I’ve been trying to escape his shadow,” says Simon. “My career being able to wriggle free of being Will from The Inbetweeners. Wounded by the overwhelmingly negative response to the show, James Buckley even took to Twitter the day after broadcast to apologise. We get drunk” – but generally speaking, the cast have repelled professional requests, despite briefly reuniting on screen for 2019’s Fwends Reunited, a listless 10th anniversary special, that confused fans by being, not a new episode, but a spectacularly unfunny chat show, hosted by Jimmy Carr. They’re all still friends – “They feel like family,” says Simon. We get drunk”Īnd yet the clamour for more Inbetweeners has never really gone away. “‘The Inbetweeners’ cast feel like family. A sample segment saw the late Peaches Geldof being quizzed over who she preferred, ‘Stalin or Mugabe?’ (“I think it’s fair to say, on reflection, that the show wasn’t my finest hour…”) And he’s had misfires, creating the universally panned BBC Three panel show The King Is Dead. He’s had other projects, co-creating, writing and starring in the excellent Chickens, a short series about three men left in the UK during the First World War (“We were desperate to do more. He’s had other roles – he’s played Adam Goodman in the consistently good British middle-class Jewish sitcom Friday Night Dinner for the last 10 years (“I’ve been amazingly lucky that’s ran so long”). Two films followed – 2011’s The Inbetweeners Movie and, three years later, The Inbetweeners 2.Īnd yet the truth is, The Inbetweeners has defined Simon Bird’s career to date. It’s surprising to remember that, despite the high profile the show enjoys even today, Simon appeared on the Channel 4 series for just three seasons – 18 episodes in two years, between 20. The Inbetweeners remains ubiquitous on television – they say you’re never more than 6ft from a rat, but you’re even closer to a repeat of The Inbetweeners on E4. That he wants authorship of his career to belong to him and not to Will McKenzie, the snotty teenager whose school blazer once served as his second skin. It’s not surprising that Simon, now a respectable 36-years old, wants to keep a bit back.

‘The Inbetweeners’ defined an era of teenagers.

Sometimes you can see the scoop, smell it even… though it remains tantalisingly out of reach. We’d hope it was rude, at the bare minimum. Simon aside, that would be Joe Thomas (sensitive Simon Cooper), Blake Harrison (dopey Neil Sutherland) and James Buckley (bants-loving Jay Cartwright). We remind Simon that we’re talking about a WhatsApp group containing the four core members of The Inbetweeners cast. “I can’t! I think it’s really quite rude!” What Simon won’t tell us is what the WhatsApp group is called. Simon Bird has just told NME that he and his former co-stars in British comedy phenomenon The Inbetweeners have a WhatsApp group.

Birdy lyrics the same