Luxury fashion house Hermès recently hosted a special dinner in London to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Athenaeum, the production company founded by British multi-hyphenate George Jaques.
While a touch pretentious, the name was chosen mostly because it “didn’t sound like a 16-year-old made it,” someone who, at the time, “couldn’t actually spell it,” he explains.
A decade on and Jaques — now 26 (and hopefully able to spell the name of his company) — isn’t just enjoying a culinary honor from Hermès. This week sees the release across U.S. theaters of “Sunny Dancer,” his second feature as director and a film starring the likes of Bella Ramsey, Neil Patrick Harris, James Norton and Jessica Gunning.
Amassing that caliber of names, getting a movie made and landing U.S. distribution is no small feat for any indie filmmaker, especially someone still so early on in their career. But “Sunny Dancer” is just the latest and greatest achievement for Jaques, who in practically no time at all has hustled, blagged and charmed his way into the entertainment world, becoming one of of the U.K.’s most exciting and buzzy new creatives — and one with an impressive and growing rolodex of collaborators and admirers drawn in by his infectious enthusiasm.
This status was recently underlined by Hollywood, at a meal at L.A.’s ultra-exclusive San Vicente Bungalows set up by his manager with, of all people, Al Pacino and David O. Russell.
“David just kept shouting that I was the ‘Tom Holland of filmmaking,’ which I thought was iconic,” says Jaques, still sounding slightly dumbstruck by the experience. Meanwhile, across the other side of the table, Pacino was telling him how “excited” he was to see “Sunny Dancer.” “He was such a supporter and seemed so impressed by what I had done — and I just felt that was so utterly kind.”
Back on home soil, another supporter is David Parfitt, the veteran producer who won the best picture Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love.” In perhaps more British terms, he once described Jaques as the “kind of guy that’s beating up the industry.”
“I was like, ‘Woah, that’s savage,’” says Jaques with a chuckle. “But I also loved it, because I was like, you know what, I’ve been quite unapologetic in my way of doing things. I really believe that if you don’t ask, you don’t get and the worst people can say is ‘no.’ You’ll be upset for a bit, and that’s important. But then you dust yourself off and you go again.”
Neil Patrick Harris, George Jaques and Bella Ramsey at the “Sunny Dancer” at the Berlinale.
Getty Images
It would seem, at least from the outside, that few have an asking-to-getting hit rate on par with Jaques, as indicated by both his “Sunny Dancer” cast and its U.K. launch, attended by Kylie Minogue. In classic Jaques style, he’d connected with the pop icon after managing to get backstage at a concert of hers shortly after finishing shooting the film. Naturally, for a special screening in London, he invited her along.
It’s a skill he’s been perfecting since he first launched Athenaeum, when he somehow raised £4,000 ($5,300) in his local pub to stage “Dilate,” a play he’d written about teenage drug culture, in an abandoned railway arch at London Bridge. At the time, however, he had bigger — and hilariously naive — plans for the production.
“When you’re 16, you’re ballsy. So I called the National Theatre and said ‘I’d love to speak to Nicholas Hytner as I’d really like to put my play on here,’” he recalls. “And they were just like… ‘No.’ But I didn’t know that wasn’t the thing to do!”
Even without the support of one of London’s most prestigious playhouses, “Dilate” — with a little help from Jaques’ builder dad and a small amount of stolen electricity from the Porsche garage conveniently located next door — was a sell-out. And this was despite the fact Jaques was simultaneously juggling being writer, director and star, his first year of high school exams and working on a market stall in Clapham selling donuts, pizza and sausage rolls.
Two weeks after its short run ended, word got around, and Jaques received an out-of-the blue call from Sky’s then managing director of content (and later CEO of Sky Studios) Gary Davey, inviting him in for a chat.
“I remember thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’” At the meeting, Jaques was also introduced to Zai Bennett, now overseeing production for BBC Studios, and Anne Mensah, currently heading up U.K. content for Netflix. Thanks to Bennett, who he credits as a mentor, he also walked away with Sky agreeing to sponsor his already-written second play (this time about mental health and suicide, which he would put on in a “real theater”).
Another early mentor for Jaques, who by this stage was already being described as a “budding impresario” in his local paper, would be the British actor Jason Flemyng, who he says has been a “huge part of my career.” Introduced via an estate agent, Flemying agreed to chip in £1,000 towards his second play off the back of a phone call and would later produce Jaques’ first short film “Silence” (written while he worked at a barber shop, made for “no money” and shot largely in London’s Wandsworth Common). “Silence,” about PTSD and “probably the darkest film I’ve ever made,” would world premiere at the Bahamas Film Festival (run by the friend of a lawyer Jaques had met along the way).
“I went over with my dad and had the most wild time — I think I was about 18 or 19, in the Bahamas, with my first film, and I picked up an award. It was like… what the fuck?” Jaques asserts that he’s since insisted every film of his screen in the Bahamas.
It should be noted that some major industry connections have come about via more underhand methods.
While the Sony hack may have been disastrous for the studio, it was a boost for Jaques in his early years. Amid the rubble of highly controversial emails, he picked out the address of Sony Pictures Television’s head of international production Wayne Garvie.
“So I cold emailed him and he was like, ‘How the hell did you get my email?” he says. “I told him, ‘I got it from the hacks, Wayne.;”
Garvie — a hugely respected name in TV — has been “a mentor of mine ever since — I adore him and he’s been so kind,” says Jaques, who adds that they’re currently “working out loads of stuff we’re going to do together.”
Of course, figuring out an email address isn’t particularly difficult. Having been comically rejected by the National Theatre’s front desk the first time around, a couple of years later — now with several stage productions under his belt — Jaques discovered the address of Hytner and dropped him a note.
