The breakout star of the cult TV series Sex Education talks about his Rwandan roots, family gossip and coping with overnight success

At the beginning of 2019, Ncuti Gatwa had fewer than 1,000 followers on Instagram. He had filmed Sex Education the previous summer, and by January, it was ready for the world to see. Though it starred big names – Gillian Anderson, Asa Butterfield – on paper the show sounded more like a cult oddity than a smash hit. Butterfield played Otis, a secondary-school student turned sex therapist for his peers in a gaudy world that sat between a John Hughes movie and a Just Seventeen problem page. Gatwa starred as Eric Effiong, Otis’s best friend. Netflix had flown the cast to New York to promote Sex Education, which was released when Gatwa was on the return flight – and his character was a huge hit. When he landed at Heathrow, Gatwa turned on his phone. In the space of several hours, his follower count had gone up… by a couple of hundred thousand.

“It definitely felt exposing,” Gatwa says. He’s sitting in a café in Soho, almost exactly a year after the show changed his life so suddenly. At 27, he is a decade older than Eric, and less flamboyant, though he shares the character’s ebullience. He sounds different, too – his own accent roams Scotland, Rwanda and Tottenham, where he now lives, and his broad laugh ripples across the busy lunchtime crowd.