Asa Butterfield on leaving ‘Sex Education’ behind: “It would be good to push myself”

Having starred in four seasons of global sensation Sex Education, Asa Butterfield has done more than most 26-year-olds on camera. He’s lost his fictional virginity, starred in his own personal masturbation montage, and had both his real and his on-screen mother see him fake a climax. But until seasonal comedy caper Your Christmas Or Mine 2 he had never done anything risky with a goat.

That all changed with Claus. Claus was the black mountain goat whom Butterfield’s character James has to attempt to wrestle back through an unlocked gate after his phone plops down a toilet. Although the animal was sometimes clearly a toy held by a crew member behind the camera (“Ssh,” says Butterfield), the moments where the actor was grabbing the goat by the horns were very real indeed. “Claus was funny,” says Butterfield, sitting in a Hackney café. “He was a little bit of a diva? He had his moments and when he didn’t want to work he made it known.”

The cast and crew were working on the side of a snowy mountain in Innsbruck, Austria. They would have preferred a trio of identical goats so that the Clauses could be interchangeable in the event of any goat tantrums. “We were a little low on goat options in Austria,” says Butterfield. One Claus had to do – and he didn’t even have any film experience. “He’s not a stage actor. He’s not trained. He didn’t go to drama school.”

Then again, neither did Butterfield. This afternoon, blue-eyed and wearing a hoodie and a silver earring, he is unshaven. A young man. But it was as a young boy that he found fame, acting as one of the leads in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas at the age of 11. Although he had been to a drama club in London, the city where he was born and still lives, he circumvented drama school by continuing to put big films on his CV when his friends were still learning how to format theirs. Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang at 12. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo at 14.

“After Sex Education, life became a lot more intense”

Was Butterfield – no relation to comedy character Brian, in case you were wondering – conscious of wanting to become an actor when he was just a child? “For the first few years I was acting I didn’t think I was gonna carry on doing it,” he says. “I didn’t really know what acting was.” He loved being on camera and managed to juggle it with schoolwork, always getting good marks thanks in part to on-set tutors. But he didn’t want it to become his life. Even after the success of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas he told his mum he might not carry on. He wanted to dig up dinosaurs.

It wasn’t really until Hugo in 2011 that Butterfield fell in love with acting and filmmaking. He continued to land big films – Ender’s Game, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, Journey’s End – but nothing has compared with the monster that is Sex Education, which landed on Netflix in 2019. As Otis Milburn, he helped a show about a student and his sex therapist mother become a global phenomenon, broaching or advancing topics like consent, slut-shaming, bisexuality and pansexuality. It opened up the world like a treasure chest for Butterfield and made him leading man material.

“It really became a lot more intense,” says Butterfield of this newfound recognition. He still takes the bus and the train – if he couldn’t he would reconsider what he was doing – but he can’t walk around as he used to. The fourth season of Sex Education was, famously, advertised with the aid of enormous billboards featuring the characters’ orgasm faces. This loss of privacy can be uncomfortable for actors and for Butterfield can occasionally bring his mood down. Sometimes people might want to talk to him when he’s not in the right frame of mind. “It’s hard to communicate that without coming across as privileged.”

But the trade-off, the Faustian pact with the devil of fame, is “absolutely worth it”, he insists. He is aware of how extraordinarily lucky he is. And it sounds as though 15 years on movie sets has made him a gift to work with. “‘Ordinary’ isn’t the right word for it because there’s nothing ordinary about his talent when you see him on screen,” says Tom Parry, who wrote both Your Christmas Or Mine films. “But he just puts himself alongside everybody else. He is the most casual and disarmingly low-status star you’ll ever meet.”

What does Butterfield think makes him a good screen actor? “I think it’s confidence,” he says thoughtfully, not so modest that he dismisses the question. “I feel very confident on set and I feel like I’ve got good instincts as to what’s working and what isn’t, and I trust my instincts. I think I’ve got a good ear for comedy.” Parry agrees. “In the rehearsals and on set, anything that doesn’t sound real or plausible or is slightly awkward, Asa is very good at picking that out. Good acting is like a duck paddling, isn’t it – you don’t see it. Asa is exactly that: effortless.”

In the first Your Christmas Or Mine the neat conceit was that boyfriend and girlfriend James and Hayley (Cora Kirk) each decides to surprise the other by turning up at their family home for Christmas. In Your Christmas or Mine 2, the two families – James’ upper-class father and his new American girlfriend with Cora’s Macclesfield relatives – spend all of Christmas together this time, now on the neutral territory of an Austrian ski break. James’ chivalry causes a mix-up with the accommodation and there follows a series of comic misunderstandings and crossed wires. Parry and Butterfield had a sickeningly good time staying in a high-end ski lodge for three weeks. “You’d spend your off days in the sauna,” says Butterfield, “and it would be a sauna where you could look out across this valley in the mountains.” Default nude? “Default is nude. When we got there the hotel we were staying in became a non-nude spa. Probably some HR thing. However, if you went to any of the Austrian spas down in the village, oh yeah – it’s a free-for-all.” Have his bodily inhibitions been obliterated thanks to Sex Education? “Not completely,” he says. “I still do get embarrassed, believe it or not.”

As for his own Christmases, they tend to be big, raucous, family affairs, not dissimilar to the two films. You can also imagine that Butterfield plays a comparable role: both on-screen and off he is considered, fairly serious, not keen to put on a show. He has siblings and half-siblings and this Christmas will be spending the time in Yorkshire, where his mum’s family are from (his parents separated when he was young). “We don’t get to see too much of each other so it’s really nice to have a few days just totally embracing it.”

As for Christmas presents, he’s not sure. He doesn’t know what to ask for. He just got himself plates and a new pot and pan set. He’s just moved house (from Hackney to… Hackney), so we offer to buy him a sofa for his new place. “That would be a bold present,” he says. “We’ll chat later on.” If he’s honest, he says, his favourite part of Christmas is working out what to get everyone else.

“When you do a part for that long it comes so naturally that you almost don’t have to work as hard”

Butterfield is at an interesting point in his career. He feels as though he is at the start of a new chapter. “I don’t know where the next few years will take me now that Sex Ed has gone,” he says, sounding as though he genuinely hasn’t given it much thought. He tactfully avoids a vague probe about superhero films. “I’ve been doing a lot of comedy the last few years and I wanna do something more dramatic again.” He is also at the stage, he admits, where he is keen and able to be more selective about the work he does. He could take a break from the industry or go into producing, writing or directing. He is acting as producer on a TV comedy with a friend but asks that the premise remain private.

Sex Education has been wonderful, he says, but, after four seasons, he needs to go in a different direction. “I feel very comfortable in front of a camera and on set,” he says. “Almost too comfortable. I don’t feel like I need to be kept on my toes so much any more. I love the show, I love the part, but when you do that part for that long it comes so naturally that you almost don’t have to work as hard because everything is there on the tip of your tongue. Saying you don’t have to work as hard isn’t the right way of putting it but you don’t have to fight through that to discover what might be on the other side.”

One of the things he is contemplating is a turn on the stage. It didn’t appeal to him for a long time because he was terrified. He clearly still is. He struggles with the concept of trying to inject variety into the same lines night after night. “But I am now toying with the idea and I’ve spoken with a couple of writers and gone up for a couple of theatre things in the past six months.”

After so long baring so much of himself on-screen for Sex Education, you might imagine that Butterfield would like to hide away. But he is ready for a new challenge, in whatever form that may take. “It would be good for me to push myself outside of my comfort zone.”

‘Your Christmas Or Mine 2’ is streaming now of Prime Video

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