Second Best

Second Best description

Netflix’s Sex Education star Asa Butterfield makes his much-anticipated stage debut in January 2025 in a play about losing the role of Harry Potter to another child actor. It’s called Second Best and it’s written by Barney Norris, not to be missed.

Asa Butterfield stars in this brilliant one-man play based on the French author David Foenkinos’ wonderful tear-jerker of a novel. Writer Barney Norris’ first book, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, was published in 2016 and he has written three other books since: Undercurrent in 2022, plus two non-fiction books. He has won several important awards for his work.

Second Best – The story

In Second Best, Asa Butterfield plays Martin Hill, a man who as a child narrowly missed out on playing the iconic role of Harry Potter. Now, as he prepares to become a dad for the first time, Martin can’t stop picking away at that seminal moment in his life where everything could have turned out so different.

The plot explores Martin’s many lingering what ifs, straddling ‘hilarious’ and ‘heartbreaking’ perfectly, a universal story so many of us experience as we look back in time and wonder what might have been.

A coming of age story you’ll adore

The play, which is directed by Michael Longhurst, designed by Fly Davis, and produced by Simon Friend, is on stage at Riverside Studios, a coming-of-age story delving into success and failure, love and loss, and fathers and sons. But the universal theme is one we all recognise: the way we feel when our plans don’t succeed.

Playing at Riverside Studios (venue info)