Alex Lawther x ‘Boys By Girls’.

March 14, 2019 | by Juliette Stuart

Alex Lawther - of ‘End Of The F***ing World’ and ‘Black Mirror’ fame - recently sat down with Boys By Girls to talk all things water, dreams, and his newest project, ‘Alex’s Dream’.

Lawther explains a little of the plot of Alex’s Dream: “A young man turns up to a party he is not invited to and gets asked to tell everyone there one of his dreams. There is a sense that you're not really sure where the dream ends or if it's all a dream. The ambiguity I always found strangely charming. The sense of not being quite sure where the dream takes place - where Alex is awake or where we actually are in time. I quite like that. I think it works well in a short film. A little nugget of strangeness. Suspended time.”

“I'm associating with dreaminess, romanticism and nostalgia - they seem like quite light efforts, quite light ways of being. I feel like there is actually something quite resilient in optimism, dreaminess, daydreaming, and hopefulness. We live in a world of commerce, and things have to be solid, sellable, concrete, and physical, and therefore there is somewhat a tendency when people speak about dreaminess or dreamers that it seems to be derogatory in the sense of them floating around somewhere around there in the ether - but I think there is a strength to dreaminess.“

Lawther finishes by talking about Brexit, “I'm filming in France at the beginning of this year and I'd like to see if I could work more in a foreign language. I like the idea of working in Europe. I also love the idea of, although we’re in a country where 51% of our population has chosen otherwise - I would like to sort of refuse what might suggest the isolation of England and Britain from the rest of Europe through my work in some way. If I can carry on working in France or in Europe generally, I like the idea of that. I've been lucky to work in a play called ‘The Jungle’, working with actors from Syria, Afghanistan and Iran, so yeah, it feels sometimes in the UK that the world isn't getting smaller and smaller. I suppose part of my dream with my work is that I can continue to push against this.”