“I basically said: ‘When I was 16, I reached out to the National, but now I’m 18 and I’ve run my own theater company for a few years. I would love to meet you.’”
Hytner, one of the most accomplished names in British theater, replied, met the teenager for a coffee, helped him land his first agent and allowed him to intern on a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” sitting in rehearsals and watching him direct.
It was around this time, while developing his first feature “Black Dog” (by now having teamed with Scottish producer Ken Petrie) that Jaques’ acting career began to take off in a major way. Having already had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part as a German WWI soldier in a trench in Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile” (“I lied and said I was fluent in German,” he says), at the age of 20 he landed the joint lead alongside Jude Law in Marc Munden’s experimental 12-hour live single-camera drama “The Third Day” for Sky, made with the renowned Punchdrunk immersive theater company.
The wild-sounding shoot on a remote British island — filmed in the middle of COVID for added complications — saw Jaques “being buried alive” in a trench with Law and, in one scene, forced to throw himself “while in my underpants” into the freezing sea. It was a scene he had to redo several times, to the extent that he actually caught hypothermia.
“And it was the most amazing thing in my career I’ve ever done,” he says. “I am so proud of the work because forever on, after that show, I was the boy that that got hypothermia and went through what Jude Law did for less of the credit!”
Following “The Third Day” would come another lead role alongside another acting icon, this time Samantha Morton in Starz’s “The Serpent Queen,” playing the “sickly, dying” King Francis II. Then came Sky’s crime series “A Town Called Malice” alongside his friend Flemying (who was disappointed to learn he was playing his grandfather and not, as he had assumed, his dad).
For all the back-to-back work, there were some splashes of imposter syndrome. Despite his tiny role in “Death on the Nile,” Jaques jokes that he was the “only one who didn’t go to RADA.” Later on, ahead of an important scene in “The Serpent Queen” he recalls freaking out and telling the showrunner Justin Haythe (who also wrote “Revolutionary Road”) that he felt like a “phony” who didn’t know what he was doing and “got here by chance.”
In response, Haythe grabbed his young actor by the arms and told him: “George, I wrote this whole scene for you. Take the confidence we have in you and go smash it.” After he did indeed smash it, co-star Morton urged him to “go home and have a long bath with lavender oil,” advice he ignored the second he got back to the hotel, calling the other actors and heading out to celebrate.
Following “A Town Called Malice” (sadly nixed after one season by Sky), Jaques began shooting his debut feature “Black Dog,” naturally persuading several of the creatives he’d befriended to join him, including the marine supervisor and grip from that very nearly fateful scene in “The Third Day.” Jaques also somehow managed to convince Parfitt — just off his latest Oscar-winning feature “The Father” — to come on board as exec producer.
Bella Ramsey and the young ensemble lead cast of ‘Sunny Dancer’
Colin J Smith
“Black Dog,” a charming road movie about two troubled teens driving from London to Scotland, screened at the London Film Festival in 2023, earning solid reviews. Suddenly many more people, and not just those on the receiving end of a ballsy email or phone call, were beginning to take note of its then just 23-year-old director.
Written while in the edit of “Black Dog,” “Sunny Dancer” — which premiered in Berlin earlier this year, opening the Generation 14plus strand — would take things to the next level.
A coming-of-age “cancer comedy,” the film follows “Game of Thrones” star Ramsey as a grumpy teen sent to what she calls “Chemo Camp” for kids in remission — where she eventually finds a group of misfit friends and a renewed lust for life (plus sex, alcohol, drugs and all the trappings of adolescence she’s missed out on so far). It’s sweet, joyful, deeply funny and also profoundly emotional — taking a sad subject but ditching the standard cliches by making the story about the kids rather than the diagnosis.
Alongside the top-tier cast, it also features a cameo by James Blunt and has a score written by Este Haim. All were charmed — and quickly befriend — by Jaques (who, while in the U.S. promoting the film, has been staying with recent friend addition Neil Patrick Harris). Haim has made T-shirts to help the U.S. launch, which is also being supported by Scissor Sisters, the pop-rock band having attended the premiere in London after their gig was cancelled. There are zero scenes in hospitals.
In a more recent ask-and-get update, for “Sunny Dancer’s” London premiere, Jaques convinced distributor True Brit to hire a bucking bronco and a drag queen “who was doing the splits off every surface.” James Norton, returning to a shoot the following day, initially said he could’t try out the bronco for fear of injuring himself. “Cut to a video of James on the bronco going viral on TikTok — I was just like, I am so gonna get in trouble,” says Jaques. Thankfully Norton didn’t just avoid doing himself a mischief, but won the competition by staying on the the longest.
“James is hardcore!” says Jaques, who admits that, having been given some “lovely bougie clothes” to wear for the occasion, he was “too slippy” and kept falling off.
The image of Norton on a bucking bronco points to another reason why the growing pool of creative talent that Jaques has lured into his path — legitimately or sneakily — have stuck around.
“I think people want to work with us and on our sets because we have a lot of fun,” he explains, noting that Ramsey said it was “the most fun job” of their life. “That’s what I want this industry to be. We’re not doing brain surgery. We’re making films, TV and theater — let’s have a fucking riot along the way.”
As Jaques enthuses, it’s “much more fun” being a yes man who might make things happen.
“I just want to get excited about the world and live in the clouds with people. And if have to come down to reality because I’ve got a fat no, then I’ll come down for a bit. And then I’ll want to go back up again,” he says. “Right now, I’m just so excited about the work we’re making next and the actors we’re working with — and how, as David Parfitt says, we’re just going to keep beating up the industry.”
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