interview | chloë cassens

jacket. Ami Paris
t-shirt. Rokit Vintage
trousers + trainers. Sandro

Between the ages of 18, 21, and 23, George Jaques wrote, shot, and released ‘Black Dog.’ By then, he’d already said his USP as a director was simple: he was young, and he was writing about what it actually feels like to grow up right now, in real time, without the benefit of hindsight. Three years and one film later, that line still holds — mostly. “I feel older, and I’m definitely clinging onto that USP,” he says, “but what I love is that the films, TV shows and theatre I’m making are growing up with me.”

‘Sunny Dancer‘, his sophomore feature, is the proof. He wrote it at 23 and shot it at 24, following the same age-adjacent trajectory as ‘Black Dog’ before it — except this time, growing up meant writing outward as well as inward. “I think the big change is I just want to make work that makes you laugh and makes you cry,” he says, having spent this film writing not just teenagers but also parental roles for Neil Patrick Harris, Jessica Gunning and James Norton, with what he calls real detail and accuracy. He’s proud of that in a way that feels distinct from the pride he has in ‘Black Dog’ because it is less about getting something out of himself and more about getting somewhere on purpose.

Jaques has always been candid about the gap between the person who writes a script and the person who eventually directs it. Who he is when he begins writing a project is entirely different by the time the premiere comes; a different person, by his own account, arriving to finish someone else’s homework. ‘Sunny Dancer’ closed that gap, a little. “When I went into ‘Sunny Dancer’, I went in knowing how to make a film, but also knowing what I wanted to do and how to get there, and I think that was the real difference,” he says. “With ‘Black Dog’ I poured a lot of love into it and hoped for the best, whereas this one felt a bit more deliberate in places.”

Still, distance accumulates. Between writing the script and watching it play in cinemas, Jaques picked up a lead actor he hadn’t had when he first put pen to paper. “I didn’t have Bella Ramsey attached to play Ivy, and now I do, and now it’s coming out, and I’m so proud of that,” he says. What he holds onto, across both films and the ten years of running his own company that sit underneath them, is a kind of internal consistency: “It was always the film I wanted to make, and I’m proud of myself because in these past ten years we’ve never fucked anyone over, and we’ve always stayed true to who we are, and that feels really special.”

jacket. Oliver Spencer
shirt + shorts. MITHRIDATE
loafers. Grenson
opposite
jacket. Ami Paris
t-shirt. Rokit Vintage
trousers + trainers. Sandro

None of that consistency has made imposter syndrome go away — if anything, ‘Sunny Dancer’ intensified it. “The step up from ‘Black Dog’ to ‘Sunny Dancer’ was such a leap that I don’t think I’ll ever have to make a leap that big again,” Jaques says, citing access to music, to a stacked ensemble cast, to genuine scale for the first time. He tried to counteract the vertigo of that leap by flattening the hierarchy on set: identical trailers, shared cars to work, the same accommodation for everyone. “That made it feel like we were all one, so you sort of forgot about the imposter syndrome,” he says. It crept back anyway, on the day he found himself on set with James Blunt, James Norton, Jess Gunning and Bella Ramsey all at once. “I was like, holy fuck, how have I done that?”

It resurfaced again at Berlin, where ‘Sunny Dancer’ opened the festival and made Jaques one of the youngest directors to do so. It resurfaced while the cast shot a ten-page spread for British Vogue. It will presumably resurface again in September, when the film reaches Canada and the US. “This is something I wrote in my kitchen, and now the world is seeing it,” he says. “I don’t really think about that that often, but that is pretty mad.” The way he manages it, mostly, is by refusing to let the outcome into the room while he’s working. “If you’re thinking too much about that when you’re making it, and you’re so worried about reviewers, or box office, or all those things, it can be really challenging,” he says. “There’s a place where you finish the film creatively, and then you need to start thinking about the marketing. But up till that point, you’ve just got to focus on the movie.”

