Heartstopper meets Bridget Jones in Harry Trevaldwyn’s ‘bold’ young adult novel and TV show
Harry Trevaldwyn on The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King, his new queer YA novel set for the small screen. (Getty)
At school in the early aughts, Harry Trevaldwyn would pen short stories with the aim to disturb. “I wanted my teachers to take me super seriously, so I’d write really dark stories to be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can get gritty’,” the actor and writer recalls with mock bravado.
“Which probably just made the teachers quite concerned about me.”
As he got older, the urge to write never subsided, though the content became less macabre and more sketch show genius. During the pandemic, you may have stumbled on Trevaldwyn through his online skits satirising society’s despicables, from Surrey yummy mummies that would make Motherland’s Amanda feel inferior, to the ethically ambiguous CEOs plaguing our LinkedIn feeds.
The videos led to the sorts of longer form writing opportunities which, says Trevaldwyn, “I’d always dreamed of doing”, including TV scripts and now, his first young adult fiction novel. A smattering of small acting roles in big TV and film projects were born from his droll social media presence too, including in last year’s Star Wars spin-off The Acolyte and Covid-19 comedy The Bubble, alongside Pedro Pascal and Karen Gillan. “So it’s been very nice,” he says. “It really worked out.”
If Trevaldwyn’s skit characters are ballooned versions of people we all know and love to hate, then his latest creation, Patch, taken from that new YA romcom The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King, is a version of himself he would’ve loved to have been.
Patch is a queer teenager on a pre-Prom mission to find a boyfriend. Said boyfriend must be Hollywood handsome. Ideally bilingual. Hopefully with a famous relative or two. Patch is a little over-confident – “Oh, he’s so full of himself. I’ll say it if you won’t,” Trevaldwyn smiles impishly – and absurdly dogged, or “deranged” as his creator puts it, in his attempts at finding young love.
He’s armed with the antiquated advice of his mum’s noughties romance magazines, and the guidance of his equally wide-eyed, yet somewhat more grounded, best friend Jean.
“I never wanted to show Patch struggling with who he was because of his queer identity, but I do think that so much of his identity is informed by that. He’s living so boldly and brashly because he can. His heart is so in the right place, and it’s so clearly him searching for the romance that he’s seen before, but in such terrible ways,” the author explains of the book. “So it is kind of like a Bridget Jones meets Heartstopper meets Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging.”
If that makes him sound like the over-confident one, you need only to look to the reviews, which have dubbed it “one of the funniest, warmest YAs to be published this decade”.
Trevaldwyn is clear that “Patch isn’t me, he’s much braver, much more competent, much more self-involved, hopefully, than me,” but he does represent what the author wishes he could’ve experienced. Now aged 31, he came of age in the noughties, where teen romances began in school’s four walls, then thrived through MSN patter and messages tapped between classmates on Blackberry BBM. For young LGBTQ+ folk back then though, first love wasn’t burgeoning in school corridors.
“In a lot of different places, it was still incredibly difficult to be queer. But [in] my experience, it was just almost like an unspoken thing, where it wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t celebrated,” he remembers. Trevaldwyn’s teens came just a few years after the abolishment of Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 law, which forbade teachers from talking about homosexuality in classrooms. Its brutal legacy remained rooted in the school experience at the time; the concept of publicly queer teachers, LGBTQ+ support groups or Pride celebrations felt comically far-fetched. In pop culture, overt queer representation just about stretched to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”.
If the author was profoundly affected by keeping his sexuality a secret during his school years in Oxford, his hometown, he doesn’t show it. Speaking via Zoom from a flat he’s days from moving out of, he’s warm and open, and effortlessly and unsurprisingly witty (“I didn’t come out until I was later. Until I was later? Is that a sentence? I used up all my sentences in the book,” comes one quip). It was his time at the University of Bristol, where he studied English Literature, where he finally “found out about, like, queer celebration” and settled into his sexuality. Yet not being publicly out until university did, he thinks, leave him feeling around in the dark romantically.
“I find it so scary that so many of your first interactions as a queer person experiencing the queer world could go any which way because there was no formatting around it. You had to figure out by yourself, and sometimes you could figure out by yourself in a wonderful way, and sometimes it could be in a really dangerous way or a really unsafe way,” he reflects – and while there are undoubtedly boundless queer kids still finding themselves at risk on the internet’s darkest corners today, there are many more living out and proud in the school hallways compared to 15 years ago.
