Somewhere Boy’s Lewis Gribben: ‘I know what it’s like to be an outsider’

An 18-year-old boy, his skin as pale as milk, squints up at the sky. He’s standing in a garden in Yorkshire suburbia, enjoying the sensation of the dewy grass between his bare toes. He can’t stop smiling. It’s one of the first times he’s ever set foot outside.

The boy’s name is Danny, and he’s at the centre of Somewhere Boy, Channel 4’s funny and peculiar new drama about a kid who’s been locked up inside his father’s house for his whole life. Danny’s mother died when he was young. His father, literally out of his mind with grief, has kept his son prisoner in a twisted attempt to protect him from the world. To stop his ever-more-curious child from trying to get out, he’s told him there are monsters on the other side of the front door, hungry for human blood.

Lewis Gribben, the actor whose restrained performance as Danny is filled with pathos, knows what it’s like to feel apart from the crowd. “I understood the idea of being an outsider,” he says. “I didn’t go to the school where I lived. I went to a different school that had a special unit for kids with autism. I’m also dyspraxic and I’ve got dyslexia really badly so I couldn’t fit in a lot of the time. When people had parties at their houses, I didn’t live in the area. I couldn’t socialise with my other classmates because I had a scribe, because my writing was so horrific. When I discovered drama, it was the one department where it’s not much writing, so I got to proper be myself around people, and feel like I belonged somewhere. All of that really helped with Danny. I could bring myself to the part, and bring all that pain.”

Though the idea of “all that pain” doesn’t exactly scream comedy, Gribben has funny bones. When we speak, the Glaswegian actor is sitting in a hotel room near London’s Leicester Square. He’s got a sharp look about him: blond buzzcut, black blazer. A vigorous nodder, he says “proper” a lot and tells me he was “proper piss-sh**ting it” when he got the role of Danny. Somewhere Boy is made by Clerkenwell Films (the production company behind the cult hit black comedy The End of the F***ing World), which Gribben knew had a terrific reputation. “Obviously, The End of the F***ing World is a show people love and want more of, so I’m sorry, you’re not getting more, you’re getting this other show,” he says, laughing. “You’re getting me.” He needn’t apologise. Gribben brings a haunting, otherworldly quality to Danny. He plays him like a fuzzy, newborn foal, taking its first trembling steps into the world. And he knew it was his role for the taking. “Very few people could play Danny authentically and make it believable, because they’d end up heightening the weird man-child aspect. Whereas I could, with great direction, bring an authenticity to him.”

Gribben dropped his Glasgow brogue for the part, and adopted the flat, basking vowels of Yorkshiremen. To prepare, he watched Ladhood – the Leeds-set coming-of-age BBC comedy that his brilliant Somewhere Boy co-star Samuel Bottomley is also in – and “lots of Sean Bean movies”. “The day before we started filming, I decided I was going to Daniel Day-Lewis it,” he says, making a reference to the Oscar winner’s very serious approach to method acting. “Stay northern all the time.” Does he have a different personality in another accent? “I’m a much bigger dickhead,” he says. “I banter around a lot more that normal and take the mick on set. The show’s so dark and depressing anyway, so if we were being serious all the time I’d want to jump off a cliff. So I had to make fun of everyone I saw, and they did it back, which I needed. I like that kind of atmosphere. Everyone tolerated me being a pain in the arse, which was nice.”

Having slipped into the accent relatively easily, Gribben found that the real challenge in playing Danny was maintaining his state of vulnerability. When he’s finally freed from his father’s house, Danny goes to live with his auntie (played with real warmth by Lisa McGrillis) and his loner lad cousin Aaron (Bottomley). Every facet of suburban life they’ve stopped noticing is like sandpaper on Danny’s senses, whether it’s the whoosh of cars on the motorway or the temperamental British sunshine. After one particularly heavy scene where Danny’s feeling lost, says Gribben, “I remember feeling really dark and in this weird vulnerable state”. “Being that exposed was something I’ve never had to do before,” he says.

He also performs an intimate scene so tender that it gives Normal People a run for its money. “That was all very new to me at the time,” says Gribben. “I made fun of it every single day until the day of it. I was like, ‘Haha, can’t wait for that scene!’ And then on the day, I was like, ‘No one effing say anything. No one make a joke. I’m petrified and scared as all hell.’ But it turned out well, I like to think, from looking at it.”

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Some people, myself included, will watch Somewhere Boy and conclude that Danny’s father Steve (an angst-ridden Rory Keenan) is abusive. But Gribben doesn’t think it’s that straightforward. “It toes the line with Steve, because he loves his son so much that he’s willing to damage him to protect him,” he says, adding that it’s not so far-fetched to imagine that, if an overprotective parent were to experience a tragedy, they might “go over the edge” and make the same decisions as Steve.

Watching the series, I was struck by how, at points, Danny seems to see the world so much more clearly than others around him. There’s an amusing moment in the first episode where Danny sees Aaron scrolling social media. “Are they your friends?” he asks. “They seem nice.” When Aaron replies that “they’re c***s”, Danny simply says, “Oh. Very boring, isn’t it? Sitting here looking at pictures of c***s.” It’s just one of many moments at which screenwriter Pete Jackson shrewdly cuts through the bleakness with an amusing exchange. “It’s just so very true,” says Gribben, laughing. “Why do we look at Instagram? You just see people doing nice things on holiday, and you’re like, I don’t f***ing even like these people. The one good thing about Danny being in his own world is he doesn’t have to try to fit in or act like everything is better than it is. He just sees what reality is. A lot of us want to be cool and liked and loved, but not to the point where you lose yourself. It’s an old-school way of his that I wish could come back. I do hope that if young people watch this, they see they don’t need to change who they are. It’s a cheesy message but just don’t do it. Just be yourself.”

As a child, Gribben was “a massive Harry Potter nerd who pretended to fly around on a Nimbus 2000” in the school corridors. “My mum was like, ‘Right, bit weird, should probably get him some friends,’” he says. So she took him to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow when he was seven, and he did youth theatre there for years. As a teenager, he got into a company called the Attic Collective, and was taken on by his agent after they saw him in a non-speaking role at a show in Edinburgh. “They were like, ‘Yeah, you look dead interesting, so do you want to sign?’” How many actors can say they got signed without even delivering any lines? “Not many,” says Gribben. “I feel like whenever I tell people that they get so pissed off, like, ‘What, I f***ing had to act my heart out there and all you had to do was prance about on a stage.’” After getting an agent, Gribben still wanted to improve, so he went to Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh to study acting for stage and screen.

A role in the 2019 horror comedy Get Duked! followed, and then a long line of drug dealers and criminals in T2 Trainspotting, Deadwater Fell and Shetland. “Just because I’m Scottish and have a buzzcut!” Gribben says. He’d been prepared to take “the whole indie route” through the industry. “I was happy to be a very thespian artsy actor who you see here and there, popping in and out of TV episodes, but never the centre focus, so I don’t know how Somewhere Boy happened. I’ve never been the face of something. It’s a lot of pressure.”

Gribben considers where he is for a moment. “If I was ever going to do it, it was always going to be Somewhere Boy. It just fits what I’m about.”

‘Somewhere Boy’ will air on Sunday 16 October at 10pm on Channel 4 (two episodes a night until the 19 October). All episodes will also be available on All 4

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