Today, Netflix unveils the premiere date and the first images of Sex Education, a distinctively honest and witty look at the universally awkward coming-of-age experience. Launching globally with eight, one-hour episodes on January 11, 2019, the dramedy delivers a healthy dose of nostalgia, taking you back to your high school days, with a fresh postmodern take on young adult life, friendships, and attitudes towards sex, identity, love and everything in between.
Set in the fictional English town of Moordale and shot entirely in Wales, UK, Sex Education is a contemporary British love-letter to the classic American high-school story starring Asa Butterfield (“Ender’s Game,” “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” and Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) as Otis Milburn, the only child of two sex therapists, and award-winning actress Gillian Anderson (“The X-Files,” “American Gods,” “The Spy Who Dumped Me”) as Jean Milburn, his mother, a larger-than-life sex therapist with no filter. Newcomers Ncuti Gatwa and Emma Mackey star in key roles throughout the series — Gatwa as Otis’ best friend “Eric” and Mackey as “Maeve,” the mastermind behind Otis’ underground sex therapy clinic. The series also features Kedar Williams-Stirling (“Jackson Monroe”), Aimee-Lou Wood (“Aimee Gibbs”) and Connor Swindells (“Adam Groff”) as Otis, Maeve and Eric’s Moordale classmates.
SEX EDUCATION SYNOPSIS:
Meet Otis Milburn – an inexperienced, socially awkward high school student who lives with his mother, a sex therapist. Surrounded by manuals, videos and tediously open conversations about sex, Otis is a reluctant expert on the subject. When his home life is revealed at school, Otis realizes that he can use his specialist knowledge to gain status. He teams up with Maeve, a whip-smart bad-girl, and together they set up an underground sex therapy clinic to deal with their fellow students’ weird and wonderful problems. Through his analysis of teenage sexuality, Otis realises he may need some therapy of his own.
JEAN MILBURN (played by Gillian Anderson)
Jean Milburn is funny, observant and always larger than life. She is fiercely independent and has no filter when it comes to interrogating people about their personal lives, which makes her a brilliant sex therapist. She lives at home with her only son, Otis. She and her ex-husband Remi, another sex therapist, have little to do with each other unless it involves Otis’s welfare. Early on, she made a decision to never shield Otis from anything and to always speak to him like an adult.
OTIS MILBURN (played by Asa Butterfield)
Otis is the only child of two sex therapists, Jean and Remi. Now his parents are divorced, he lives with Jean and has grown up listening to her home-office therapy sessions through cracks in his floorboards. Blessed with the gift of intuitive sexual understanding; cursed with the inability to do anything about it. His incredible breadth of knowledge about human sexuality is both his super-power and his kryptonite. Then Otis comes to the attention of Maeve, who changes his outlook on sex forever.
ERIC EFFIONG (played by Ncuti Gatwa)
Eric is Otis’s best friend, and they tell each other everything. A motor-mouth who is comfortably gay and out of the closet, but notoriously lame. At home, Eric has five sisters and strict, religious parents. His father has accepted that Eric is gay, but worries about the world Eric is growing up in.
MAEVE WILEY (played by Emma Mackey)
Maeve is the scary, bad-girl in school. Her outward persona disguises a whip-smart intellect and a wicked sense of humour that she reserves only for those closest to her. Maeve lives alone in a caravan she can barely afford; she has to think of ingenious ways to pay the bills, including running an essay-writing business and inventing the sex clinic with Otis. Maeve doesn’t know her dad and her mum is an addict. Her dream is to get a scholarship to a good university, but everything is working against her achieving this.
JACKSON MARCHETTI (played by Kedar Williams-Stirling)
Jackson has never failed at anything in his life. He’s popular, crazy-hot and a future Olympic swimming champion. He is the child of same-sex parents. He is under increasing pressure to give up his social life to maintain his burgeoning swimming career. Where Otis is capable of connecting with Maeve on an emotional level but cannot give her sex, Jackson and Maeve have great sex, but he cannot give her the intimacy she needs.
AIMEE (played by Aimee-Lou Wood)
Aimee is part of cool clan “The Untouchables” (although they don’t treat her very well) and girlfriend to Adam (although she finds him embarrassing). She’s usually the one that has to carry the other popular girls’ bags, pay for their drinks and make sure they get home safely after a party. She is also secretly best friends with Maeve, but don’t tell The Untouchables. She is a people pleaser with a heart of gold, who just wants to get through school unscathed.
ADAM GROFF (played by Connor Swindells)
Adam is the school bad-boy with a rage problem. Adam’s father is the school Headmaster, Mr. Groff, who frequently threatens to send his son to military school. Adam has been bullying Eric ever since they started secondary school, and despite Eric’s hopes that their relationship might change for the better, Adam shows no sign of letting up any time soon. There is a rumour that Adam has a giant penis. This is 100% true.
Sex Education is created and written by Laurie Nunn and executive produced by Jamie Campbell, and co-executive produced by Sian Robins-Grace. The series is a production of Eleven Film for Netflix, and was directed by Ben Taylor (“Catastrophe”) and Kate Herron.
