Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex is the film on everyone’s radar right now – and rightfully so. A nuanced take on an age-old storyline where the protagonist’s mission is to lose her virginity, it follows Mia McKenna Bruce’s Tara and her two friends as they go on a post-GCSE rite-of-passage holiday to Malia for a summer of drinking, clubbing, and hooking up. Balancing the carefree, energetic fun of youth with the painfully complicated other side of the coin, it is a witty, spirited, and heartbreaking coming-of-age story that captures the age — and the idea of a “teenage dream” — in all its layers. Hard to watch but important to see, it forces viewers to question consent and sex in a new way. As educational as it is compelling, it is a story that too many can relate to, and one that needs to be shared.

One of the most important roles in the film is Britain’s rising star Samuel Bottomley’s Paddy, a teenage boy from the North of England who meets Tara on holiday. A quiet character who truly epitomises the real results of toxic masculinity, he is swept up in his own pressures, insecurities, and ego, and ultimately coerces Tara into having sex with him. Possibly the most painful part is how realistic the character is, and how many times the victim is left feeling violated, devastated, and unsure about what just occurred — or if she can call it rape.

“A lot of people imagine rape in a different way,” Bottomley tells me as we connect over Zoom. He’s in South Africa now, on location for an upcoming project, but we talk all things How To Have Sex in anticipation of the upcoming BIFA award ceremony. “This has happened to a lot of people and it’s a very touchy subject matter. Understanding how important it would be to people watching it who connect… It was important to do it justice and do it right.”

From the first time he read the script, he knew he wanted to be part of the project – and he knew he wanted to make a difference through his work in the film. “I’m always going for auditions. I auditioned for a different character originally — it was a smaller character than Paddy — and I got a recall,” Bottomley explains. “I was reading the script on the way down to London and I remember thinking, ‘I need to do a bigger part. I need to make it a big character or do a different character,’ just because I loved the script so much.”

“It was new to read a script that was so real,” he continues, explaining that it felt like the films he had grown up watching with his family. “I’ve always loved films and my family’s always been into great telly and great films. I’d always been into really good English, British films that felt real to the places they were set in and the people that they were doing them.”

Along with watching films, he’s been acting in them since childhood too. From getting street cast at age nine for Tyrannosaur to spending his after school hours working on projects, he found a love for the environments of sets and became fascinated by the process of creating a story from scratch. “Originally it was the environment on set [that drew him], and then I think it grew into something else – understanding how films are made, learning my craft. As a kid, every set felt like a new experience and it was all about having fun. I never really saw it as a career until I got older. To a certain extent, it still feels like a fluke, but it’s feeling less and less like a fluke.”

If his performance in How To Have Sex is any indication, it is no fluke at all. Portraying a character like that of Paddy is a difficult yet crucial job that, though Bottomley was originally apprehensive about taking on, proved to be entirely rewarding for the actor. “I’d played a couple of dark characters before and my nana always says, ‘when are you going to play a nice kid?’ I’ve played nice kids, but, you know, my family is always saying, ‘bloody hell, you’re always playing a baddie!’ So I was a bit sceptical to go down that route again, because the last thing you want as an actor is to get typecast. But then I started to go more in depth to the character and you realise how important it is.”

“Whether the film got as much recognition as it did or not, it would have always been a significantly important character to the story and to other people’s stories as well, you know what I mean? I knew a lot of people would feel seen, so it felt like an important one to play.”

However, finding ways to get into character for a role that offers limited space for empathy was challenging. “It was a difficult process, maybe the most difficult one I’ve done” he tells me. “It was a constant tussle between trying to find compassion and then just completely despising him, really. But I don’t think you have to like your character to play them well. You just have to understand them. I didn’t have any empathy for him at all really, but once I understood his motives and goals in scenes, that helped.”

Finding parts of the character that he did connect to helped as well, however small they might have been. “I always bring a certain amount of myself to a character that I play,” he explains, noting their similar upbringing in the north of England as an example. “But then there was a tussle between the realness within myself and then detaching and doing the horrible scenes, which were difficult to shoot, man, but really important.”

There is arguably nobody else who could have portrayed the role as well as Bottomley, who has mastered the art of nonverbal acting throughout his many years of experience. So much of what made his performance so compelling was the way he could portray an entire story without any words at all, crucial for a character of little speech. “Sometimes you can say more by not saying anything at all. You can say a lot with your eyes and your face. I remember watching films with my mum and she’d say, ‘silence speaks volumes.’ You can do a lot with your face — speaking’s a bonus.”

Accomplishing such meaningful work within such a difficult subject matter, however, required more than great acting. For the difficult scenes, it was the safe environment on set and the trusting relationship with his castmates that made all the difference. “If we didn’t have that, it would have been a different film,” he says. “It wouldn’t have been as easy to make. Having a good relationship with Mia, especially, was important. And we did have a good relationship, all of us did, really. We were all there for each other.”

Being away from home in their early to mid twenties, working in an unfamiliar country without family nearby brought the cast and crew together at an intensified pace. Particularly when the area you’re filming in is fairly small, as it was in this case. Staying in Malia on a strip with little besides a beach and an old town, by the third week, he knew his surroundings like the back of his hand. Isolated and surrounded by many non-English speaking locals, the team found a sense of home in one another that created a supportive dynamic on and off screen.

For such a heavy and sensitive subject matter, there was an inherent pressure that came along with it, which has made Bottomley all the more proud of what the cast and crew accomplished. “It’s educational in a way. If the characters had seen the film, the situation probably wouldn’t have happened. [Paddy] probably would have understood it was wrong and not gone through with it. There were very important things that we wanted to get across — and we did it. When I watch it, I’m very proud. As an ensemble cast, we did what we were aspiring to do. So when I stand up and clap after watching it, I really mean it.”

And looking around at the emotion in any theatre playing How To Have Sex, it is clear just how beautiful of a job they did.