Lost Boys & Fairies is not a true story. But like most drama and fiction, it draws heavily on the real-life experiences of the people who made it. Daf James, the Welsh playwright and screenwriter behind the story, also adopted three children with his husband when those children were aged between two and five. As in the show, he went to activity days to meet children who needed carers, got interrogated by social workers and had plenty of sleepless nights. So when we see his protagonist Gabriel getting hit in the head with a football by a seven-year-old in a Cardiff park, are we watching fiction here or reality?
“Everything I write is personally inspired,” Daf tells me, over Zoom from his attic bedroom, just minutes after we have both put our children to bed. “But I’ve learned how to adapt my lived experience into fiction. Andy is a fictitious character; the father is a fictitious character; the children are fictitious characters.” Andy, the saint-like husband of Gabriel, is played by Hawkeye star and Northern Irish actor Fra Fee, who tells me that his role in Lost Boys & Fairies was “genuinely the honour of my life”. It’s a statement that, like the show itself, hits a note of radical sentimentality. “I’ve never played a gay man on screen before,” Fee goes on, “which sounds a bit mad as a gay man myself. So to get the opportunity to do something that felt so positive was such a gift.”
