Jack Rooke’s got a problem with something written about him on the internet. Folded into a slightly-too-small chair in the regal-looking cafe of north London’s St Pancras Renaissance hotel, he shakes his head in dismay, causing his mass of tight curls to jiggle. “Rooke. Is. Gay,” he slowly repeats when reminded of the three words that make up the entirety of his Wikipedia page’s “personal life” section. “There’s a guy I’m currently dating who has mentioned it no less than four times. I’m like, ‘Can somebody just delete that?’”
But while Wikipedia’s summation of Rooke’s personal life may be reductive, its section headed “works” is expansive. It culminates in Big Boys, the 31-year-old comedian and writer’s Bafta-winning, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, which has just returned to Channel 4 for its third and final season. Based on Rooke’s 2015 Edinburgh fringe show, Good Grief, about the death of his father from cancer, and his 2020 memoir-slash-advice guide, Cheer the F**k Up, it follows grieving, gay student Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) as he navigates life at Brent University and tries to lose his anal virginity.
By his side is straight best friend Danny (Jon Pointing), his geezer-y bluster and banter masking a struggle with depression. Both are buffeted by a support cast of strong, straight-talking female characters including Jack’s hilarious cousin Shannon (Harriet Webb).
At its best, Big Boys mixes the soulful pathos of The Royle Family with the top-tier cringe comedy of Fleabag. It’s about life and death, but with jokes involving eye-opening gloryhole injuries, the perils of downing poppers and niche 2010s pop culture – Jack’s pet fish is called Alison Hammond – littered throughout. Rooke himself acts as narrator, often speaking directly to Danny – a character “based on four of my friends”, he says, “three of them are still here and one of them isn’t”. The fact that Danny is addressed in the past tense adds an undercurrent of melancholy.
Rooke, today sporting a shirt stolen from the Big Boys costume department, had trouble letting go of his creation. “I spent a lot of time crying in the car on the way [to set],” he says. “And then, because the budgets got so bad, later I was also crying on the tube on the way to set because I thought ‘every little helps’,” he laughs, pulling off a very Rooke/Big Boys trait of mixing humour with something more serious: a cashflow catastrophe hitting homegrown TV production and UK culture more broadly. “But while I was there, I had the happiest, best time.”
Some of the best days were spent filming with the likes of Rylan Clark and the actual Alison Hammond, who both have cameos. Rooke says he was certain neither would agree to appear, which seems strange given the show’s glowing reviews, litany of awards (in 2023, Rooke won a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award) and celebrity fans such as Kylie Minogue, who was recommended the show by a friend of a friend (“I think if you’re a gay man and Kylie Minogue doesn’t have your number, then you’re not gay,” Rooke quips).
So why the lack of confidence? “I still don’t see it as a hit show,” he says, sipping a mint tea. “I see what huge hit shows get in terms of budget and marketing.” He references cash-rich Netflix productions promoted by flashy immersive experiences housed in warehouses. “I’m like, ‘Can’t we do that with Big Boys? Go to a warehouse and there’s gloryholes everywhere, but you have to put a love letter through the hole instead of a cock.’”
Even the big set piece that opens series three – the gang jet off to Greece after Shannon wins big-ish at bingo – was done on a budget. “It wasn’t actually Greece,” Rooke laughs. “It was Malta, because of the tax cuts. Also, there’s a whole Greek gay bar section that we shot in a hotel in Edgware called the Madonna hotel. It’s the campest place ever.”
Rooke has always been able to improvise if necessary. As a kid, growing up in Watford, he was obsessed with magic and would sleep with a homemade magic wand (actually a stick covered in masking tape). He struggles to pinpoint exactly what it was about magic that he loved, but is wary of linking it to his sexuality, or upbringing, as part of some Sad Gay Past he had to escape from.
“I am the product of two working-class parents that had a kid in their mid-40s and by that point had a bit of money,” he says. “I was born into a council flat but then we moved to a house so I feel like I had a foot in the working-class experience of growing up and not having much, and then a foot in the middle-class experience. I also don’t really know how much of my youth I spent worrying about being gay.”