The origin of ‘Sunny Dancer’ sits in two separate places that happened to meet in the edit suite. The first is Jaques’ own life: his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was 15, and he’d wanted to write about it for years, on the condition that he could do it in a way that didn’t look like every other cancer film. The second is an offhand comment from his editor, Caitlin, while they were cutting ‘Black Dog’. “I said to Caitlin, I’ve always wanted to write a film about cancer,” he recalls. “At the same time, I also wanted to bring back those 80s and 90s ensemble films we don’t really get to make anymore, like The Breakfast Club, and I knew the cool young actors from growing up that I wanted to put in one spot. Then Caitlin was like, oh, I used to go to these summer camps, and I was like, no way, that’s the film.”

What followed was a lot of research with a dose of imagination. Jaques began working with Teenage Cancer Trust and meeting young people who’d effectively grown up on hospital wards. “What you realise is cancer is the least interesting thing about them,” he says. “They’re feral, they’re full of life, they’re mental, they’ll tell you about their first snog.” That observation became the film’s entire organizing principle — a remission story with no hospital scenes, about a club nobody asked to join, and the joy its members find in each other anyway.

jacket. Oliver Spencer
shirt + shorts. MITHRIDATE
opposite
jacket + trousers. David Koma
cardigan. Ami Paris
loafers. Grenson

Ivy, the character everyone will eventually clock as the closest thing to a self-portrait Jaques has written, wasn’t the role he had the clearest picture of. Ironically, that belonged to Ella, written specifically for Ruby Stokes. “I never could really picture who’d play Ivy — which is very rare for me,” he says. It was his casting directors who suggested Bella Ramsey, fresh off ‘The Last of Us’ and stepping into a story with no zombies, no dragons, nothing they’d built a career on yet. “I was so excited, but I was nervous too — that they wouldn’t do it, and that if they did, it would be totally new territory for them,” Jaques says. “When they signed on, I was like, wow, we get to go make this thing together, and that was so exciting.”

The film’s dialogue — chemo camp virginity jokes, pill-snorting, “cancer ghosted” — reads like it arrived intact, but Jaques describes something closer to a controlled improvisation. Every actor gets a script pass written specifically for them, and every scene gets what he calls a “feral take”: once the scripted version is in the can, he lets the cast go feral. “That’s where you get a lot of genius stuff,” he says. “You also get a lot of crap. A lot of the time they’ll try a joke and it won’t land, but the reaction to the joke might be incredible, and that means they trust you.”

That same appetite for texture shaped the world outside the dialogue. Jaques and his cast built out full “files” for each character — A-level results, hobbies, Spotify playlists — that fed directly into costume and production design, down to the tennis racket packed in someone’s camp bag because the actor had mentioned liking tennis. Jaques wrote the entire fictional history of the camp itself: when it opened, how it was refurbished, its slogans, its cheesy songs. His production designer, Pat Campbell, turned all of it into signage and set dressing Jaques would stumble across on set. “Our budget wasn’t huge, but the attention to detail was so specific, because whatever we put on screen had to feel authentic, real and lived-in,” he says.

Even the film’s big fight scene, staged to The Cranberries after a trip to an amusement park, was fully choreographed rather than improvised — though Jaques snuck in one piece of casting he’s particularly proud of. The “local yobos” heckling the group are played by young cancer survivors in their first roles. “I thought that was a fun, cheeky nod,” he says, “making the bullies the ones who’d actually had cancer.”

suit. Alexander McQueen
vest. CDLP
loafers. Grenson
bracelet. The Great Frog
opposite
cardigan. Jil Sander
jewellery. The Great Frog

HAIM’s Este Haim and musician Zachary Dawes co-composed the score, and Jaques wanted their involvement to do more than supply mood. “I wanted to make a film that felt transatlantic, that didn’t just feel like a small British indie — proudly independent, but with scale,” he says. His brief to them was blunt: don’t make background music. Make the score tell a story, work alongside the dialogue instead of competing with it. The film’s needle-drops — The Cranberries, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Olivia Dean among them — are a mix of songs Jaques listened to while writing, songs from his own adolescence, and songs Haim and Dawes brought in. What he’s proudest of is subtler: several of those songs play quietly underneath a scene before they’re allowed to fully arrive, as in the tampon scene and again in the forest, where Jamie xx sits low in the mix until it suddenly isn’t. “I really love that language we developed,” he says.

