‘Sex Education’ Creator Breaks Down Otis’ Privilege, Maeve and Jean’s Similarities and How Eric Finds His Faith During the Final Season
SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from the fourth and final season of “Sex Education.”
When “Sex Education” premiered in 2019, it followed a timid teenager (Otis, played by Asa Butterfield) with progressive ideals, trying to lead the student body of his repressive high school to sexual liberation. By 2023, when Netflix released the fourth and final season, all of that had changed.
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Moordale Secondary School shuts down at the end of Season 3, so Season 4 takes place in a whole new world. Most of our characters end up at Cavendish College, which is Moordale’s complete opposite. It’s a “student-led” campus where the kids make all the decisions. The queer kids are the cool ones, and anyone trying to attain it-girl status with meanness and exclusivity ends up at the bottom of the social pyramid.
It’s paradise for Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), who instantly fits in with the popular crowd. He’s surrounded by other queer people for the first time, and has new support as he decides how and whether to come out to his church. His new status causes friction with BFF Otis — the two used to be outsiders together, and Otis doesn’t understand why Eric needs other friends.
When Otis tries to offer his sex therapy services to students, as he had at Moordale, he realizes that Cavendish already has a sex therapist, O (Thaddea Graham) — who becomes his mortal enemy as they face off in an election to be the one true therapist. His girlfriend, Maeve (Emma Mackey), is off in America pursuing her writing dreams. His mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), is less-than-present, as she goes back to work while in the throes of postpartum depression after she’s had Joy, her new baby. So Otis’ angst is at an all-time high.
There are moments in its final season that feel like the old “Sex Education” — namely, when Maeve returns to Moordale just before her mother’s death. The fleeting reunion of the show’s main characters is sweet, but it’s a reminder that nothing can last forever. After a dark period, Maeve realizes she can’t let her grief and her love for Otis keep her in Britain. Otis starts to see how Eric’s need for community with other queer kids and people of color doesn’t make their friendship less special. And Jean finally accepts help.
Series creator Laurie Nunn spoke with Variety about everything her characters’ sex education taught them in the end.
This final season was a pretty big swing, since we’re in a completely different environment than we were in for the first three seasons. Could you walk me through your ideas of what you wanted to accomplish by closing the school last season, and building a completely new world with new characters for the final outing?
In Series 3, we’d obviously had the school having changes in leadership. To create a really strong story motor for the next series, we needed to move them into a new environment. We were having a lot of conversations in the writers’ room about looking more inward. We all consider ourselves to be pretty progressive people, but everybody has blind spots and things that they can keep working on. We don’t always get everything right, and that’s what we wanted to explore. It’s a lot of fun to take our old characters and put them into a new environment, and watch them struggle a little bit. It creates good comedy and drama.
This season is really thoughtful about how holding different identities can affect your experience of being a teenager in school. Because of that, I’m curious about the new characters. Did you write parts for a trans girl, a trans boy, a hard of hearing girl, and so on? Or did you cast these roles, and write around your actors?
We knew we wanted a new popular group at the new school, and we wanted it to be an inversion of the mean-girls trope. A group of kids who get their status out of being the kindest of all the kids. We really just came up with those characters from scratch, and then cast actors to play them. They were written with a lot of specificity, and that came from different experiences from within our writers’ room — characters we felt we don’t get to see on screen.
O is different from the other new characters in that she’s not always leading with kindness, but still has a lot to teach the orginal “Sex Education” characters, especially Otis. What drove you to create the storyline during which she and Otis compete to be Cavendish’s one and only sex therapist?
One of the things I was really interested in exploring in Series 4 was Otis and his privilege as a white, straight man. It’s always there under the surface in how Otis conducts himself, but it’s not something we’ve ever fully confronted before. That was where the idea came in of bringing in a sex therapist who is a woman of color and asexual and, in many ways, better at therapy than Otis. And watching how that rattles him and makes him feel insecure, like he has to hold onto power rather than trying to share it.
He also ends up taking a lot of that angst out on Jean, and goes behind her back to invite her sister (Joanna, played by Lisa McGrillis) to stay with stay with them, which gives us a window into Jean’s postpartum depression.
That’s the other thing with Otis. He’s very isolated when we see him at the start of the series. Maeve is overseas, his relationship with Eric is more distant because Eric’s making new friends, and his mom is in a really bad place because she’s just had a baby and she’s not coping very well. He’s feeling really sad, and that brings up the worst parts of his personality. And with Jean, there’s always been so much backstory that we haven’t really been able to explore in the show, because her storylines have revolved around Otis or Jakob [Mikael Persbrandt], her ex partner.
