Somewhere Boy

Only Lewis Gribben could've played Danny, at once a vulnerable, tender performance, and one with a single-minded determination to it.

Samuel Bottomley, meanwhile, offers an interesting foil to Lewis Gribben: cousin Aaron is, in some ways, as dislocated from the world as Danny is, struggling to fit in and never quite feeling at ease within himself. It’s at once a very vulnerable, very tender performance, and one with a certain single-minded determination about it; there’s a real sense of history to Gribben’s performance, which manages to capture a sense of unstudied childlike innocence and a mature-beyond-his-years preparedness to confront monsters, a pointed and deliberate mess of contradictions. But by the same measure, Somewhere Boy always makes an effort to root that within a plainly genuine kind of love and affection; Danny always insists his dad loved him, that his dad was protecting him, that his dad would never lie to him; part of the series is about gradually taking that apart, gradually illustrating the scale of Danny’s father’s abuse and how deeply those scars run. When he goes to live with his aunt and cousin Aaron, Danny is too frightened to leave the house, and insistent on keeping the people he starts to care about close to him in a way not unlike his father – it’s a little reminiscent of a former cult member undergoing a process of deprogramming, in a way. Growing up, his only exposure to the outside world was a pizza advert tracked in on his dad’s shoe; now, he’s being introduced to a world of karaoke and pubs and internet porn and garden parties.