Interview: Jake Dunn on ‘What It Feels Like for a Girl’
It’s hard to believe What It Feels Like for a Girl is one of Jake Dunn‘s first on-screen roles. A complex, carefully constructed performance that needs to be seen to be believed, it’s the kind of turn that announces the arrival of a genuinely exciting new talent, one that is well worth watching.
What It Feels Like for a Girl centers on Byron, a teenager growing up in early-2000s Nottinghamshire, navigating the harsh realities of gender dysphoria, domestic abuse, and societal rejection. Based on Paris Lees‘ memoir of the same name, the series captures the chaos and isolation of adolescence with raw, unflinching honesty. Byron’s world is one of constant volatility, at home, at school and in the streets, where moments of escape are fleeting and often come at a cost.
Dunn plays Liam, a local boy whose easy charm and streetwise swagger initially seem like a lifeline for Byron. But as the relationship deepens, it becomes clear that Liam’s attention is less about connection and more about control. Dunn brings a quiet menace to the role, slipping between tenderness and manipulation in ways that feel alarmingly real. It’s a slippery, deeply uncomfortable dynamic, and a striking turn from an actor at the very beginning of his career.
Dunn says he initially came across What It Feels Like for a Girl shortly after he finished filming William Tell, a historical epic that brings the legendary Swiss folk hero of the same name to life. “It was on my radar for a little while,” he says of the show. “I did a film called William Tell, which we shot in Rome in 2023. It was four and a half months in the heat, shooting a swords-and-shields film, and it was really knackering. When I came off that, I spoke to my agents and said, ‘Look’—and to clarify, I’ve never once been in demand at all, ever—but I said, ‘Hey, I really don’t want to audition for a while. I’m just really tired.’ I got back in November, and I really wanted to take time off until maybe March, just to be on my own. When you do a job like that, it’s so physically demanding that you don’t have any creativity left at the end of it. It was nice to feel that exhausted, but also—yeah, I was just drained. Around that time, a couple of my friends were auditioning for What It Feels Like for a Girl, I think starting that November. It never came my way, and I didn’t seek it out because I just wanted some time off.”
Still, the project kept making its way back to him. Even as Dunn tried to disconnect and take time for himself, the show seemed to linger in the background; mentioned in conversations with friends and brought up by people in his circle. “I kept hearing about it,” he says. “People were saying there’s this character called Liam. He’s this drug dealer in Nottingham who’s really scary and kind of mysterious. You don’t really know what he’s about. He seems mercurial. And I remember thinking, ‘That sounds really cool,’ but it still hadn’t come my way. Then, months later, it did.”
Dunn ended up submitting a self-tape for the role and just a week later, he found himself doing a chemistry read with the show’s lead, Ellis Howard.” We did the scene at the end of episode two, where Liam has stolen Byron’s keys,” he recalls. “And the beginning of episode three, when they’re in Liam’s flat. I didn’t meet any of the creative team, just [casting director] Nathan [Toth]. I hadn’t met [director] Brian [Walsh], or anyone at [the production companies] Hera or BBC—so I thought, ‘This might take a while, if it turns into anything.’ But then, like three days later, I got the part. So that was it.”
And the rest, as they say, is history, with Dunn delivering a tightrope walk of a performance, bringing some much needed complexity and pathos to the character. In a less capable actor’s hands, Liam could have easily been a one-dimensional villain that only serves to progress Byron’s narrative, but thanks to Dunn’s dynamic performance, he’s so much more. Not much of a backstory is given to Liam, neither in the show or the book on which it is based. But through the smallest shifts in body language and a carefully constructed persona that slowly starts to chip away, Dunn hints at a whole world of hurt and history beneath the surface. We eventually end up learning as much about who Liam is from what he withholds as we do from what he reveals.
So it was a surprise to learn that Dunn didn’t have many conversations with the show’s creatives about Liam’s backstory, basing the performance on what was on the page and his own intuition instead. “It was all on the page,” he says. “It was unbelievable. The writing on that show… I mean, Paris is fucking amazing. And the whole writing team understood Liam so well. I don’t even feel like I had many conversations about him. I was really petrified, to be honest.”
That fear hit early on, starting directly from the show’s read-through. At the time, Dunn was in the middle of press for Disney+ series Renegade Nell and found himself running between junkets and the table read. “I just wasn’t prepared,” he admits. “I didn’t have the accent, I didn’t have anything ready. And if I’m honest, I really thought I was going to get recast. I was afraid I wasn’t rough or ready enough to play this part. But they really trusted me.”