Even series one’s crowning moment – when Jack tells his mum he’s gay – was never supposed to be a big event. “I used to get very annoyed on set when people called it the coming out scene,” he says. “For me, it’s about the fact his dad’s dead and he can’t tell him something about himself that’s new. That was the emotional drive. It wasn’t about the shame of sexuality.” The scene was later shown on Celebrity Gogglebox and hit a nerve, going viral on TikTok. “I was trying not to do the grand cliche of gay writers who write the coming out scene, but of course it was a fucking coming out scene. I needed to just accept that.”
Rooke says there was always “the presumption that I was [gay] from very masculine, geezer-y figures in my family”. But his dad, “a bit of a Danny”, would take him to places that “had some gay presence”, like Camden market, and would also support his childhood obsession with the Spice Girls, replacing a Baby Spice doll after Rooke chewed its head off. Even before his dad died when Rooke was 15, he was supported by a strong feminine energy. “I was around a lot of women taking very little shit from anyone for anything,” he smiles. He mentions his auntie Jill, a 74-year-old painter and decorator, and his auntie Marion, who drove buses. “They all grafted a lot, because they had to. The men I spent a lot of time with in my earlier years were either in crisis or violent. And I don’t mean constantly abusive, constantly bad people, but they dealt with their aggression through punching walls or kicking something.”
In his late teens, Rooke did work experience at Calm, a charity aimed at offering support for those in crisis. “Everyone who called in the first week I was there was a wife, sister, mother or girlfriend, worried sick about a man in their life,” he says. The experience inspired Big Boys storylines involving Danny’s girlfriend Corinne (Izuka Hoyle) and his hapless university mentor Jules (Katy Wix), who attempt to put Danny back together. “The reason the male mental health conversation has occurred is because women have encouraged men to open up,” Rooke says. “I want this series to celebrate those women.”
I ask Rooke why he suggested we meet in the Renaissance hotel. I assume, perhaps, it was a Spice Girls reference (their debut video for Wannabe was filmed here). It turns out it’s to do with where he’s heading next, post-Big Boys, with the hotel featuring in not one but two future projects. “One is a film I want to write and direct, and the other is a comedy drama.”
He’s tight-lipped about the latter but, like Big Boys, the film is a personal story tinged by loss. In 2020, Rooke’s older brother Dean lost his partner to cancer. The day they found out it was terminal Dean proposed underneath Tracey Emin’s “I want my time with you” neon sign that hangs at the back of the hotel. “Dean is a real geez, like a lad’s lad, and I remember thinking it was the most touching, thoughtful, emotionally resilient, brave thing I’ve ever seen anyone do ever.”
Writing, however, isn’t necessarily where Rooke’s future lies. He much prefers being on a set, running things, feeding into every detail. He’s disarmingly honest about his book, calling it “awful. Dreadful.” He was inspired to write it after reading too many books about mental health written by “a thirtysomething middle-class person who would then say, ‘I did have a private therapist subsidised by both my parents as well as the income that I’d made in my 20s being a FTSE 100 company leader’”. He lets out a loud cackle. “I got so fucking fed up of reading those shitty books that I was like, there has to be one that’s written by someone like me on the NHS waiting list who thinks they might be gay and whose friend’s killed themselves. But I don’t think I’m a very talented longform writer. Did I do the book for the money? Yes. Did I also hope it would be useful and that it would have advice for young people? Yes.”
An increasingly powerful figure in TV – he recently signed with the prestigious American agency UTA, whose other clients include Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Greta Gerwig – Rooke is keen for his work to continue to help people. It’s this altruistic trait he admires in others, too. He tells me his current celebrity crush is financial journalist and unlikely hunk Martin Lewis. “I don’t know why,” he laughs. “There’s something about him wanting to help people not get scammed that really makes me go fucking feral.” Another line for the Wikipedia page, perhaps.
• Big Boys series three is available to stream on the Channel 4 website
