After Sex Education I wanted to do something different

Asa Butterfield may be best known for playing nerdy teenager Otis in Sex Education, but now he is swapping the classroom for the stage as he makes his theatre debut in one-man show Second Best.

The 27-year-old said he was done playing a teenager and “wanted to do something totally different”.

He says he perused various theatre scripts and Second Best caught his eye.

“It’s the perfect story that explores how you move past that sliding doors moment,” he told the BBC.

The show tells the story of a former child actor, Martin, who narrowly missed out on playing Harry Potter when he was younger.

The drama follows Martin as he navigates fatherhood and imagines how his life would have turned out had he got the role.

Butterfield says the play, based on the novel by David Foenkinos and written by Barney Norris, is “funny, touching and relatable as everyone will have thought about the what-ifs at some point in their life”.

As we chat in the corner of the stage that he is calling home for the next four weeks, Butterfield is surprisingly relaxed.

“I’m still coming off from the high of being on stage and I don’t think I’ve really processed it so my feelings are a bit TBC,” he says.

He appears calm but it’s clear he strives to be the best. After the show and before our interview, he heads straight to the director for a debrief on the performance and lists the areas he felt he needed to improve on.

Despite being only 27, Butterfield has been acting for the past two decades.

At 10 he played Bruno in Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and later starred as the lead in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

He says he had been “putting theatre off for a really long time” but decided to bite the bullet as he wanted to push himself – and push himself he did as it’s no easy feat to stand on an almost empty stage for 90 minutes and perform a monologue.

He is happy with the decision he made as he says he finds being on stage “totally exhilarating”.

“After the first performance I didn’t sleep at all,” he says.

Similar to his character Martin, Butterfield has had to learn how to deal with rejection and says he has been turned down for roles “countless times”.

A few years ago he found himself in the running to play Spider-Man, a role that eventually went to Tom Holland.

“At times I think about the auditions I didn’t get,” he says. “But, I also think that something else will come up. If I had got the role as Spider-Man, I wouldn’t have been able to do Sex Education.

“I’ve learnt that some things are out of your control and as long as you give things your best shot, that’s all that matters.”

His character Martin could escape Harry Potter in order to not remind himself of the pain of not getting the role, but Butterfield says it is harder to do that in real life due to social media.

“You have to treat social media really carefully as too much exposure to it can really mess with your head,” he says.

“I try not to use it very much as I don’t want to compare myself to others.”