A quote in the film — “there was a time when you weren’t sick once, and you would’ve wanted to be this girl at this camp more than anything” — is the moment ‘Sunny Dancer’ briefly remembers it’s a film about cancer, after nearly forgetting. It’s the line Jaques says that changes everything after it, pushing the group from friendship into something closer to love. It came out of a talk he gave at one of these camps, where he felt, in his words, like the influencer character from his own film. “It was clear to me those spaces are so important, because they give people who’ve been treated as ‘other’ a place where that becomes the norm, and so it becomes nothing,” he says.

The idea behind the line reaches past illness, into something closer to a working philosophy: that people in the middle of a hard thing dream of the other side of it, and then forget the hard thing the moment they arrive, because there’s already a new hard thing waiting. He applies it to himself without much prompting — to finishing GCSEs, to surviving a brutal shoot, to being interviewed by the same journalist a few years apart. “I think we all need reminding sometimes that the version of yourself you’re talking to today is the version the you from a couple of years ago would have dreamed of being,” he says. “Which is why I love doing repeat interviews with people — it feels like we’re on that journey together.” At ‘Sunny Dancer”s premiere, a few of his oldest friends — the same friends who came to his first play when he was 16 and were at a film premiere when he was 26 — called him the next day, struggling to understand how he’d written the film’s more personal scenes.  “I told them, it’s just my job,” he says. “Like my mate who’s a doctor saves people, and I write lines about it.” 

suit. Alexander McQueen
vest. CDLP
loafers. Grenson
bracelet. The Great Frog
opposite
t-shirt. ICECREAM

Without spoiling it, there is a reveal at the end of the film that is equal parts shocking and obvious. It recontextualises just how young Ivy is to be carrying what she’s carrying. “I always knew it was going to be there,” Jaques says. “Everyone goes into a cancer film knowing someone’s going to die — that’s a given because of the subgenre — but I really wanted to flip that on its head, to have no hospital scenes, to make you forget about the cancer, and then have it come back and hit you hard.”

Underneath the structural swing is research he carried from his own family and from Teenage Cancer Trust: that chemotherapy and radiotherapy are only the beginning of a much longer story, one that includes weight gain from medication like tamoxifen, decisions about freezing sperm or eggs, and long-term damage to the heart. “In my head, this is the first bit of a really long story for some people, and sadly the last bit of a too-short story for others, and that’s hard to fathom,” he says. He describes real fear in balancing that weight against his instinct to be outrageous and funny throughout. “For some people it’s the end of their life, and for others it’s the start of a really changed one, and that’s a delicate thing I felt I needed to protect.” The ending, brutal as it is, was non-negotiable — but so, he insists, was the feeling underneath it. “I think you still leave the cinema dancing, and you know she’s going to be okay, and you leave thinking, how lucky are we to be here.”

The film’s final gut-punch — Ivy watching Ella’s camcorder footage, the “ella explores” vlog — came from handing an actual camcorder to Stokes, who’s credited as camera operator. Jaques and his editor ended up with an hour of behind-the-scenes footage as a byproduct, most of it the cast simply messing around out of character. “I didn’t think a camera operator tagging along with the gang would be able to get that intimacy — it would be too invasive, too performative,” Jaques says. “I didn’t want to just show you the whole film again with a shittier camera. I wanted to give an intimate look at a different bit of every scene, and all the bits you might have missed.” 

