Over the last few years, we have found ourselves inundated with sadcoms. Again and again, we’ve been deluged by ostensible comedies that are so concerned with grief and trauma that the laughs end up feeling like a distant afterthought. Striking the right balance between comedy and drama takes absurd levels of effort and craft at the best of times. Doing it with a premise as bleak as BBC Three’s new series Just Act Normal is almost impossible.
My hands are tied with embargos, so I have to be vague about certain plot details, but Just Act Normal is a show about three young siblings who decide to struggle on as normal after their mother – a perennially unreliable woman with substance abuse issues – disappears. Their lives are suddenly spent trying to navigate the complex systems of the adult world while processing the grief of abandonment in real time. Sounds like grim stuff (Disney’s Good American Family recently tackled a similar subject in the form of full-blown melodrama), and yet there’s a palpable lightness of touch to Just Act Normal. You could almost call it joy.
“We were always, like, ‘This is a warped fairytale,’” says director Nathaniel Martello-White of the show’s complicated tonal balance, as we talk on Zoom. “The kind of comedy and drama in the series reminds me of the way that fairytales swing from extreme moments of joy to intense moments of pain and destruction. So I’d always tell these guys to try to find those kinds of archetypes and references for the characters.”
“These guys” are Akins Subair and Chenée Taylor (also present on the Zoom) who play Tionne and Tiana, two of the siblings who suddenly find themselves alone in the world. Janice Okoh adapted Just Act Normal from her 2013 play Three Birds, and to say that the play left these youngsters with big shoes to fill is a woeful understatement. Taylor’s part, for instance, was initially played by Michaela Coel.
“I wasn’t familiar with it,” Taylor says of the play. “I didn’t try to find it to watch, either, just because I didn’t want it to influence my performance in any way.” On following a presence as large as Coel’s, she says: “It scared me for a second. But then I thought about it and said, ‘No, it doesn’t scare me.’ They’re two different things, the play and the series, do you know what I mean?”
Subair had even less familiarity with the material, only auditioning the weekend before filming began. “I got the job on Friday, and I was going to a football game on the Sunday, so I just had the Saturday to familiarise myself with the entire script and get everything cemented in my head.” Subair is a Londoner and Shaheen Baig, the show’s casting director, sent him a YouTube video of the West Midlands dialect he needed to master. “But as you can imagine, with all of it happening so abruptly, I didn’t really have time to go over the YouTube video countless times,” he says.
What’s remarkable about this is that you completely buy Taylor and Subair (and Kaydrah Walker-Willkie, who rounds out the trio as younger sister Tanika) as siblings. They enmeshed at speed, according to Taylor, over a series of Nando’s dinners, and the result is a comprehensive portrait of a group of people struggling through a painful experience.
You could call it loss, but that isn’t quite the word for what they go through. “Their mother is a functioning addict,” says Martello-White. “The reason why these three children have this resilience is that, although their mum loved them, they’ve also been managing that aspect of their lives. When Tianna steps up as the surrogate mother of the family, she’s been playing that role for the last four or five years.”
As well as Okoh’s script, Martello-White credits the successful balance of comedy and drama to the casting. “While it was a very, very important, serious subject matter, it was being dealt with in this quite mischievous, playful way,” he says. “The process became about finding actors who can deliver that flavour. I was looking for people who have this kind of charisma and authenticity, which these two have in abundance.”
Both Subair and Taylor are television newcomers. “Nobody in my family is from the industry,” reveals Taylor, a Birmingham native. “I moved to London when I was 18, so I could go to a part-time drama school, and work part-time. I really hustled. I worked in a bar, I worked in a theatre. When you tell people you want to be an actor, they all say ‘Oh, go and work in a theatre, you can make connections.’ That is not what I did. I served drinks and I took people to their seats.”
“Similar to Chenée, I didn’t go to drama school,” adds Subair. “I actually studied economics. But acting has always been plan A for me. Once I graduated, I went to a drama school spinoff called Hackney Showroom, which essentially provides opportunities for people of working-class backgrounds who may not have had the opportunity to go to these prestigious schools such as Rada or Lamda.”
The cast is rounded out by an impressive list of heavy hitters. Romola Garai plays a teacher caught between concern and self-interest. Back to Black’s Sam Buchanan does a fantastic job confounding the trope of the estate drug dealer. Ivanno Jeremiah is heartbreaking as the children’s estranged father. And then there is Jamelia (most recent screen credit: Celebs Go Dating), who damn near steals the show as a kind of maternal stand-in figure.
“She’s very funny,” laughs Martello-White. “Just for that role, I wanted to do something meta and cast a musician as a Tina Turner impersonator. Obviously Jamelia is a Brummie, and she’s an incredible musician, so it was kind of, ‘Oh, let’s see what Jamelia is doing.’ And she really wanted to start getting into more comedy and premium TV, so all those things aligned. I’m really glad it worked out, because she’s just got so much in front of the camera. Again, it’s a very serious storyline so you really want it to feel grounded, but we were also looking for that absurdity, which she did fantastically.”
More than anything, though, Just Act Normal is an incredible showcase for some astonishing young actors. This is already shaping up to be a landmark year for amazing new discoveries – it can’t hurt that Baig is also the woman who found Owen Cooper for Adolescence – and Just Act Normal only accelerates that. The play might have left the actors with big shoes to fill, but we’ll be talking about this cast for years.
