I hear Jack Thorne before I see him. We’re meeting in a quiet cafe in Hampstead, north London, to discuss his very first love story for TV, Falling. I catch snatches of him chatting with various waiters – “Thank you, good sir” and “Lovely, lovely” – before he appears in front of me, all smiles but a little nervous, too. Which is surprising given this is the writer who had a hand in hits such as Skins, Shameless and the This Is England trilogy, co-created a cluster of brilliant adaptations (His Dark Materials, Lord of the Flies, Enola Holmes) and is steadily building up a vast canon of work inspired by disturbing but fascinating real-life stories (National Treasure, Toxic Town, The Hack). Most notably, he also co-created the Netflix series Adolescence, winner of endless awards, and viewed by 140 million people and counting.
The ridiculous thing is that Thorne’s theatre career is as illustrious as his TV work. There’s the small matter of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on stage (an experience that Thorne found rewarding but, with all eyes on him, “not always a lot of fun”); plus his takes on A Christmas Carol and the chilling Let the Right One In. He drew on his family’s own experiences with IVF for the screenplay to the movie Joy, and is currently co-writing Sam Mendes’s highly publicised but super-secret four-film series about the Beatles (“I’m not allowed to talk about that”).
