Sex Education’s Lily Iglehart is wearing a plated silver wig, a black and red rubber dress with Regina George-style boob cut-outs, a thick metallic belt, on-point silver eyeshadow, and thigh-high silver boots. She reminds me of Cleopatra, if Cleopatra were a sexy queer alien. Her girlfriend Ola Nyman (Patricia Allison) – also dressed in an out-of-this-world (literally) metal-heavy ensemble – jumps on top of her. They start kissing. It’s about 40 seconds in to the third season of Sex Education, and already, you can tell this is going to be a big series for Tanya Reynolds. 29-year-old Tanya plays Lily – a student at Moordale High who spent a very horny season 1 trying to lose her virginity, then in season 2, started dating Ola – who draws her own alien erotica fiction and roleplays as her own characters.
Zooming into each other’s homes – “I was just admiring it; honestly, it looks great!” Tanya says sweetly, when I apologise for my embarrassingly messy bedroom background – she tells me it’s these elaborate cosplay costumes that, surprisingly, make Lily an easier character to play.
“The thing is, I find it quite hard to play sexy,” she says. “And when Lily is playing her Glenoxi characters, she’s the sexiest creature that has ever existed. So when she’s doing her sexy roleplay, she’s doing it with conviction, and I find that quite difficult to have that confidence. But it’s the costumes that really take the edge off.”
Here, Tanya shares her beliefs on the importance of taboo-tackling TV, why sex education in UK schools need a massive overhaul – and what we should all be dressing up as for Halloween this year…
What’s the one moment of filming Sex Education season 3that you’ll never forget?
There was a great day when we were filming the school trip, which in the show takes place in France, but we were actually filming in Kent. It was just beautiful rolling hills. I have videos of me, Chinny and Trish on my phone running through the hills like we were in the Sound of Music – it was just a really, really funny day.
Another highlight was filming with Sophie Thompson who plays my mum, because I’ve wanted to meet Lily’s mum for three years now, and they did not disappoint. Sophie’s a brilliant actress who I’ve admired for so long, so working with her was just lovely. And, I mean, I’m a sucker for a mentor, so whenever I’m around an actor I’ve respected for a long time I just want to be around them and absorb their wisdom!
Lily is eccentric and experimental, and we’re not used to seeing characters like her on screen. What’s it like playing a character that challenges norms?
It’s such a mad privilege to play someone like Lily. Three years ago, when I first read her scenes, I not only thought she was one of the funniest characters that I’d ever read, but just so brilliantly unusual. It’s rare to read characters like her, and it’s so much fun to play someone who’s so outside the box. It’s really important as an actor to love who you’re playing – even if they’re a terrible villain, you have to understand them, understand where they come from, and you have to be on their side.
So it’s incredible to play someone who I not only love, but who inspires me. I want to take pieces of Lily and put them into my own life and my own body.
What is it about Lily that inspires you?
She is so intelligent, creative and focused on her work. She’s created these other worlds and universes that are so detailed, and I really admire that drive – and her confidence about it. Like, she knows how talented she is, and she knows how special she is. I would just love to have that confidence.
I don’t know about you, but I was not that confident as a 16-year-old girl. It’s great to see young women on screen who are confident, capable, and comfortable with who they are.
That’s exactly it. I was just the opposite to her, as in that I was not at all selfish, or at all confident, not as focused. She doesn’t care what anybody else thinks, she’s so focused on her own thing, and that’s just where she puts all of her energy. It isn’t until the third season that you see her get a little bit jolted out of her own space by other people’s opinions. Whereas as a teenager – and even now as an adult – I’m just way too self-conscious.
Lily and Ola’s relationship is about tackling taboos and opening up conversations around sex, why do you think it’s so important to see that on screen?
Because so many of us get our education from the art we consume – the books we read; the TV shows, plays and films we watch. Like Lily’s experience of vaginismus in season two; I didn’t even know what that was until this show. And I know so many young women who had the same experience of watching this show and finally realising what vaginismus was. Now, everyone I speak to has had some experience of it, and like me, suddenly realised it wasn’t just this ‘strange freak thing’ – it’s actually really common.
Especially after the sort of sex education most of us received in school – you know, putting a banana on a condom and avoiding pregnancy at all costs!
Literally. In my school, the girls were taken into a separate room and told about periods; the boys were totally left out of the conversation. To the point where one of my dear friends who is my age, a couple of years ago, actually asked me some very basic questions about periods. I was like, ‘how do you not know this?!’ It’s because boys aren’t taught about periods at school, but when I think about my experience of sex education at school, it was all about male ejaculation. We learn so much about semen, but we’re never taught about female ejaculation or any of the crazy stuff that goes on inside of a woman’s body – it’s all just about pregnancy.
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And there’s never any discussion about pleasure – particularly for women – or sexual confidence, which is what is so great to see in Lily’s character; she’s so sure in her own sexual power.
It’s amazing that she knows what she wants – or she doesn’t, and she’s just figuring it out, and that’s fine, too. That’s the thing too; we need to see more people getting it wrong. There’s so much pressure – especially with social media – to be this fully-formed, perfect version of yourself, and I think we find it hard to have any kind of blemishes on us. We find it hard to fail in any sense of the word, and actually, that’s not what being a human is about. We make mistakes, and we don’t know who we are all the time. We’re constantly trying to figure it out, we’re all constantly winging it, and I would love it if we were easier on ourselves about the mistakes we make. So that’s why it’s so important to see people in TV and films getting it wrong.
Lily’s costumes are obviously incredible. If I was to dress up in any of Lily’s costumes for Halloween this year, which one should I pick?
There are SO many! But definitely the one you see at the very beginning of season 3. It was like a silver rubber diving suit with a silver wig, and it was just so sexy! I wish it got more screen time. So yeah, get yourself to a diving store.
Sex Education season three will be released on Netflix on 17th September.