In 2017, Dylan Llewellyn was thinking about throwing in the towel. “Things were quite quiet for me, and I was struggling a bit with acting - I wasn’t landing anything, wasn’t getting many auditions,” he says. “Things were quite low and I was thinking about giving up. And then Derry Girls came round the corner.”
The early signs were promising: the scripts for Derry native Lisa McGee’s sitcom, about a group of teenagers growing up amid the tail end of the Troubles in the Nineties, “genuinely made me laugh, and I’m a bit of a tough crowd”; when he auditioned as James, the perma-bemused “wee English fella” who is grudgingly adopted by Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) and Orla (Louisa Harland), he “could see the producers laughing on the couch to the left as I was doing my scenes… I was working in a café making sandwiches and stuff back then, and I got the call from my agent [to say I’d got the part] while I was washing dishes.”
