Joe Thomas is Kingsley

1 September 2011

"senstive yet insecure"

InBetweeners star Joe Thomas believes reinvention is the key to making it through university.

"There is no doubt in my mind that being a student was an immensely accelerated period of my life," says Joe. "I felt I was changing far faster than at any other point in my life, particularly during the first term. You have to change quite radically just to get through your first day at uni!

"The thing that is often remarked on about students is that they reinvent themselves and I think that is to cope with the fact that there is not much to make you special anymore. Your parents still think you're special but what you had as a teenager, you are now number 80 out of 900 people who have got the same thing. So much goes on and you do come out a changed person at the end of it.

Also at school you're bound together by the authority structure of having teachers but at university you can no longer live your life through the guise of someone rebelling against school that has defined you for a long time.

"It is a time when you leave a lot of stuff behind. Quite sad and poignant in a way but then it forces you to sort out who you are. I can't imagine not having gone through that experience. I would be completely different."

Joe  adds: "I think Sam and Jesse are very well suited to  looking at the minutiae of student life, noticing what it is about a person or environment that makes you feel a certain way. With students it's important to have people who deal in subtle detail because students don't operate on that many scales; they do the same thing pretty much for three years."

Joe believes his character Kingsley in Fresh Meat is braver than he was at university...

"Kingsley stands up for himself to a greater degree than many people would. He's got a sense of fairness and I think it's nice that he hangs on to what he has learnt from his life so far. He can't change quite so much as the other housemates because he already matured quite a lot before going to uni. I think I was more shallow and sought experiences just for the sake of them at his age. I pretended I didn't care about stuff that I did care about because it was embarrassing. He's braver. He's got a sense of how people ought to behave which he doesn't waiver from that much.

"But he is pretty narrow-minded too; I think he only really likes Josie in the house. Kingsley is quite serious, he needs serious company. He literally doesn't understand what JP is talking about. He accepts them for who they all are but with Josie he immediately thinks 'she is one of me. She's the one'."

Says Joe; "The whole series is about people making mistakes. When there is no structure and you are genuinely in the absence of authority you make more mistakes. Students make bonkers decisions about the way they live their lives. Josie makes some horrendous decisions, as does Oregon who chooses to have an affair with her lecturer.

"For Kingsley switching course from geology to drama I think was maybe a desperate attempt to do something spontaneous. There is a certain sense of stoicism in choosing geology for Kingsley. Maybe he knows he doesn't really like it but has to do something so sticks with it and then just for a moment thinks 'f**k it, I can do whatever I want'. It's ill thought through, a vague attempt at a gap year experience that he hasn't been able to have. Also it is funny because he is so unsuited to drama and has no idea what he is doing.

"For many people going to uni it's the first time away from their parents' home and effectively you're a child living with lots of other children - if you think of it in that way and imagine children running a house together and organising bills, no wonder things get messed up and nothing gets done.

"When you're a student you think you're the one, I'll be different. To be honest that is a romantic spirit that I really approve of. I was quite surprised to find my university was still running when I went back, I always thought it would close its doors when I left and that my experience was unique. It is your sense of uniqueness which makes you think you'll get away with making bad decisions and in a sense you do get away with it because you're young.  When you are young you have this amazing power to recover from everything in all sorts of ways."

Living in Manchester for three months during filming created the perfect atmosphere for Fresh Meat, admits Joe.

"We were all there together, living in the same apartment building and there is that sense of having a semi-student experience. We had our work to do, hanging around together. There is always a kind of common room atmosphere on set, sitting together and talking about work and then going out and getting horribly drunk.  We had to stop going out drinking because what is not like being a student is that we had to get up at 7am."