For a select community of people who used to watch the British television show Skins, this has been an especially good year. The six-season (plus bonus epilogue episodes) E4 series was a CW-esque teen drama (it also aired on Megavideo, depending on where you lived) set in Bristol became a beloved aughts drama with even more now-beloved actors who played partying, unpleasant teenagers wracked with problems like eating disorders, alcoholism, and love triangles. At the end of the show’s first season, the protagonist got hit by a bus and he spends the whole next season recovering from a brain injury. Classic Skins! To be clear, many years are good years for fans of Skins, because a number of actors who appeared on that show are still regularly working, but this has perhaps been the best year yet. Most everyone on the show is now in their 30s, and many of them are doing great. Let’s crunch the numbers.
The year started off strong with Dev Patel’s explosive directorial debut, Monkey Man, in which he punched and kicked his way to justice as the titular character. Patel was the first Skins alum to break big once his tenure on the show was done, after Slumdog Millionaire hit the jackpot at the 2009 Oscars. On Skins, Patel played Anwar, a geeky, nervous virgin — an archetype Patel himself has never really returned to in his film career, where he seems determined and capable of choosing the coolest role at any given time. In the Vanity Fair “Hollywood” issue, Patel described Skins as “the little rash that won’t go away” but also noted he wouldn’t have been cast in Slumdog were it not for Danny Boyle’s daughter being a Skins fan. Thank you, Danny Boyle’s daughter, for Monkey Man.
Of course, a number of Skins alums have stayed true to their television roots. Skins’s first generation’s Aimee-Ffion Edwards, who played Sketch, wrapped up a tenure on Peaky Blinders and went right into Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, where she now plays Shirley. Kaya Scodelario, who played wayward troublemaker Effy Stonem the first four seasons, is now the token woman on Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, the TV show based on The Gentlemen the movie. Scodelario was previously the token woman in the Mazerunner movies as well as the token crocodile fighter in Crawl, performances that vaguely suggest she should have been in the lead in Twisters. Though Effy Stonem is an ostensibly fictional character, it’s always a relief to see that Scodelario — nothing like her breakout role — is doing fine and well. Skins’s third generation’s Freya Mavor wrapped up another season of Industry, to say nothing of fellow third-gen alum Sean Teale, who rounds out the central throuple at the heart of Doctor Odyssey.
Gen two’s Jack O’Connell popped up in Ferrari late last year (yay) and only Back to Black this year (uhhh) — but it’s just nice to see him working. Let’s get him in the mix on The Gentlemen or something a little more fun for once, if only to capture some of the magic of his turn as Cook.
But of course, the real Skins alum having a moment is the show’s aforementioned first-generation protagonist who got hit by a bus: 2024 Q4 triple threat Nicholas Hoult, who appeared in Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2, Justin Kurzel’s The Order, and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. Much noise was made about Hoult’s reunion with his About a Boy co-star Hugh Grant — cute, yes — and much less noise was made about his American Cinematheque talkback with Skins co-star Daniel Kaluuya. (Kaluuya, of course, is probably the most accomplished Skins alum, given he has a literal Oscar, though he’s kept a relatively low profile and is presumably still working on his Barney movie.) In the years since his time on Skins, Hoult shed the pretty-boy archetype for characters who are far weirder and funnier than his teen-drama turn. In fact, Hoult is largely representative of what’s so thrilling about seeing Skins alums out and about in the world of television and film: that for all their partying and arguing on the show, most have settled into character work that shows a real sense of range. While the television and movie landscape is still full of the odd RADA alums who do better American accents than most American actors, there’s almost always a former partying schoolkid from Bristol out there, making people who remember the year 2005 proud.