Jaques traces the film’s emotional center back to a single moment at the Berlin premiere, watching his mother sit a few rows behind him. “There was a version of this movie where she wasn’t sitting in that audience,” he says. It’s the thought underneath everything he hopes the film does for the families it’s made for: gratitude for health that’s easy to take for granted, and a reminder that roughly one young person is diagnosed with cancer every seven minutes in the UK — rare enough not to define the culture, common enough that it shouldn’t be treated as foreign. “People shouldn’t treat them as ‘other,’ but should still show them love,” he says. “I want people to remember times when they felt ‘other’ and found their tribe, and to feel like they can take on the world.”

cardigan. Jil Sander
trousers. MITHRIDATE
jewellery. The Great Frog
opposite
jacket. Rokit Vintage
t-shirt. ICECREAM
trousers. Oliver Spencer

‘Sunny Dancer’ is in theatres across the U.K. now.

photography. David Reiss
fashion. Rosalind Donoghue
talent. George Jaques
grooming. Bjorn Krischker @ The Wall Group using Hair by Sam McKnight + ANUA
production. Clara La Rosa
interview + editor. Kelsey Barnes

Freedom looks different depending on who’s chasing it. For Romy — the artist behind DeathbyRomy — it’s unguarded, unpolished, and entirely her own. She was writing songs at five years old. By fifteen, she’d picked a new name and started uploading to SoundCloud, an early act of self-reclamation before she had the language for it. She didn’t yet know how many times she’d have to reclaim it again. Autonomy, as she’s learned, isn’t handed to you — it’s something you build and build, over and over, if you’re stubborn enough.

That fight is everywhere in the work that’s followed: in “2468,” a snarling anthem for anyone who’s ever been told their differences were a liability; in “BODYHORROR,” whose comments section has become an unofficial support group for women who finally feel heard; in the tattoos, the armour, the alter ego itself. And now, ahead of a new chapter for her and fresh off opening arena-sized shows for Limp Bizkit after Fred Durst found her on TikTok — she is still building. Still reinvesting every dollar back into the project and choosing to do it her way.

In conversation with Schön!, she talks about the cost of independence, her creative partnerships, the references that shaped her as a storyteller, and what it actually feels like to turn your rawest material into a stage.

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I’ve been listening to your full discography, and the music you’ve made and released independently over the last few years feels so authentically you compared to what you released in the past — you can hear how much freer you are. Can you tell me about the last few years, and what it’s been like taking control over everything?

I appreciate you actually delving into the music and listening to a bunch of it — it really means a lot to me. Being an independent artist was something I never knew was a novelty until I wasn’t one. I didn’t know it was something I’d ever have to fight for, or that I’d ever have to work to maintain. I just started making music as a kid — I started writing when I was 5, and I started producing my own songs and putting them out on SoundCloud and things like that when I was 15.

I never thought that control and autonomy were things that could be lost, and when they were, it was pretty earth-shattering — also something I didn’t know how to fight for while it was happening. Since gaining my autonomy and control over my project back, I’ve been reminded of the true joy it is to create — to create different little aesthetic and sonic worlds for each song, for each album, for each thing I’m going through in my life that I’m processing through music and the songs I’m writing. I just feel so lucky.

I watched your interview with MJ Gray, and you talked about how this artist project started over ten years ago and has grown alongside you as you’ve grown up. You’ve also described it as an alter ego — did you feel like you needed that kind of armour, having some distance from just going by your first and last name?

I didn’t think about it in such a deep, calculated way when I first picked the name DeathbyRomy — I picked it when I was 15 or 16. It was kind of a reclamation of beauty and strength for me. I experienced some really low times in my life where I took my life for granted, and DeathbyRomy was meant to mean death by something beautiful. It was me trying to own a confidence I didn’t yet believe in but really wanted to — it felt like a spell, in a sense, maybe not in the technical meaning of the word.

