While it’s heart-warming family fare, Finding Father Christmas has a melancholy streak running through it. Not only does Nick have to puncture the magic of Christmas for his son, but he’s also a widower. Buckley’s own boys, Harrison, 14, and Jude, 12, are long beyond the age of believing in Santa, but Buckley can still remember having the chat with them. “I think it was sadder for me and my wife, to be honest,” he says. “It made sense for them, but for us a bit of the magic had gone.” Can Buckley remember when he found out? “Yeah. I had older cousins. They ruined everything for me. I think I was five or six.” Ouch.
One of the main reasons Buckley took the role was to work with Rush, the young actor with dwarfism who so comprehensively stole the show in Daisy May Cooper’s Am I Being Unreasonable? “He was brilliant. I’d say if Christmas was a person, it would be Lenny. He’s the happiest person I’ve ever met.”
For many, it may be jarring to see Buckley playing an (almost) middle-aged dad, but it also makes a refreshing change. It’s a gentle, subtle performance that shows that there are more strings to his bow than the loudmouth Jay. “Yeah, it’s nice,” he agrees, before changing his mind. “Is it nice? It’s a bit depressing, maybe. I used to be the young, sexy up-and-comer and now I’m playing dads. But this is about father-son relationships, which are complicated, and I’ve got a lot to draw on there. You want your boys to grow up to be nice young gentlemen, and my boys are really nice, caring young men. It’s about guiding them and constantly having a dialogue, and being comfortable talking. And sometimes that can be uncomfortable.”
Television in 2025 has been dominated by this subject, thanks to Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s knife-crime drama Adolescence. Scores of people called for all teenage boys in the country to watch it, and when Netflix made the series free to UK secondary schools, the move was heralded by the Prime Minister. Buckley, who has not seen Adolescence, has a wonderfully different strategy. When Harrison struggled a little at secondary school, Buckley showed him, for the first time, The Inbetweeners, a show often dismissed as displaying teenage boys at their vulgar and dunderheaded worst.
