Big Boys star Dylan Llewellyn: ‘I’d quite like to play a right horrible git’

Can the actor really be as nice as the gentle teen he plays? As the hit comedy wraps up its second season, he reflects on dyslexia, finding acting by accident – and how Derry Girls saved him

“I have been playing sweet teenagers all my acting life,”& says Dylan Llewellyn, sitting across from me in a& busy London restaurant. “But& really, I’ve got to a stage where I’ve started to grow out of it. I’m& getting to the point where, at 31& years old, I’d quite like to play some& actual adults.”

Picking at a lunchtime plate of prawn toast and pork dumplings, Llewellyn is smiling, only half-serious in his assessment. Certainly, he’s got no complaints about the fact that playing adorable, gentle and occasionally hapless teenagers has helped him carve out an impressive primetime career. There was polite and awkward schoolboy James& Maguire in all three seasons of& smash-hit Derry Girls, his major breakthrough. More recently, he’s been playing shy and tender 19-year-old Jack, the lead in Channel 4’s much-lauded coming-of-age comedy Big Boys, which returned to& our screens in January for season two.