Forever Inbetween

Four 20-something British boys known as The Inbetweeners have debunked our reputation as a scary, dangerous country. In real life, that is. The socially awkward characters they play – originally as the protagonists on hit TV sitcom The Inbetweeners and now in the follow-up to 2011’s successful The Inbetweeners Movie – are unlikely to be a disappointed when they head Down Under for a gap year.

“It starts a couple of months after the first film ends,” says Simon Bird who plays Will McKenzie, the sarcastic nerd-type with a habit of putting his foot in his mouth.

“Will’s at university, Simon’s at a different university, Neil’s been given a job – well done, don’t know how that’s happened, don’t know what the interview process would be that would allow Neil to get a job – and Jay’s gone off to stay with his uncle in Australia. And I think for Neil, Will and Simon, life isn’t panning out quite like they’d hoped. Then suddenly they get this email from Jay which is classic Jay bullshit, saying what an incredible time he’s having in Australia, how he’s become the country’s number one DJ and he’s had sex with both the Minogue sisters. Neil laps that up and suggests they go visit him.”

From Byron Bay to the tiny South Australian desert town of Maree, Will, Simon, Jay and Neil traverse the Aussie landscape and find that between the backpacker scene and the locals, they’re failing to fit in anywhere. “With this film, I feel like there aren’t really any other inbetweeners in Australia,” explains Blake Harrison who plays lovable idiot Neil. “These guys should not really be there. They’re not backpacking, they’re not Australians and they’re not manly enough to take on all things that Australia has to throw at them. They are very much on their own.”

All four actors promise that The Inbetweeners Movie 2 is set to be even better than its predecessor, with the show’s creators Damon Beesley and Iain Morris producing a script the boys claim is genuinely funnier than the last one. And, while we can expect The Inbetweeners to come up against the kind of challenges Australia is internationally famous for, Bird, Thomas, Harrison and Buckley were disappointed to find that while on location in Oz, no one was bitten by a snake or a spider.

“We didn’t see anything poisonous,” Joe Thomas, who plays Simon Cooper, offers, mystified. “Weirdly, we were quite disappointed about that.”

“We were gutted,” says James Buckley, who plays Jay Cartwright. “Before I was gutted I was like, ‘Oh, better be careful.’ I was literally going to buy ziplock bags for my shoes and shit but there was absolutely no need. Where we were in the outback it was like, no animal is stupid enough to be here.”