Jay Lycurgo is late – but not for want of trying. Arriving for our meeting at a café on London’s Embankment, he explains he got “trapped” taking a shortcut through the campus of King’s College. “I thought, ‘What if all of a sudden I was a superhero and I could just parkour down,” says the 28-year-old south Londoner. “I’m going to defy gravity and float here.”
It’s a neat entrance for the actor, about to star in Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Based on Keiran Goddard’s 2024 novel, with a screenplay by Enda Walsh, it tells the story of five friends in contemporary Birmingham. Lycurgo plays the clownish but lovable Oli, a drug dealer who also uses. “It’s not a conventional storyline of an addict,” says Lycurgo. “What I love so much about Oli is his optimism.”
The film premiered to critical acclaim earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight category, where it also took home the People’s Choice Award. The experience was “incredible”, says Lycurgo, sipping an iced latte. “You’re talking about this working-class project and you’re on a beach looking out at 10 yachts.”
The intertwining lives, loves and losses of the friends – Patrick (Anthony Boyle), Shiv (Lola Pettigrew), Conor (Daryl McCormack), Rian (Joe Cole) and Oli – are set against the spectre of the city’s demolished housing blocks. Oli starts at the lowest point out of the five, but his upward arc is the clearest as he quits drugs and gets a job on Conor’s building site. Key to his journey is Lola, a stray dog whose wellbeing becomes a proxy for his own. “She’s a lifeline. A dog needs you so much but it’s like Oli can’t live without Lola either,” says Lycurgo. (The terrier took home the Palm Dog award – an unofficial prize for the best canine performances at Cannes.)
To prepare for the part, Lycurgo watched Pete Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin (2023). On set, he relied on the nurturing direction of Barnard, a key voice in British social realism for films such as The Arbor (2010) and The Selfish Giant (2013). “Working with Jay was a real joy,” says Barnard. “He’s a live wire, great collaborator and improviser, plus he’s dynamite on the dance floor. He completely threw himself into it, bonding with the rest of the cast and the community we were working with.”
The youngest of four siblings, Lycurgo grew up on a council estate in Croydon, south London. His mother was a cleaner, juggling multiple jobs alongside childcare. His father, David Johnson, had a short career as a professional footballer, playing for Watford FC during the “Elton John-era” 1980s. “What it does for me is that it makes anything seem possible,” says Lycurgo.
After considering professional football himself, Lycurgo turned to performing after seeing two boys in a talent show at his local theatre, Fairfield Halls, singing “Twist and Shout”. (Lycurgo was performing keepie-uppies.) He was rejected by the Brit school but later enrolled at ArtsEd performing arts school in London after a teacher encouraged him to apply. “It was just improvising, making people laugh. I didn’t take it that seriously at first,” says Lycurgo, whose acting idols include Sam Rockwell, Steven Yeun and Stephen Graham.
Fittingly, after television roles in BBC’s Doctors, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Netflix’s fantasy series The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, his breakout came with Tim Mielants’s 2025 film Steve, an adaptation of Max Porter’s 2023 novella about a school for adolescents with behavioural issues. Lycurgo took home a Bifa (British Independent Film Awards) for his moving performance as Shy, acting opposite Cillian Murphy. “Jay is one of the best actors I have worked with,” says Murphy. “He is incredibly disciplined but also has access to true deep emotion and spontaneity.” The pair subsequently worked together on the 2026 Peaky Blinders film and are still close. “He doesn’t really have a choice,” jokes Lycurgo.
Steve was a “perfect” project for the actor, who felt a particular affinity to the subject matter – his father is now a headmaster of a school for alternative needs. “I’d always wanted to do indie films. There’s a British attitude and rawness that no one else has,” he says. He used his Bifa acceptance speech to address his own mental health struggles. “I’ve been at the lowest lows, I have been very depressed – scarily depressed – so if I’m in the position I’m in, then hopefully [by speaking] I can help someone else,” he says.
The actor moved out of his parents’ house during the making of Steve (“It was just one too many times asking my mum to do the washing”). He now lives alone in south-west London and enjoys watching the incongruous local colony of parakeets from his balcony. “There’s a story that Jimi Hendrix brought them over,” he says.
Songwriting is another outlet; he started learning the guitar aged 25. “It gives me so much joy when acting gets overwhelming,” he says, describing loose plans to release his songs that, including the Beatles homage “Yoko Love John”, are inspired by relationships. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” says Lycurgo, who is currently single. “I’ll just keep on writing love songs.” Less gratifying is his identity as a Tottenham Hotspur fan. “I’m in a group chat full of Arsenal fans, and I just give it back. But I love being in that underdog place,” he says. “It’ll be even better when we win the Premier League. I might be 70 years old, but it is within the bounds of possibility.”
In the meantime, Lycurgo is about to go abroad to shoot a secret new project, but would be happy if he could continue working on small indie films, citing Scrapper’s Charlotte Regan as a dream collaborator. “The thing for me with acting is, how long can you keep your imagination curious?” he says. “This is the first year of it all where I feel a bit grounded. Whatever my reality is, I think, bring it on.”
Grooming, Lauraine Bailey using S’Able Labs and Dyson Hair Pro. Movement director, Alexandra Green. Photographer’s assistants, Marco Marchetti and Elliott Humbles. Digital operator, Roland Ismay. Stylist’s assistant, Clementine Harris Stuart. Production assistant, Danton Appleton-Smith. Production, Town Productions