‘Skins’: The dark side of a British TV phenomenon
When Skins first landed on TV back in 2007, it was an instant sensation. A gritty British antidote to the era of glossy American series like Gilmore Girls or The Hills, from episode one, the teenage drama was utterly dedicated to controversy. A feast of sex, drugs and adolescent chaos, Skins dives deep into the dark side of the youth experience as it explores addiction and mental illness with an unfaltering edge.
Telling the tale of a group of college friends, the seasons birthed some of today’s biggest stars, as Jack O’Connell, Nicholas Hoult, and Dev Patel got their start on the show. But at the time, the cast was built of relative unknowns. In an attempt to perfectly capture those messy 16 to 18-year-old years, they cast real teenagers and plucked them from schools to put on screen. While their characters were spiralling around the hedonistic carnage of the end of their teenagehood, the actors were doing exactly the same but with new fame and a distinct lack of guardians in sight.
Behind the scenes of Skins, the cast’s lives didn’t feel too far removed from their characters. But unlike a TV show, in reality, they’ve had to move forward and process the experience, with many cast members speaking out about the dark downside to the series.
When the first series started production, built from a cast of teenage actors chosen when casting directors simply dropped into local schools around Bristol alongside some auditioned names, they moved into a hotel. While some of the local cast headed home after filming, the rest were essentially left unaccompanied and as described by April Pearson, who played Michelle in the first two seasons, “stayed in a hotel and smashed the place up.”
Turning a hotel into something that represented student halls as the freshly 18-year-old cast ran wild, tales of their behind-the-scenes parties were brought up over and over in interviews as the cast brought the on-stage drug and booze-fuelled chaos off-screen, too. “We thought we were anarchic crazy teenagers,” Pearson continued, “We knew how to have fun.”
But while all that sounds like every teenager’s dream, the issues arrived when these kids found themselves back in front of the cameras, revealing that a duty of care was lacking in every arena. Not only were they left unsupervised behind the scenes, but even when it came to the show’s more sensitive scenes, the cast has since spoken about a distinct lack of guidance that left them feeling vulnerable.
Pearson was the first to speak out about it. On her podcast, Are You Michelle From Skins?, she’s discussed at length about her experience on the show. “I was having this conversation with Jamie, my husband, and I was saying I do feel like I was too young. I feel like I wasn’t protected,” she said in one episode.
“A conversation I’m having a lot with [Skins] alumni is, at the time you’re young, you don’t know any better, you don’t really know what to say and speak out,” she continued. “As with a lot of victims of trauma, you look back at it and go, ‘Yeah that was fucked up.’”
While at the time, the cast seemed to be enjoying their first experiences on set, the show’s content pushed them in at the deep end seemingly without adequate tools or coaching. The 2000s came long before mental health or well-being on set was taken quite as seriously as it is today, meaning that even when acting out intense or graphic scenes like depictions of violence or suicide, the cast rarely got support afterwards.
It was also a time before the era of the intimacy coach, a now standard role on sets where sex scenes or even on-screen kisses will be acted out. More than most shows, Skins is packed with explicit moments that only added to its success as a shocking new drama at the time. But when considering that these actors were not only new to the industry but were young and inexperienced, it’s no wonder they were left feeling uneasy.
“I turned 18 right at the beginning of filming, so I just had so many more sex scenes than everyone else. My first day was a sex scene,” Laya Lewis, who played Liv in the third generation of the show, said on Pearson’s podcast.
Similarly, Jack O’Connell spoke out about the experience of filming revealing scenes at such a young age. “My career definitely predates the intimacy coordinator age,” he told The Independent. “It’s hard to say that you’re ever totally comfortable [filming sex scenes],” the actor continued. “Listen, I admit I was very naive at the time, enough so as to not check in with myself and question myself if I was feeling comfortable or not. It just felt like part and parcel of the programme in a very different time than the one we’re in now.”
But O’Connell really shouldn’t have had to check in with himself. There should have been more support around to ensure that these fresh teenage faces felt more than happy with the scenes they were involved in and felt unwaveringly supported on more sensitive sets. To the actor now, that is an essential requirement of work, adding, “You feel very compromised and if you don’t feel that you’re protected in that environment, it can be very unnecessarily daunting,” he said.
While plucking unknown faces from the streets and introducing them to the world undoubtedly helped Skins deliver on the raw energy it succeeded for, there seemed to be a lack of care to help the cast handle that. “I do think if you want to pluck children out of the street, which is essentially what they were doing in order to have this authentic on-screen thing going on, I think there needs to be just a bit more… [support],” Lewis summarised.
Since cast members have spoken out, the writers of the show issued a statement reading, “We’re deeply and unambiguously sorry that any cast member was made to feel uncomfortable or inadequately respected in their work during their time on Skins.” Whether the atmosphere on the set was simply a sign of the times before the industry woke up to deeper care requirements or whether it was merely a dark underbelly to an already gritty show, it casts a shadow across one of the most infamous and iconic pieces of TV history.
