The six-part BBC series follows an agoraphobic film enthusiast named Evie, played by Wood, who transforms her mother’s garage into a weekly cinema for her and her best friend Noa, who Nabhaan Rizwan portrays.
When actors Aimee Lou Wood and Ralph Davis first met as students at RADA, they instantly clicked and promised to write together one day. A decade later, the pair have co-written and starred in their first romantic comedy drama series, Film Club.
The six-part BBC series follows an agoraphobic film enthusiast Evie, played by Wood, who transforms her mother’s garage into a weekly cinema for herself and her best friend Noa, portrayed by Nabhaan Rizwan.
The pair are forced to consider for the first time that they might not be just friends when Noa reveals that he has secured his ideal job on the other side of the country.
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The series explores relationships, family, friendship, love, and the escapism of cinema, and also stars Doctor Foster’s Suranne Jones, Liv Hill from The Serpent Queen, and Adam Long from Happy Valley. Wood, the author of the BAFTA-winning series, claims that she and her then-girlfriend, House of the Dragon’s Davis, started writing the series while lockdown was in progress.
“Ralph and I first met at RADA about ten years ago. We instantly connected and developed this strange, secret language on our first day. We agreed to collaborate on something one day. The 31-year-old Stockport-born actress explains, “Cut it to five years later and it’s lockdown.”
“During that time, it became so clear how much people needed film and TV. It was the only way to access the world beyond your own flat, to experience something bigger. Storytelling suddenly felt even more urgent. We’ve always had that need for stories. Everyone suddenly shared that obsession. People craved plot. We needed to be taken away, to escape.”
Wood, who recently received an Emmy nomination for her role in the third season of The White Lotus, reveals that she and Davis took inspiration from classic romantic comedies for their writing for the series. We lacked the vintage rom-comics. She elaborates that everything on TV felt too cool, too restrained, full of smouldering looks, sparse dialogue, and people were simply staring at each other in a seductive way.
Where was Meg Ryan, though? When Harry Met Sally, where were you? Holly Hunter, who appeared in broadcast news? We essentially desired nerds to fall in love. Instead of really cool, silent people, we wanted to see neurotic, messy people fall in love.
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As part of their writing for the series, Davis, age 31, claims that they watched up to 12 movies a week during lockdown. He admits, “We got pretty geeky during lockdown, and that was our escape.”
“We just watched a lot of movies,” he said. We were once living together, but as people started to leave, going for walks, and having “velocity fun,” we were too scared. So we just stayed inside and watched 12 movies a weekend. Really, that is where everything came from.
We were originally theatre people, so we kind of kept our theatre hours in mind when writing. A vague 10-to-6. As we sat next to each other on a laptop, we would just keep laughing as we went along.
After glimpsing an early draft of the screenplay, Jones, 47, who plays Evie’s mother, reveals she was eager to join the cast. I recently finished an early draft and immediately realized, “This is so beautiful, I want to be a part of it.” I said, ‘ I’m in. Tell me when it’s taking place.
After I had first seen that draft, about a year and a half later, things actually started moving. What a gift, to be honest. It is so exquisitely written and stunning.
Suz, a passionately devoted and fashionable single mother played by Jones, claims that her portrayal of her engages in some serious pretense. She wants her girls to do well, and Sebastian wants everything to be nice.
“But with that narrative comes the pressure to present oneself well, to live a nice life, to have fun, and to appear composed.” She does all the covering up and hiding behind.
Wood mentioned her fellow cast members in her opening statement, saying that the entire experience felt unremarkable. Everyone in the building knew they were right for those areas as soon as they entered. Boom, she exaggerated. It was immediate.
Some of us were already acquainted with one another, but the filming process felt like a lifetime. That is not something that frequently occurs. You had to believe they had been doing this for eight years because there was a real sense of unity that this group of characters needed.
Film Club will be broadcast on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer on Tuesday, October 7.