I wanted to dig a little deeper into Jean, and why she is the woman that she is. And it felt like the best way to do that was introducing a family member, so we could get an understanding of Jean’s upbringing — and also how that mirrors Maeve’s upbringing. Even though they’ve had very different experiences, there are some similarities between them, and I’ve always found it quite interesting that even though those characters have never met on screen before, Otis has ended up falling in love with a girl who is quite similar to his mom.
How did that connection between Jean and Maeve affect the way you wrote Maeve’s arc in America, where her writing courses don’t go as well as she thought they might?
I wanted to explore the idea of failure. When I was in school, there was this pressure towards the end: If you don’t know what you want to do with your life, or if you fail your exams, or you don’t get into a good university, your life is gonna be over. I wanted to find a way to say to people that there are second chances, and I knew Maeve was the character I wanted to explore that theme with.
Then as the writing progressed, I started to realize that was happening across the board with all of our characters. Otis is failing at sex therapy. Jean feels like she’s failing at being a mom, but she’s also failing on the radio, her new job. And Maeve has had this rejection that has completely knocked her confidence. We’re watching her try to build up the resilience to go back and face her demons throughout the series.
Maeve almost makes the wrong decision and stays with Otis in Moordale, but eventually goes back to the U.S. to follow her dreams after a nudge from Jean. Was there ever a moment you considered keeping them together?
I’ve always known they wouldn’t stay together. I find that almost more romantic: the idea that they have had this huge effect on each other’s lives, they’ve really changed each other for the better, but this isn’t the right moment. I’ve always thought maybe they would meet each other again in a 10-year reunion or something, and that might be the right moment for them to explore a proper adult relationship. But at this moment, she really has to focus on her own goals. I like that we leave her in a place where she’s going to thrive and they’re left in this heartbreak, but it’s a happy-sad heartbreak.
Eric has some happy-sad heartbreak this season too, being rejected by his church for his sexuality but finding a way to hold onto his faith anyway. Can you walk me through that storyline, and the introduction of Jodie Turner-Smith as God?
That came out of conversations in the writers’ room from writers who identify as queer, but have felt like they’ve had to walk away from their religious community. The feeling that came out of those conversations was real sadness and grief, because they’ve had to kind of cut out a huge part of themselves and sometimes turn their back on their family, their heritage. I think often we see storylines about queer people giving the church the middle finger, and I wanted to try to tell a story about someone who is grappling with the fact that they don’t want to do that.
Eric wants to integrate his faith and his sexuality. I wanted to leave him in a place where he’s able to say, “Yes, I am gay, but I’m also Christian.” Both of those things can exist even though it might be quite a painful journey. And being able to cast Jodie Turner-Smith as God was a real kind of pinch-me moment. Ncuti and Jodie are really mesmerizing in those scenes, and I think they both play it in a truthful way that grounds it, even though it is magic realism.
Did you hesitate with the magical realism at all, since it’s so new for the show?
We’ve had dream sequences, particularly with Otis and how we explore his mental health and anxiety, and we’ve had heightened, almost-magic moments. But this is definitely the most surreal thing that we’ve sort of put in the show. It just felt like the right way to tell the story. It’s something you hear from religious leaders; they talk about “getting the call” from a higher being. I really love the idea of this 17-year-old boy “getting the call.” We had to show it in that very real way.
That call from God leads Eric to find Cal (Dua Saleh), who has gone missing in the series finale as they struggle with loneliness and lack of access to gender-affirming healthcare. Jackson finds Cal at the same time, remembering their hangout spot from when they were better friends last season. One of the last big scenes of the show is this trio — the three most prominent Black characters, who haven’t connected as a group before — talking everything out. What led you to that moment?
It came to me once I realized that Episode 8 was going to be about everybody coming together to look for Cal. And then, when I knew that Eric was gonna get the call, it felt like a natural way to bring those those two storylines together. Even though Eric and Cal don’t know each other really well and don’t have a lot of screen time together, they have so much in common in terms of trying to be 17 and having to hold this responsibility on their shoulders of navigating various identities. So Eric was the right character, in that moment, to help deliver a message to Cal. Dua is really heartbreaking in that scene, and I love that Jackson is there as well. I love that it’s our three characters of color coming together and being there for each other.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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