You & Me creator Jamie Davis has spoken up about working with Russell T Davies again, who was an executive producer on the drama and appeared in a Doctor Who spin-off years ago.
Jamie worked as an actor before inventing his new ITVX show, and his credits include performances in Casualty, Shameless, Hex, and Footballers’ Wives.
With his screenplay debut, he’s written You & Me, a story that’s both heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure, that tells the linked stories of Ben (Harry Lawtey), Jess (Sophia Brown), and Emma (Jessica Barden) across multiple timeframes in London.
Jamie, Harry, Sophia, and Jessica recently chatted with Metro.co.uk about the project, how the lead actors handled their characters, and what it was like to have It’s A Sin creator Russell on board as a producer.
The screenwriter acknowledged that having Russell join the production was both ‘wonderful and scary,’ having reached out to him on a whim when he’d written the show and thought to himself, ‘If I could send it to anybody, who would I send it to?’
‘I thought Russell because he’s the best, but I worked with Russell maybe nine years ago, so we didn’t really know one other,’ he explained.
Jamie previously appeared in the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures as Davey in the episode Invasion of the Bane, which aired on New Year’s Day in 2007.
He recognised in the email that it was ‘unlikely’ that Russell would have time to read it, but decided he’d rather wager on ‘unlikely’ than ‘impossible’.
‘So I sent it and then like two weeks later I remember I was on the train, I had the kids on my lap. It was the end of the day on a Friday, I thought I’d check my emails and then I’m done,’ he recalled.
‘I got this email from Russell that I’ll never forget. It’s still saved on my phone. He said we should meet. So we met for lunch and he said we should make it into a TV show. We talked all about what I wanted to do as a writer, what I wanted to do next.’
Russell handed the screenplay on to Dominic Treadwell-Collins at Happy Prince, ITV Studios’ drama label, who enjoyed the premise as well, and they started to work, creating the show throughout the summer.
It was amazing not just to have the returning Doctor Who showrunner as an executive producer, but Jamie can now depend on him as a’mentor,’ he revealed.
‘I know that in everything I write, whether this or the other things that I’m writing, he’s going to read it. He’s always on your shoulder when you’re writing and you’re hearing that voice [saying], “That’s not funny. That’s not good enough.”
‘It makes you better. because you know you’re going to send it to the person who you think is the best, who makes you work harder. The greatest gift he’s given me is that he makes me be better either by what he taught me or by making me work harder. The whole thing has been a dream come true.’
In You & Me, Jess becomes pregnant after she and Ben fall in love, so Sophia spoke to a friend – also named Jess – who had a similar birth story to her character months before she began filming.
‘I was giving her a little bit of her tale. I was doing it for her and attempting to express her narrative in some of the situations. ‘I thought it was incredibly lovely,’ the Witcher: Blood Origin star recalled.
‘Our discussion really opened up, and she was able to confide in me about certain things she was going through. So it was a very connecting event for me, for my friendships, and it was joyous.’
Sophia also appreciated filming in London in the midst of the summer, which meant that she was able to quickly travel home at the end of the day, which she found ‘wonderful’.
‘Even though a lot of the themes that we explore are quite intense, for my character Jess, there was a lot of joy. I was falling in love with Ben and so I had a lot of fun doing that,’ she added.
Harry agreed that the experience was “totally wonderful,” praising the “levity, care, and generosity” displayed by everybody involved in the production.
‘[There was] a full culture of love and support, which made it as simple as it could possible be,’ he explained.
‘But it’s also a duty, because there are enormous issues in here that have a really significant place in a lot of people’s lives.
‘If it’s not an experience you’ve experienced, you have a responsibility and an obligation to do it right and depict it with some kind of realism and make it feel true for people.’
While he and his co-stars were ‘pretending’ in the plot, the Industrial actor didn’t want to ‘feel like a fraud’ when representing important sequences.
‘That took – I think for all of us in our own way – some conversations with people and really making sure that we had a genuine understanding of the story we’re trying to tell,’ he said.
Jessica, who plays Emma in The End of the F***ing World, highlighted how much she appreciated playing a ‘regular person’ in compared to past parts.
‘Obviously she was going through very deep things, they were things that 100% happen to all of us in our lives. I just really liked playing somebody that wasn’t really that far off my own age, in life, in an everyday world, going to a job and has friends and family,’ she outlined.
‘Even though the timeline is slightly disjointed for everybody, that’s one of the key things about the show. The information is revealed to you at different times.’
The Hanna star continued, saying how she was ‘blown away by playing a regular person who had a flat’.
‘I loved it. There’s not a lot of things made like that right now. It was amazing to play somebody where all of your decisions and your instincts are just supposed to be grounded. I loved it,’ she said.
You & Me is available to watch on ITVX.
Source My Celebrity Life.