He thinks of Netflix’s Heartstopper and how joyous it is that TV and film like it exists now for young queer teens, but how sad too that entire generations missed out, particularly his, who avoided the queer representation boom by just a few years. “I love hearing my friend’s stories about when they were first figuring out love and how embarrassing it was and how dramatic it was, and I feel it also forged so much of how they go about the world romantically,” he says. “I really felt like I missed out on so much of that [because] I wasn’t out and I wasn’t brave enough to kind of pursue those things.”
Writing The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King then, in which Patch’s biggest dilemma is finding a boyfriend rather than someone discovering he wants one, was “very full circle; almost therapeutic in a way of being like, ‘Oh, it would’ve been so embarrassing, and this is how it would’ve played out if I had been [out],” Trevaldwyn says. “It was so lovely almost living out those experiences through him.”
Trevaldwyn mentions Heartstopper with fond hankering but, talking of full circle, it turns out that The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King could soon be a Heartstopper in the making. See-Saw Films, the production company behind Netflix’s adaptation of Alice Oseman’s adored graphic novel series, is currently optioning Trevaldwyn’s book. “My timing is bad,” he smiles. When we chat on an afternoon in mid January, he has approximately two weeks to get the screenplay draft submitted, which coincides nicely with releasing the book, writing a second book (more on that shortly) and moving house. “Love that for me.”
The TV version will be sent to different distributor bosses in the near future, so there’s little he can say about it for now. “We’re keeping it all under wraps at the moment,” he says politely, “so hopefully more on that soon!”
What he can say is that putting Patch’s ploy for love on screen made perfect sense, given his skit and acting work. “When I was writing the book, I imagined it very visually, so it was actually a real dream. It was such an enjoyable process, turning it into script because I knew so much of what it looked like and which bits work for screen and which bits work for book and that kind of thing.”
Working with See-Saw “has been amazing” and the “best step forward” he adds. Again, he draws comparisons to Bridget Jones and Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project, too, as vision board inspiration. Imagine Bridget’s “spinster” energy colliding with the “bold, brash, funny” of Mindy: that’s Patch. “In writing it, I watched so many of my favourite rom-coms and TV shows to try and get that tone across.”
Patch’s world looks set to continue growing, as the second book he mentions is a related story. “I don’t know if I’m meant to say that,” he laughs. “My thinking is that it got announced that it was a two book deal. I’m doing a second book. You know what? Maybe it’s a war biopic. This is a war biopic that will be harrowing. Harrowing and long.”
It’s a wonder he’s had the time. His online skits are still continuing in a slow drip feed, and there’s top secret project yet to be announced. Plus there’s the growth of his acting résumé, which will soon contain arguably his biggest project to date: the live action adaptation of How To Train Your Dragon, which has a curiously large LGBTQ+ following. He’s starring as Tuffnut, Hairy Hooligan member and one half of the Thornston twins, with Wicked’s Bronwyn James, also queer, playing his sister Ruffnut.
“The queer twins! We love, we love, we love it,” he beams. Again, there’s little he can say about the film, bar gushing about his “superstar” co-star and its creators. “I honestly couldn’t have picked a better twin if I had a twin myself,” he says, and “even just being on the set, it already looked so fantastic, and so brilliant, and such a fully-realised world”.
He promises the blockbuster, due for release on 13 June, will maintain the magic of the animated original (Dean DeBlois, who helmed the original trilogy, is back directing the live action remake). “I think that the reason that it took off in the way that it did is that it was a film that had so much warmth and heart,” he says. “I would say that our version of it keeps that going and it elevates it and brings it into the real world. I’m so excited for people to see.”
Until then, Patch is dominating Trevaldwyn’s brain space, filling in for the queer experiences he missed, and perhaps offering a small dose of healing every day. He thinks about his sexuality at 31 in the way Patch does as a teenager: with pride. “I do think it takes some time and probably a lifetime of therapy to do that, [to] change that in your mind… But now it’s something I’m so proud of,” he says. “So thank God!”
The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King is available to buy now.
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