I wouldn’t say I created the alter ego knowingly, but clothes and my means of self-expression — the way I present myself to the world — have always been a form of armour in one way or another. Be it my tattoos, which I started getting more and more of because I liked how hard they made me feel, being such a soft, emotionally vulnerable person. I wanted to create that kind of armour just to face the world — even the artist project aside.

I know you work with stylist Elena Lark, whose work I love — fashion is very much a tool of self-expression, and your style is incredible. Can you tell me about your creative partnership with her, including for the “2468” music video, where she sourced the military costumes and made all the jersey sweatshirts for the cheerleaders?

In my whole career, I’ve never worked this closely with a stylist before. I self-styled pretty much everything until the “BDSM” video, which was my first project with Elena. There were a couple of one-off experiences before that — I worked with a lovely duo of husbands named Jack and Judson on the music videos for my last album, Hollywood Forever, and I enjoyed working with them, but ultimately felt like styling was still something I wanted to control myself. I know it best, and it’s easier to avoid hurting people’s feelings when you’re doing it yourself. I’ve always been kind of a do-it-all-yourself person, for better or worse.

I met Elena because she’s dating my guitarist and best friend, Jayden Hammer. I got to know Elena and her personality very well before we even talked about working together. She’s such a sweet, humble, gracious, honest, lovely individual — she has such a soft and kind energy, and I knew I’d feel very safe creating with her. I knew no one’s toes would feel stepped on, and it wouldn’t be hard to object to ideas that didn’t feel like me — something I’ve found can be difficult when working with stylists in general: wanting to give them room to do their thing while not wanting to compromise your vision. Elena and I have so much in common.

After “BDSM” went so well, it was clear we pull from a lot of the same references and share the same passion for clothes and creating a world. She’s quickly become one of my closest friends, through working with her and through her dating my best friend. She’s as hard a worker as I am, and I saw that immediately and knew we’d work well together. We spent countless hours going through one collector’s collection of military uniforms, making sure we were above board and not wearing anything frisky or problematic. She really wanted the uniforms to be real, and she took the time to hand-stitch the little patches with the R’s onto all of them.

We sourced and pieced the cheerleader look together — we’d been generously offered blanks for free from LA Apparel. Some of my favourite references were ’70s and ’50s cheerleaders — the earliest uniforms, the ones we see less interpreted today. That classic feeling invokes more dreaminess to me because it’s from a different time. She and I created that logo together, based on the Team Death logo with the upside-down star and the DVR in the center, and she hand-stitched all of them herself.

When you think back to your childhood, was there a specific book, film, or album that inspired you to pursue becoming a storyteller?

So many — from the world of Studio Ghibli, created by Hayao Miyazaki, and the very fantastical worlds he’s created in all his films, to Mark Ryden, the painter, to Björk, and seeing her collection of music videos early as a kid, to Lady Gaga, seeing the “Bad Romance” music video and knowing she was wearing Alexander McQueen because my parents had gotten me an Alexander McQueen book when I was young. The list goes on.

 I was reading comments on the “BODYHORROR” video, and one that really resonated with me said this is the sentiment every woman has been screaming for centuries. What does it mean to you that people — particularly women — are resonating with your music that way?

It’s exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s scary to put yourself out there, to be loud about problems that maybe, when we were kids and teenagers, we weren’t ready to voice yet. It’s why victims and survivors don’t always come forward with their stories, and it’s not always safe to. That’s something I think is constantly overlooked, probably by the other gender only.

I did this for reasons that were cathartic and therapeutic for myself, and I knew that in doing that, it would be felt and resonated with by other people too. I’ve had some scary run-ins with people who don’t appreciate the things I have to speak up about, but I will never stop, and I care to be a voice that helps someone who maybe didn’t have the words for an emotion or experience they’ve gone through.

“2468” is a call to arms and an anthem for misfits — I think everyone has had moments where their differences felt like a liability rather than a strength. What was the writing and recording process like, and did it feel like you were reclaiming those differences?

