What can you expect from season two of Netflix’s Sex Education?
The smash-hit Netflix series following a group of sex-mad kids in a high school in Wales has just announced its season two premiere date.
“Can you believe this weather?” my taxi driver asks, very much rhetorically, as he speeds down the backstreets of Newport, Wales, sun streaming through the windows of the car.
He’s right to marvel. It’s an unseasonably warm day at the end of August and I’m on my way to a sleepy Welsh town to observe the tail end of production on season two of Sex Education, slated for release on Netflix on 17 January.
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The first season premiered last year to rapturous critical and popular acclaim – it was clever, funny and fantastically saucy, with some star-is-born performances from unknown actors Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa in the lead roles.
The series, which followed Otis (Asa Butterfield) and his pals Maeve (Mackey) and Eric (Gatwa) as they opened a sex clinic in their high school – helped along by Otis’ silk kimono-wearing therapist mother, played by Gillian freakin’ Anderson – was sex positive, inclusive and, crucially, never talked down to its younger viewers. It was, instead, the kind of teen drama it felt like television didn’t make anymore, where teens behaved like teens and not like baby-adults Riverdale, or were needlessly explicit for the sake of shock value (ahem, Euphoria).
Sex Education also looked like nothing that had ever come out of the United Kingdom in the history of television production. For one thing, there was the fact that its school – the fictional Moorfield High – encouraged its students to dress in American-style letter jackets and whatever colourful, Call Me By Your Name-esque costuming they felt like wearing that day. There was the fact that the kids threw American footballs instead of kicking a soccer ball around a muddy field.
And there was the sun. The sun! How that first season of Sex Education bathed in it, was drenched in, big pools of light puddling in every scene.
Has an English television show ever looked so sun-drenched and healthy and happy? It was shot over a similar time period as the second season – in late summer 2018 – and Wales was going through the same particularly warm patch of good weather as they are sweating through on the day I visit. It’s 26 degrees and it’s a heatwave. And everyone on the set of Sex Education is having a fantastic time.
Today’s set is a church hall, cunningly made up to look like the interior of Moorfield High. While they wait for an assembly scene to be shot, crowds of teenage extras clad in day-glo shirting and acid-wash jeans are milling around in the sun, shoes kicked off, gossiping about their summer adventures.
Veteran actor Alistair Petrie, who plays Moorfield’s stern principal Mr Groff, father to the misunderstood Adam (Connor Swindells), enjoys his craft services lunch while talking to producer Jon Jennings.
Patricia Allison, whose overall-obsessed half-Swedish student Ola captures Otis’ heart at the end of season one, poses for selfies with fans gathering on the street.
Everything is calm and relaxed, so calm and relaxed that it hardly feels like a film set, which are rarely calm and relaxed at all.
Almost all of the crew came back to Wales to work on the second season, and there’s a collegial air to the way things are run down here.
Everybody knows each other. The mood is languid and lazy, like the last days of school before the summer holiday.
Which, in a way, is exactly what this is.
Season two of Sex Education will take place in the immediate aftermath of the first season. Otis and Ola have kissed, and Otis has finally, finally, been able to climax when he masturbates.
Adam and Eric have had sex, but before either of them can reckon with what that means, Adam is shipped off to the army by his father.
Bubbly Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) has ditched the popular girls to rekindle her friendship with Maeve, which is a good thing because Maeve is gonna need it.
She’s just dumped her lovely boyfriend Jackson (Kedar Sterling-Williams) to tell Otis that she loves him, only to find him in the arms of another girl.
I can tell you very little about season two, other than that it will feature a Glee-esque a cappella scene and that there are a few interesting new characters.
Producers on the set of Sex Education are protecting the plot of the second season as if their very life depended on it, and the cast are staying pretty tight-lipped, too.
Aside from revealing that Otis’ dad will feature heavily in the season, and that an entire episode will focus on Eric, Otis and his father camping together, that’s about all they’ll reveal. When I speak to Butterfield and Gatwa, sitting side-by-side, they just grin at each other and shout “no spoilers!”
“I mean, obviously, there’s plenty more of (our) relationship that you love, and I think we’re even closer now after last season,” Butterfield says. “We had a little bit of a rocky road – ”
“We had a bump,” Gatwa interjects. The 27-year-old Rwanda-born and Edinburgh-raised actor was one of the breakout stars of the first season.
His Eric, an unabashedly out gay man nevertheless struggling with his identity and his relationship with his father, oozed charisma and style from every pore. (Today, he’s clad in his costume ready to go to set, a wonderfully put together printed two piece.)
“But we’re stronger now,” adds Butterfield.
Season two will focus on Otis and Eric’s “sexual journey,” as Butterfield puts it.
“Otis dealing with having a girlfriend,” he says, “and Eric dealing with having, uh, a couple of men that have caught his eye.”
Gatwa’s lips are sealed as to who those men are, but nevertheless he beams radiantly.
The rest of the cast, including the gloriously bonkers Lily (Tanya Reynolds), determined to lose her virginity but battling painful vaginismus, are back too, each with a new sexual issue of their own to explore.
The point of the show, each castmember stresses, is to educate viewers on the issue of today. Season one tackle the aforementioned vaginismus as well as female masturbation, lesbian sex, ejaculation issues and abortion.
Season two will look at, among other things, the topics of the sex lives of older women through Anderson’s Jean, and assault, through the character of Aimee.
On a lighter note: “We got a very in-depth tutorial about douching,” Butterfield says, while Gatwa guffaws beside him. “That was quite new to me.”
Though Netflix famously doesn’t release viewership figures, season one of Sex Education was a phenomenal success. Anecdotally, Gatwa remembers the moment that his life changed when he, Butterfield and Mackey landed back in London after travelling to New York to promote the first series just before it dropped on the streaming platform.
“I got on the plane with my 500 Instagram followers, and I hopped off the plane with hundreds of thousands of followers, and I was like – what the f**k,” Gatwa says. “What has happened here? That was mad.”
He turns to Butterfield. “That was quite scary. You were used to it I guess.” (Butterfield is a former child star who has appeared alongside Harrison Ford in Ender’s Game and in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children.)
With fans comes fan culture. Butterfield, who was already famous before Sex Education, might not have noticed the difference, but for Gatwa and Mackey – their lives have changed irrevocably because of the show. For the better. (Even Wood admits that she can’t pop round to the supermarket in pyjamas anymore, because “‘it’s like Doris in the corner shop is like ‘I love Sex Education,’ and I’m like, ‘What are you doing watching Sex Education?’ Also, sorry for the first 10 seconds, Doris, you’ve known me since I was five.”)
“There’s been a really great response from specifically the LGBTQ community of colour in London,” Gatwa says. “I was at Black Pride, and the amount of people coming up to me to talk about Eric, and the relationship Eric has with his father, was quite a lot. And it was beautiful to hear.”
Butterfields adds: “I’m not having fan mail asking about [sex issues] or sending pictures ‘is this normal?’” he jokes. “I’m not getting any of that, thank God. But I think the show has definitely opened up a dialogue between people, which is one of the great things about it. It’s opened up a door for that conversation around sex.”
Sex Education season two streams on Netflix from 17 January.
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