield says from the rehearsal room of London’s National Youth Theatre.
The British star, famed for his performance as Otis Milburn in Netflix’s awkwardly raunchy teen hit Sex Education, has been in showbiz for a long time. After minor roles in ITV’s After Thomas (2006) and Garth Jennings’ comedy Son of Rambow (2007), Butterfield was cast at age 10 as the lead in Mark Herman’s Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pajamas….
The actor is speaking from the rehearsal stage of his one-man production, running Friday, Jan. 24, to Feb. 22 at London’s Riverside Studios. Second Best, written by Barney Norris, based on David Foenkinos’ best-selling novel and directed by Michael Longhurst, is about a young man named Martin who, in the present day, is helping his partner through her pregnancy. Yet through each trimester, Martin is battling his own resurfaced trauma around his childhood and the loss of his father, which coincidentally occurred at the same time he narrowly lost out to the final contender for the main role in the beloved Harry Potter movies….