Definitely — it felt like a complete reclamation of myself and the little girl who dropped out of school because she was tired of being bullied, and tired of being made to believe she was wrong for being herself, or that the things that made her feel comfortable and good were strange or undeserving of admiration, understanding, or love. It took a lot of years and further self-discovery, and finding my tribe, to realize our differences are what make us beautiful — that our individuality is something to be celebrated and cherished.

Writing this was very cathartic. I wrote pretty much the entire song on my own in my first session with a producer named Chris Lyon, who I’d never worked with before, and the song was pretty much done. I felt like it was lacking some elements to make it catchier, though, so I called in my friend Brasco to help push it further and help the story land — and he did right away. I write the majority of my songs alone, but I’m also very welcoming to collaborators, and I believe there’s power in numbers in all regards in life. He helped bring a digestibility to the song I think I was struggling to obtain myself, and made it all the stronger.

A unique thing with this song — one I haven’t run into too many times — is that the original production didn’t resonate with me for a long time. I felt like I had an incredible song that just wasn’t done justice yet, so I put it through many rounds of production and reproduction, and eventually brought it to another producer to work on. It finally got brought to life the way I wanted. We added the bridge super last minute — just a couple of months before it came out. It was a unique process, but it was worth it. The song deserved the moment we gave it.

At what point do you feel like a song is done?

You’ve got to just let it be. I have a lot of friends who are crazy perfectionists, and I’d consider myself a perfectionist to some extent, but when it comes to communicating something, it’s never going to be perfect. We’re never going to do it in a perfect way — even if we think it’s perfect and it gets misinterpreted by someone else, there’s always room for that. It’s going to happen, and I think I’ve learned to be more malleable, to allow my songs to shape and move me — I hope that doesn’t sound too out there. It took a while to develop my sound, and it took a lot of trial and error. I feel like I’ve established a sound that is Death by Romy, one that’s more malleable than I or anyone ever told me it could be. I feel like I’m in a really free place with my creation and sound exploration, and I think that’s coming through in the music. I’m happy to hear that.

You creative-directed the “2468” video as well — can you tell me about the storyboarding process and where the vision came from?

I make all my storyboards — I conceptualize and direct all of my videos, though I’m happy to share that title with the DOP. At their inception, all of the concepts are me — I make the storyboards in Keynote, on my phone, because I’m not a computer girl. This was the very first rough draft of the video that I presented to my whole team and directors. There’s some influence from the movie ‘Across the Universe’ — the Beatles movie, where Prudence’s character is seemingly singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to a football player, and then the camera pans and it’s revealed she’s actually singing it to a fellow cheerleader. I loved the way that was revealed in that movie, how nostalgic those shots felt — that’s part of why we used the old cheerleader uniforms.

It was also inspired by Glee and Santana. There’s a reference some fans have pointed out. That ended up being a later-down-the-line reference that my director and I decided would be cool to use for some of the shots. For the original story, my manager Allie helped me pace the storyline better than I had — she went really hard and mapped out, at this point in the song, during this lyric, we should start alluding to the girls, the feud between them, and their dynamic. That’s how all my videos start — a little mood board on my phone.

Your music is so cinematic — are visuals something you’re thinking about while you’re writing and recording?

You know what, I am and I’m not. I’m definitely a very imaginative person, a daydreamer through and through, and I do get visuals while I’m writing my songs — because I’m looking back on a memory I’m writing about, or recontextualizing that memory, and it gives me ideas. I don’t generally conceptualize the actual music video until I’ve lived with a song, run it into the ground in my own head, listened to it a million times over — and then I feel like the song tells me the story it wants to.

The lyrics in “Manic Dream” — “I wanna dance with the bliss of being seventeen / I wanna burn all my money and forget everything / I’d rather die at the top than ever make it there” — really resonated with me. What do they mean to you?

