Ellis Howard

Byron wants to be noticed, and Ellis Howard makes that wish understandable even when the teenager is difficult company. In What It Feels Like for a Girl (2025), Nottingham’s queer nightlife offers a way out of a Nottinghamshire town. Howard gives the wit and recklessness as much attention as the capacity for affection. He lets Byron behave badly without reducing him to a problem for the programme to explain. We recommend the series chiefly for this performance, with a reservation about writing that sometimes presses too hard to reassure.

Howard’s first screen credit was as Ivan VI in Catherine the Great (2019), with smaller parts in Help (2021) and Red Rose (2022) following. Byron, the lead in this adaptation of Paris Lees’s memoir, is the substantial step forward. The part gives Howard room to show how class restricts a young person’s choices without making the character’s every action illustrate that point. Money matters, but so do desire and the need for acceptance. Howard keeps all three at work, which makes Byron’s decisions absorbing even when they are uncomfortable to watch.

We were disturbed by the sex-work passages because Howard keeps Byron’s youth apparent beneath the effort to appear in control. The confidence does not make the character seem any older or safer. Yet Howard also preserves the humour, so that concern for Byron does not become the only reason to watch him. We can enjoy his company and still worry about where his impatience might take him.

Paris Lees, Georgia Christou and Paul Williams write best for Howard when they allow awkwardness and contradictory feelings to remain. Their more conventional stretches try too hard to make Byron’s experiences instructive, though he has already made those feelings clear. That extra guidance is the chief limitation of a drama otherwise willing to trust both its actor and its audience. For his next lead, we would rather see more difficult choices than a script determined to explain them.