Instead of diving headfirst into research and asking questions, Dunn made a conscious choice to keep a distance from the real-life inspiration behind the character. “With Paris, I actually held off on asking for any information about Liam,” he says. “I didn’t want to know a lot. He was a real person—based on real people—and the whole situation was really scary. I kind of did the opposite of what actors are supposed to do. I didn’t ask what he looked like, where he was from, any of that. Because it’s inspired by a true story, I just couldn’t.”
So he decided to look inward instead, basing his performance on people he knew during his adolescence. “I based him on a couple of people I knew in Nottingham when I was a teenager,” he says. “Guys who genuinely scared me. They were ruthless, young men who would antagonize you, get in your face, who were physically coiled, aggressive, unpredictable. So it was kind of a ‘hope for the best’ situation.”
That approach came to a head during the shoot’s earliest scenes, many of which were the most intense not only to film, but to watch as well. “Those first two weeks of filming—all of the scenes in Liam’s flat and a sequence at the end of episode three involving a character called Dean—I’ve never been more scared in my life doing anything,” he says. “That fear pushed me into a place where I couldn’t back down. I was so afraid of getting it wrong, it made me quite intense about it.”
And that intensity more than paid off; Dunn’s portrayal is both magnetic and unsettling as Liam, hinting at the depth and intensity of an experienced actor far beyond his years. When it comes to understanding Liam, Dunn is clear-eyed about the character’s darker complexities, and unafraid to say the quiet parts out loud. “It’s a very interesting power dynamic,” he explains. “Essentially, Liam is an ex-sex worker—an ex–child sex worker—and there’s a real push-pull in terms of who sits at the very bottom, systematically, of society. Who’s the most pushed down upon. Liam is absolutely pushed down upon, but he also has autonomy. He has his own flat. He has this power to him. But it’s always a power grab.”
That tension, he says, helped him shape the character in a way that felt grounded, even if not always sympathetic. “Something that really made me okay with the choices I made in playing him—and I really don’t agree with the idea that you have to like the part you’re playing, by the way. I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have to sympathize with someone [to play them],” he says. “But what helped me not judge myself so harshly was this idea that, in my head, Liam had been abused, or groomed, or coerced as a kid. And that trauma became self-fulfilling. He would never be able to acknowledge that what’s happening with Byron reflects what happened to him. Because that would mean admitting it happened—and that’s too dangerous for him.”
For Dunn, that internal struggle is clearest in the show’s sex scenes, which he notes are more about control than desire. “It’s not about sexuality,” he says. “It’s about power. It’s about who has the upper hand. And in the moments where Byron is confident or dominant, it completely shuts Liam down. He can’t handle it. It’s not that he can’t grapple with his sexuality—it’s that he has to be in control. I think that comes from being in situations as a kid where he wasn’t in control. So he built himself into someone really tough. It reminded me a little of the third act of Moonlight—if you’ve seen the Barry Jenkins film. That ability to build yourself really hard because of what you’ve faced. Liam had to become a kind of monolith. He had to become unstoppable because he was so afraid.”
None of this is spelled out explicitly in the series, but for Dunn, even the small moments made a difference. “It’s not explored very much in the show, but I appreciate you saying it’s there in pockets. Because those pockets were really important for me to understand him,” he says. “But at the end of the day, Liam is just one part of Byron’s journey. And that’s what the show is really about.”
And at the center of that journey is Ellis Howard. While Liam might cast a long shadow on both Byron and the show itself, his presence felt far after he makes his departure from the series, Dunn is quick to emphasize that this is Byron’s story, and that it was Howard’s performance that grounded everything they built together on screen. “Ellis is the footprint of this show,” he says. “He’s in every scene. He is the whole show. Alongside the amazing [Fallen Divas]—every single part of it is so integral—but Ellis is the heartbeat.”
Dunn’s first scenes on the project were all with Howard, something he says shaped the entire experience. “I was lucky enough that the first day and the first two weeks were all Byron and Liam,” he recalls. “So I started the job with Ellis. It was just me and Ellis. And we filmed an intimate scene together. We really bonded, because we were both really scared—and at points, I think I was more scared than him. I had to remind myself, like, I’m not leading this show, Jake. Come on. It was such a wild feeling.”
That early connection became the foundation of their on-screen dynamic. “We just had that touchstone together, where we could check in without saying much,” he recalls. “And the great thing is, you’ve got an amazing intimacy coordinator, an amazing team making you feel safe—and then you’ve got someone like Ellis. We were both like, ‘Look, we’re telling a story that involves two people who are sex workers, right?’ For these characters, the most comfortable they might ever feel is during sex with strangers. That’s not a universal truth, obviously—but it’s where we landed for these two people. So as actors, on the first day, we just had to go, Okay. And I really trust him.”