When I was 17, it felt like a very transitional age for me. I had just quit my job — the ice cream shop, which was actually the last real job I ever had, which I’m so fortunate to say. I was able to quit because I signed my first publishing deal, for $50,000 — more money than I’d ever seen in my life, and enough to live off of. There was no other option, no Plan B — there never has been. I wasn’t good in school. I knew I wanted to make music since I was five years old. I quit my job and felt like I had the whole world ahead of me — I felt so assured in that, but I also had no idea what was ahead: the ups and downs I’d face in my career, falling in and out of relationships in my work life and personal life, how hard it would be to maintain not needing to go back to a normal job.

This has not been easy. I’m still nowhere near where I want to be financially, but I’ve made it work — I’ve survived off music since that day. I’ve overdrafted my card a million times between then and now, but it’s fine — I’m making it work, and I have something to show for it. There was this sense of invincibility, even though I was already jaded — obviously, calling myself Death by Romy, having dropped out of high school — but there was still this unknowing bliss that the age of 17 encapsulated for me. I miss that at times — not having the weight of the world and the responsibility of survival, wanting to provide a big life for myself and for my sisters and my mother.

I really wouldn’t have it any other way, though. There are hard moments where I think, “This is really hard.” I have to keep fighting and pushing — there’s a million things I have to do this week, this month. I haven’t had a vacation since I was 18. I’ve told a lot of my friends that this year, and they’re like, “Oh God, girl, take a vacation.” That’s what “I’d rather die at the top than ever make it there” means, though — I’ve put everything I have into this. Every dollar I’ve made on this project has been directly reinvested into it. I’ve fought really hard for what I have, and I’m not going to stop. Even on the days I wish I could go back to fewer responsibilities, I’m ultimately just so grateful for my life and the ability to be doing what I’m doing — and to have a good fight to be fighting, and friends to fight it with me.

Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst found you on TikTok, right? Can you tell me about how that came about and what touring with him was like? I also worked for Alt Press, so I saw the tour diary you did for us.

Fred saw a video of me playing live that was going kind of viral on TikTok — I think it was “Crash” — and messaged me saying, “You’re sick.” I was like, “Oh my god, Fred Durst is calling me a sick performer, that’s crazy.” There wasn’t much conversation then, but a few months later my agent told me they wanted me to come open for some shows in Europe, and I was thrilled. Each show was for between 18,000 and 21,000 people — the largest crowd I’ve ever opened for and played to.

It was really cool to share the stage with him, to feel the energy of this moment we’re living in right now around his song “Break Stuff” especially, and to sing that with him and see and feel that from his crowd. It was really cool and inspiring, and a good reminder that music is still really alive — as much as some of us want to believe it’s dying, or that people don’t want to go to live shows anymore, or that the internet has oversaturated the market. It’s very alive and well, still. That was a really good reminder of that, more than anything.

Lastly, if you could manifest something for yourself this year, what would it be?

Maybe an incredible vacation, and more success than I’ve ever seen around any body of work — around the album I’m going to be putting out later this year. It’s not done yet — I’m literally going to a session after this, and tomorrow too. It’s overdue, and I’ve decided it’s going to have to be a deluxe version, because there aren’t enough songs to put on the first version that will be done by the time I need to turn it in. But the date is set, and it’s coming out one way or another. 

words. Kelsey Barnes

There’s a scene near the end of ‘Nimrods‘ that Kylr Coffman still can’t quite believe is real. He won’t spoil it, but he’ll tell you how it felt to watch it back for the first time: “The end of the film just seems AI to me. There’s no way someone let me do THAT with Green Day.” It’s the kind of disbelief that only makes sense once you know where he started.

This year, Coffman steps into his first leading role in a feature film as the star of ‘Nimrods’, the Green Day-inspired coming-of-age comedy. He shares the screen with Mason Thames, Jenna Fischer, Bobby Lee, Fred Armisen and the members of Green Day themselves, playing Fred — one of three best friends who mistakenly believe their garage band has been invited to open for Green Day on New Year’s Eve, and who set off across the country chasing that mistake anyway. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 to strong critical acclaim, with Coffman’s performance singled out again and again as a breakout. 

