LONDON – When Olly Alexander started to cry filming a scene from “It’s a Sin”, nobody was too surprised.
Performing the show, which arrived at HBO Max on Thursday and follows a group of friends embracing the gay culture of the 1980s in London under the shadow of AIDS, was exciting for many of the cast and crew – and Alexander is so comfortable in show their vulnerabilities when the character he plays, Ritchie, is trying to deflect them.
“I was a complete mess after the first shot,” said Alexander, 30, in a recent video interview. “I was crying.” Peter Hoar, the director of “It’s a Sin’s”, took a break from filming.
The scene in question, which takes place after Ritchie and his friends are arrested in protest against the British government’s inaction on AIDS, is one of many on the program it explores how the epidemic devastated gay life.
When we met Ritchie, he is a mischievous and confident but naive 18-year-old who has just moved to London with the dream of becoming an actor. Alexander also moved to the rural capital of England at age 18 and marked his first film role, but today he is best known as the lead singer of the band Years & Years. “It’s a Sin” is his first acting as an actor in six years.
Years & Years’ music often explores the relationship between desire and shame and is heavily influenced by bands from the 1980s, such as Pet Shop Boys. (“It’s A Sin” takes the title of the song of the same name from that group.) So when Alexander heard Russel T Davies, the show’s creator, being interested in him for the lead role, the opportunity “made poetic sense,” said Alexander .
In an interview, Davies said the program was “classified as gay as gay, which is my policy”. For Ritchie, he added, he wanted an actor who already had a great profile in Britain. “It almost reduces to a field of one,” he said. “It was the simplest audition of my life.”
Alexander’s performance as Ritchie suggests that the character’s ambition and bravado are reactions to fear and self-loathing. “I realized right away, ‘Oh, I know who Ritchie is,'” said Alexander. “He’s trying to get on stage and shine and dazzle: I did it.”
But while Ritchie masks his vulnerabilities, Alexander spoke frankly in interviews and on stage with the band about his experiences of bulimia, anxiety, self-harm and depression.
“I just said everything about me, ”he said. “My life is a little out of the question now.”
Alexander grew up in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, where his mother founded a local music festival. Her father, an aspiring musician, worked in amusement parks.
It was a creative home, said Alexander, but his father had mental health problems and substance abuse problems that led to a difficult environment at home. When he was 14, his parents separated; he had only seen his father a few times since then, he said.
The school was an even more tense environment and Alexander experienced homophobic bullying since he was nine. “I had long blond hair and acted very feminine,” he said. “It made me a target. And children can be so cruel. “
When Alexander remembered his youth, he started to cry. It took many years before he could look back at the child who was with compassion, he said. “But this is the biggest thing I tried to do,” he added. The impact of his childhood is something he is still processing in weekly therapy, he said.
When Alexander’s schoolmates went to college, he moved to East London and became an actor who worked as a nanny and served as a table. A pale, skinny teenager with a nest of tight curls, he landed roles as Ben Whishaw Keats’ tuberculosis-younger brother in the movie “Bright Star”, and a distressed drug user in the trippy art film by Gaspar Noé “Enter the Void. “
Alexander lived in London a few years ago when he met his bandmates from Years & Years, Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Türkmen. Although they started by making electronic music inspired by Radiohead, Alexander took the band to synth-pop, with great and melodramatic choruses full of longing.
In 2015, the exciting but distressed song by the band “King” – about the strange emotion of being mistreated in a relationship – reached number one on the British singles chart, and their debut album, “Communion”, also topped the charts. album charts.
“His songs are his life,” said producer Mark Ralph, who has worked with Years & Years since the band’s early days. “If you want to know what’s going on in Olly’s life, just read all of his lyrics.”
“Love hurts me,” sings Alexander in “Sanctify”, a song about a secret connection with a straight man. “And I won’t, I won’t, and I won’t be ashamed.”
When the band sang the song at the Glastonbury Festival in 2016, just after filming at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a rainbow-dressed Alexander said to the crowd: “I’m here, I’m a queer and, yes, sometimes fear. “But, he added,” I’m never ashamed, because I’m proud of who I am. “
The speech piqued the interest of TV producers and, in 2017, he led a BBC documentary called “Olly Alexander: Growing Up Gay”. In it, he returns to his family’s home and flips through the diaries of teenagers full of references to bulimia and self-mutilation. In front of the cameras, he tells his mother about bullying at school for the first time: Amid tears, they discuss how it led to mental health problems in their teens.
“It’s a lot to ask someone to open their souls on national television,” said Vicki Cooper, the film’s director for TV. “But these difficult conversations created the best moments in the film.”
This documentary, and Alexander’s frankness about his own mental health, means that he gets a lot of social media messages from fans who are fighting against themselves. He used to try to answer them, he said, but the amount has become impossible to track.
Through these messages, however, Alexander “saw a really emotionally vulnerable side in many people,” he said. “This is a precious thing, actually.”
Alexander was also humbled by the positive response to “It’s A Sin” in Britain, he said. The program broke records for the streaming service All4, where it aired, with 6.5 million streams.
“It’s A Sin” first appeared on All4 during National HIV Testing Week; on social media, the program’s cast encouraged viewers to audition. The Terrence Higgins Trust, a nonprofit HIV organization, said the number of people taking tests through their service almost quadrupled in the weeks to come.
“People living with HIV can now live a normal and healthy life: it is very important to get that message across,” said Alexander, adding that treatments for the virus had changed since the 1980s. “I am very grateful for these conversations. be happening, because, honestly, a lot of people really didn’t know what was happening at this time in history. They are shocked to learn this now. “
This era is also influencing Alexander’s music. He is currently recording new material with Years & Years, inspired by the 80’s dance hymns from the “It’s A Sin” soundtrack and beyond: Donna Summer, New Order, Pet Shop Boys.
“During the pandemic, I wanted to hear super-optimistic club music that made me dance,” he said. “I found that I wanted to create the fantasy and energy that I wasn’t necessarily experiencing.”
In addition to working on new music, Alexander said he spent the confinements in England watching episodes of “Real Housewives” and playing Animal Crossing. “I used to be so, so determined,” he said, but now he was putting less pressure on himself.
He was happy, he added, for thinking about what he had already achieved and how much has changed since he was a little boy who wished he were not gay.
“I have had a diary since I was 13,” he said. “Sometimes I look at him and think I can say to this boy, ‘You are going to do amazing things. You will get where you are now. Everything is fine. You can. ‘”
Hugo Yangüela contributed with an additional camera operation for photographs.