Jack Thorne has spent much of his career writing about teenage fury, fantasy worlds and families under strain. Now the 47-year-old is turning to something he says he has never tackled on television before: love.
Falling is his first TV love story, a new series inspired by a news article about a nun and a priest who fell in love. Keeley Hawes plays the nun and Paapa Essiedu plays the priest, giving Thorne a romance built around one of the oldest forbidden pairings in drama and one that he says came from a real-life spark he could not shake. “I just couldn’t stop thinking about that notion of love at first sight,” he said.
The series matters today because Thorne is not coming to it as an unknown. He is already part of one of television’s biggest recent successes: Adolescence, which he co-created and which has been viewed by 140 million people and counting. He is also co-writing Sam Mendes’s four-film series about the Beatles, keeping his name fixed at the centre of high-profile screen work even as Falling moves him into different emotional territory.
Thorne’s route to that point has been as unusual as some of the characters he writes. He developed cholinergic urticaria while studying at Cambridge, becoming allergic to his own body heat, and later dropped out of university and lived in Luton. “I had some friends in the Luton Labour party I really liked and went to Labour party meetings – but the rest of the time I would watch TV and sleep,” he said. That stretch of his life, spent mostly indoors, sits a long way from the career that followed.
What followed was a run through British television and film that made him one of the country’s most in-demand writers. He co-created His Dark Materials, Lord of the Flies and Enola Holmes, wrote for Skins, Shameless and the This Is England trilogy, and adapted Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for the stage. He has also worked in theatre on A Christmas Carol and Let the Right One In, building a body of work that moves easily between family drama, spectacle and social realism.
Falling was first sparked when George Faber, described by Thorne as his work-life fairy godmother, brought him a news article about the nun and priest. Thorne said the idea lodged in his head because of the emotional pressure inside it, not because of the scandal around it. He was drawn to the instant, dangerous certainty of the feeling at the centre of the story, and to the problem of what happens when belief, duty and desire collide.
There is also a private reason the project lands differently now. Thorne met the comedy agent Rachel Mason on a train journey to the Cornwall film festival when he was just about to hit 30, and the two were asked to leave the Quiet Carriage because they could not stop talking. Later, while he was working on the Old Vic’s 24 Hour Plays gala, Mason messaged him at 1am and the messages kept coming. The gala itself challenged creatives to write, direct, rehearse and stage seven 15-minute plays in one day, a kind of deadline pressure that seems entirely in keeping with the pace at which Thorne has worked ever since.
He has been open about the strain of that pace, saying, “It’s not healthy for me to be doing so much,” and also that some of it is “not always a lot of fun.” Even so, the work keeps coming, and Falling looks set to become the latest test of whether Thorne can make an intimate love story feel as urgent as the broad, fast-moving projects that made his name. The answer, if his track record is any guide, is that he can.
