Adolescence writer Jack Thorne reveals why BBC's new Lord of the Flies sticks to an all-male cast – and explains his "sensitive" adaptation of classic

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

During the summer of 2024, Jack Thorne was commuting between the sets of two drama series he had written – one on a tropical island off Malaysia and one in Yorkshire. At the risk of upsetting one tourist board, which location did he prefer? “Glamour on both sides,” laughs Thorne. “I love both my children equally.”

The locations seem distinct, but the subject matter overlapped: the potential psychopathy of prepubescent boys. The English project was Adolescence, the Netflix drama that won eight Emmy awards, while the series that was filmed in South East Asia was Lord of the Flies, a new four-part BBC adaptation of the 1954 novel – instrumental in winning William Golding the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Toxic masculinity” – a term widely applied to the 13-year-old murderer Jamie Miller played by Owen Cooper in Adolescence – might also be applied retrospectively to intellectual Piggy, arrogant Ralph, charismatic Jack, shy Simon and ominous Roger who, in Lord of the Flies, contest control of a group of schoolboys marooned on an island after the crash of a plane evacuating them from a threatened nuclear attack on Britain.

“It’s a funny old term, toxic masculinity,” Thorne reflects. “I think just masculinity is better. And Golding writes about that so acutely.”

Thorne first read the novel while still at school: “The edition was orange and on the inside cover it had a stamp saying Portway English Department because my mum was a substitute teacher and she kept the copy. So, I first read Lord of the Flies in a stolen edition! I’ve reread it many times as an adult and felt totally different about the characters.

“When I was a kid, I felt like a Simon. But, as an adult, you realise that the way you dismissed Jack as totally unfeeling is unfair. You realise Golding cares for all these kids. Lord of the Flies is used as shorthand for all sorts of things – the source of evil, society’s division – but it’s actually more subtle than that. You’re watching a group fall apart because of little micro-decisions. It’s about the roles we play and the echoes of our parents that are passed through us.”

Thorne had once started developing the novel for Channel 4 but the screen rights were not available. Then Joel Wilson – a producer friend with whom Thorne had worked on the series Cast Offs and Glue – invited him to Sunday lunch. “I had the rights to a very hot, fashionable book and I asked Jack to adapt it but he said it wasn’t for him,” Wilson recalls. “So I said, well what book would you do if I could get it? And he said, ‘Lord of the Flies’.”

Thorne’s recollection differs: “I just remember Joel asking, probably as he took the potatoes out of the oven, what my favourite book was and I said Lord of the Flies. I have no recollection of him offering me another novel first. But memory is a strange thing. We are all in a post-truth age now. Joel will probably say that we didn’t have roast potatoes.”

These different perspectives on a recent conversation are relevant to the adaptation because the pitch Thorne and Wilson made to the Golding estate – led by the novelist’s daughter, Judy – was for four episodes each seen from the viewpoint of one boy: Piggy, Jack, Simon and Ralph.

The writer used a similar tactic in both Adolescence and National Treasure, his Channel 4 drama about a disgraced entertainer: “I was taught to write on a show called Skins, and that was all about viewpoint and spending time in different people’s heads. In Lord of the Flies, Jack’s perspective in episode two opens up the story so when you see him in three and four, the effect is very different because you’ve seen him from inside – the hurt and pain that is there.”

Does this storytelling style also reflect our general experience that two people rarely agree on the meaning of a personal or historical experience? “Yes. I’ve just had it at Christmas where there was a little family argument, and there are six different versions about whose fault it was and whether we should be angry at this person or that person. That’s why I love living in different perspectives and what it does for drama.”

The two men also decided that – against proper modern sensitivities about gender representation in drama – the series should follow the novel in it being only about boys. “Joel and I talked about that a lot,” says Thorne, “but we decided that, if girls were involved, it would change everything. My son is nine and, watching him and his friends in the playground, it’s fascinating how much more sophisticated and emotionally nuanced the girls are at that age. Girls are negotiating quite complex things while boys are working out how fast they can run into a wooden post without hurting themselves.”

With approval from the Golding estate and co-funding from the BBC and the Australian streaming service Stan, the next challenge was to find a remote tropical island with no land in sight but a mountain and jungle visible from the beach. “We started off in Australia, but couldn’t make it work there,” says director Marc Munden. “Then we went to Mauritius and ended up in Malaysia.”

Cynics might think you would take as long as possible to find your tropical location, travelling between paradises and finding them just lacking... “Ha! We did spend a long time accidentally walking through people’s wedding and honeymoon videos.”

They eventually settled on Langkawi, a Malaysian resort island, as a production base, with boat trips to an uninhabited island for shooting. The next challenge was casting a show in which every major role requires actors between the ages of 10 and 13. “That was a big worry,” admits Thorne. “It’s different from Adolescence because Owen [Cooper] had adult actors around him. With this, the children are on their own. The casting process was incredibly difficult.”

That difficulty fell to casting directors Nina Gold and Martin Ware. “It wasn’t a case of, there are these three well-known child actors, let’s put them in it,” explains Ware. “They wanted unknowns so there are no short cuts.” “Almost all of them are new to acting,” notes Gold.

Their records show that they considered up to 7,000 boys: discovered by visiting 100 schools in person and inviting self-tapes from others, as well as putting out a social media invitation for a short self-introducing clip. The crash survivors in Golding’s novel are predominantly public schoolboys – with the possible implication that those were who the government first chose to save – but Gold says, “We tried to be less tied into the class aspect than the book is.”

Hardest to cast was the central character, Piggy, whose weight, asthma and spectacles are mocked in the book. When the project was announced, jokes circulated in the industry that, in a BBC version, Piggy would lose his nickname and be tall, slender and with 20/20 vision. His novelistic description survives but, joking aside, the protagonist’s treatment now raises proper questions of sensitivity. “Absolutely,” agrees Ware. “There’s a child psychologist on the show. When we were putting out a brief for Piggy, we wanted to be sensitive about how it looked on a noticeboard at school. Later on we would send scripts to the parents of contenders.”

Eventually, they chose David McKenna, a young boy from Northern Ireland whose performance of precocious emotional depth seems likely to draw comparisons with Cooper in Adolescence. “David sent us a grainy chat through social media,” recalls Ware. “But there was a spirit and attitude that we were intrigued by.” “The moment we found David was a time of intense relief because we were struggling to think who we could cast as Piggy,” admits Thorne.

Directing such a young cast means, “you were starting from square one: don’t look at the camera!” says Munden. “But, after that, there were joyful surprises from their acting.”

“We never once had to cut because someone had forgotten their lines,” adds Wilson. “Which is unusual enough with adults.”

However successful Lord of the Flies is, it likely won’t match the spectacular reception of Adolescence: staggering viewing figures, parliamentary discussion and media storms. Some writers of a viral hit become frozen by the hopelessness of following it. Thorne, though, hasn’t experienced that: “I’m psychologically obsessed with work. There’s nothing else I can do. I’m useless at every other aspect of life. So I just go on sitting in a little shed, typing and hoping.”

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