“Imagine you go to a dog walking park, and you have all these really well-behaved dogs everywhere,” Jayden Revri cheekily starts. “But there’s always that one dog that just doesn’t listen to its owner, runs around like an absolute nutter, but you can’t help but want to pet it and say hello to it. That’s the best way I can describe Charles.” And he’s so spot on. Charles, the golden-retriever-infused character in question, is Jayden’s debut in a lead role in Netflix’s new offering Dead Boy Detectives, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comics in a spinoff of the fan favourite The Sandman.

Charles and Edwin (George Rexstrew) are best friends, working together to solve an array of mysteries. With just one added touch: they’re dead. Together, they make the Dead Boy Detectives agency, ghostly travelling around the world to help lost souls find closure to their life affairs — whilst trying to escape the agents of death. “I was actually away filming another Netflix series at the time called Fate: The Winx Saga for the second season, and loads of my castmates were auditioning for this show,” Revri starts, reflecting on the first time he heard of the project. “I remember reading in for some of my other co-stars who were auditioning for the role of Charles and thinking like, this character just speaks to me on a different kind of wave that I can’t even describe to you, really. It was just like I knew that I had to read for this role.”

And from then on, every step of the process felt like real-life proof that everything happens for a reason. “I literally went to call my agent because I had a tape for something else at the time, and just as I was about to tap his name on my phone, he started calling me,” he tells me. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is so random. I was literally just about to call you,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been trying to call you for so and so, but this short film that you’re up for,’ he was like, ‘scrap that. I’ve got you an audition for this show called Dead Boy Detectives to play Charles.’” In a matter of a week between auditions and chemistry reads, the role was his.

The eight-part series is a tongue-in-cheek, feel-good offering, and a beautiful tale of brotherhood between both male protagonists — a chemistry that can also be found off the screen in a successful story of characters-turned-real-life friends. “George and I literally met at Heathrow Airport,” he remembers. “And we flew out to Vancouver [where filming mainly took place] together. We’d never met each other before. We were just so open and honest with each other from the start about how we were feeling about the process. We both really wanted the same thing out of the show, the same way that Charles and Edwin want the same thing out of their detective solving, so it was kind of love at first sight really.”

And the extended family they’ve also built on set, with fellow castmates Kassius Nelson and Yuyu Kitamura, is also a friendship he doesn’t take for granted. “We were all so supportive of each other outside of filming, so it just made the filming side of it so easy,” he says. “We’d always hang out with each other on our free days, we’d all go out for dinner, and yeah, we made sure that the bond between us four was super tight, as we knew that was the core importance of the show – the group’s relationship. And luckily enough for us, the group’s relationship was amazing on screen and off screen.”

The process of building and living Charles is a time Revri keeps dear to his heart, and also a period of intense self-discovery and talent building as an actor. From getting cast in 2021 to finishing wrapping the series in April 2023, it’s easy to see how much has changed in his life. But perhaps, that’s what made their connection breakthrough-role and upcoming-actor so special and memorable. “I was really fortunate in my process of working out the character because we were getting sent scripts not all at once,” he explains. “We would be filming an episode, and then we’d get sent the next script for the next episode. And that was great for me because it allowed me to take it one episode at a time, and I got to really process Charles’s evolution as a character in real-time. And that’s the way that I work anyway. I mean, that’s how we all work as humans, right? We have to just take it one day at a time. And I was able to do that with Charles as well.”

“I remember straight away, as soon as [George and I] started reading lines together, I was like, ‘This is just meant to be this way,’ and we have remained exactly the same and as close ever since,” he says with a smile on his face. “I speak to him pretty much every day since we finished filming.” He describes their connection as the one thing they never had to worry about during filming, a chemistry given by two young actors who lead a perfect encounter that couldn’t be scripted.

A conversation with Revri is full of these moments where he exhales a sense of groundness, self-awareness, and the confidence of an actor who’s working really hard to follow his dream — and is so proud of it. But in the odd time, a quintessentially British trait comes into play and he can’t help to downplay such a journey. “I guess, I’m genuinely just a really normal guy who got super super lucky,” he says, reflecting on his upbringing from a theatre kid in London performing as The Lion King’s Simba to the lead in Netflix’s top-charting production. But momentum aside, the 24-year-old professional I find on the other side of the Zoom screen seems to be exactly where he’s supposed to be.

“You come across as someone who listens very carefully to your intuitions,” I tell him.

“That’s kind of how I’ve always approached any role or audition. I trust my gut, believe I understand how these characters work, and try to bring a bit of myself into every role that I do,” he responds. “I was fortunate that Steve [Yockey], our showrunner, allowed me to bring a lot of myself into Charles. There have been so many renditions of the Dead Boy Detectives, and I wanted to keep Charles true to his core, but Steve encouraged me to bring some of my own charisma and personality to the role. I’ve trusted my instincts throughout the process, and he seems to be happy with the result. I just hope everyone else is as happy with it as I am.”