For Coffman, the role isn’t a stretch so much as a homecoming. Growing up in small-town Oklahoma, he didn’t have superheroes in the traditional sense. Instead, he had bands. Green Day, Operation Ivy, NOFX. “While most kids grew up with Marvel and Star Wars. When I was growing up, punk rock was my Marvel,” he says. Later, as a teenager, he found pop-punk — The Story So Far was the gateway — and started his own garage band, Found in Atlases, playing alongside genre names like Title Fight, The Wonder Years, and Tigers Jaw on Oklahoma stages. “The music scene taught me the value of storytelling and art, specifically DIY storytelling,” he says. “If you’re lucky, your art and stories can become a home and a voice for others.” That belief is why, he adds, “getting to tell this story felt like writing a love letter to a music scene that provided the home and family I always wanted growing up.”

That homecoming got a literal exclamation point at TIFF, where ‘Nimrods’ premiered in 2025. Coffman had never even heard of the festival before his own film landed there. “That night was sick!” he says. “TIFF was my first time visiting a new country, my first time seeing myself in a leading role, and getting to share that with a crowd for the first time meant a lot… My mind was blown at how big of a deal it was.” With ‘Nimrods’ as his first major film, he says he’s learning something new about the industry every day. 

That background gave him a head start most actors playing musicians don’t get. He already understood the bond that comes from being in a band with your friends — “your band vs. the world,” as he puts it — and he leaned on that to build the on-screen chemistry of Analog Dogs, the fictional garage band at the center of the film. “Punk rock music was never great to me because it’s perfect,” he says. “It’s great because it’s passionate and honest. I truly feel like we captured that feeling with our band, Analog Dogs, in the movie.” The one real challenge was technical: Coffman grew up playing drums, so learning guitar and bass for the role meant starting almost from scratch. Still, channelling everything he’d absorbed from bands like Green Day, Sum 41 and NOFX, he says the process felt like a gift — “I felt like I understood the assignment.”

Still, choosing to be an actor at all was never a given. “Becoming an actor in small-town Oklahoma felt impossibly impossible,” Coffman says. He didn’t meet a professional actor until he left for Los Angeles after high school — and once there, he made a choice that still shapes how he talks about ambition. To save money for SAG dues, acting classes, and headshots, he went without stable housing for a stretch, a decision he says got him misunderstood, judged and called crazy. “You’re only crazy and delusional until your dreams become a reality,” he says now. It’s a line that doubles as his read on ‘Nimrods’ itself — a film about three friends whose delusion turns out to be what saves them. “Making your dreams come true is gonna take sacrifice, faith in others, and a bag of mushrooms.”

Much of ‘Nimrods’ was filmed in Oklahoma, which Coffman says made the whole experience feel like it was folding back on itself. “It was surreal shooting my first big movie in the place where it once felt impossibly impossible to be an actor.” The state’s film industry, he notes, is having a moment of its own — and he clearly sees his own arc as part of that larger story.

Working alongside Green Day themselves, he says, was the rare case of a childhood hero living up to the hype. “Don’t meet your heroes… unless those heroes are Green Day,” he says. “Hanging out with them is everything you’d want it to be and more. They are the world’s biggest punk band and still the most down-to-earth dudes.” He came away with advice from Mike Dirnt that he says he’ll hold onto for good — that staying true to yourself sometimes means knowing “not every envelope needs to be opened.”

As for the pressure that comes with a first lead role already being talked about as a breakout, Coffman says he’s trying to meet it with gratitude rather than anxiety. “I’m protecting Fred and myself by practicing gratitude,” he says. “This moment and this role are much bigger than just me. It’s so special to be telling stories and creating characters that allow others to be seen and heard.”

‘Nimrods’ is in theatres now.

skateboard photography. Brent White
portraits. Nigel Bland
interview + editor. Kelsey Barnes