That trust, both personal and professional, became the throughline of their work together on-screen. “I trust him on set, and I trust him as a person,” he says. “And it just kept going, you know? It was the best time working with him. It’s always nice when you mostly have one scene partner in a show—you really get to focus on a relationship. And I was very pleased I got to do that with Ellis.”
These days, plenty of up-and-coming actors seem more taken with the idea of being an actor (and everything that comes with it in terms of fame, Instagram followers and fancams) than the actual work itself. So it’s refreshing to hear Dunn talk about the craft with such passion and focus. Over the course of our conversation, he frames acting not as image-building, but as problem-solving, character-building, emotional calibration. For him, it’s evident that it’s not just about playing a role. It’s about saying something through the work, no matter how messy, difficult or uncomfortable that may be.
“There’s something that’s happening right now that I feel really excited about,” he says. “Rarely do actors get to be artists. And I think being an artist is about having something to say. So many actors do have something to say, but you rarely get the opportunity to be in something that actually lets you say it. You’re making [a project] and you’re going, God, I’m making this thing—but at some point someone’s gonna see it. And what should they think when they see it? That’s something I think about a lot. I want to be as clear and concise and kind as I can.”
Still, Dunn doesn’t believe it’s his job, or the job of actors in general, to teach. “I don’t stand here as an actor ever trying to educate,” he says. “I don’t think that’s my job. I don’t think my job is to explain someone like Liam. My intersection in this is playing a part that’s really difficult, someone who refuses to be malleable. He is what he is. So for me, the job isn’t to educate, but to present.”
That, he believes, is one of the show’s quiet strengths. “The great thing about What It Feels Like for a Girl is that it doesn’t try to give you a position,” he explains. “It simply shows you a life. It’s Paris’s point of view, again and again. And it never pretends to be anything else.” Even so, Dunn hopes the series makes space for empathy, especially at a time where the livelihoods of transpeople are under threat. “What you hope, especially in times like these, is that it encourages people to humanize trans people—who make up something like 0.5% of the population,” he continues. “To see trans people as people. To see trans women as women, trans men as men. To be kind to trans people and non-binary people.”
But maybe the most powerful outcome, he says, is what happens between episodes. “I think what the show will also do—hopefully what it is doing—is getting people to talk to each other,” he says. “You know, something we miss more and more these days are shows where you watch an episode and then you stop. You don’t just watch the next one—you have to talk about it.”
He pauses, before adding a final note. “I really felt that with Baby Reindeer,” he recalls. “Ellis and I actually watched that show together the first week of filming What It Feels Like for a Girl, because it had just come out. And yeah—they’re totally different things, but both are rooted in real people’s stories, real lives. And to be part of something that hopefully makes people pause—makes them talk to each other in any way—I think that’s a really special thing. And I hope people are doing that [with this show].”
As for what’s next, Dunn wasn’t able to say much at the time of our conversation (his next project hadn’t yet been officially announced) but he did share that it marked a first for him: a leading role. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been a lead in a thing,” he says. “Which is really exciting—and really scary.”
That project, now revealed to be Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, feels like the next logical step. And yet, Dunn talks about what’s ahead with the same modesty and groundedness that seems to shape everything he does. “I definitely don’t have big plans, or anything like that. I’m not that sort of actor—I don’t think I’m that sort of person,” he says. “It’s annoying to do this because it’s really wanky, but I’m going to do it anyway. There’s a line in a poem called Peanut Butter—Ellis actually gave it to me in week one of What It Feels Like for a Girl—and we both really clung to it. The line goes: ‘I have no desire to know where this, any of it, is getting me.’ And that’s exactly how I feel.”
Even now, with things starting to take off, he admits he’s still most at ease in the quiet stretches in between. “I can never get over the fact that I’m working at all. The seven months off made so much more sense to me,” he laughs. “This year’s been a real learning curve. Doing A Streetcar Named Desire [Dunn starred as Stanley Kowalski in a production of the play at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre], and then the thing I’m on currently, there’s been a slight shift. It’s different—but I’ve always loved supporting roles. I think they’re really special. Leading is a different beast. It’s for different people.”
As for the future, Dunn isn’t making any big proclamations or long-term plans. He’s just taking it as it comes, one day at a time. “Whatever happens next, happens next. I’ve got no idea,” he says. “This industry is so unpredictable. It’s always lucky if you get an audition.”
For now, he’s just grateful to have been part of something that meant something. “It’s really nice to talk about a show like this, because we made it for BBC Three—and thank God for public broadcasting that we got to make the trans show in the time we’re in,” he adds. “So it’s great to get to talk to people about it, if they’re interested. But that’s not why you do the job. You do the job because you got the job. Do you know what I mean?”
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL is now streaming on iPlayer.