Hugh Grant recently said that romantic comedies are hard, that you “need to really mean” the romantic part. But when I ask Sharpe, he downplays the pressure of his big romcom moment. “I don’t think I was going into it thinking, How am I going to play this romantic character? I just needed to work out who he is and how he’s feeling in each of these beats,” he says. “There was so much on the page to—”
(He breaks off to politely address a seagull he’s been inadvertently steering the boat towards: “Oh, sorry.”)
“—play with. I did feel nervous, just not about that in particular.”
So Sharpe didn’t prepare for the role by watching montages of Grant doing that bright but nervous smile in films released between 1994 and 2004. Instead, he thought back to how he felt during a specific period in his life.
After leaving college, Sharpe moved to London and lived in Turnham Green in west London, in a house where his bedroom was the living room. He spent his evenings going to open-mic comedy nights in Whitechapel and trying to make people laugh. Though to hear him tell it, it’s not totally clear his audience always knew that’s what he was doing. “The thing that I’d sometimes do was see how long I could act as if I wasn’t sure about the performing space, like moving chairs around and adjusting the mic, before it stopped being funny for them. And then seeing if I could do it for so long it became funny again,” he says. “I wrote a song about Tipp-Exing a pigeon once… things like that.”
A comedy agent approached him after one of the shows and said sorry, but she couldn’t represent him, because she wasn’t totally sure that what he was doing was comedy. Sharpe mined those strange, out-of-sorts years to play Felix. “It reminded me a bit of that time,” he says. “Being young, trying to figure everything out and feeling a bit dysregulated.”
Dunham wrote the character of Felix as mixed race, but later added that he was from a half-Japanese household in order to make him feel specific to Sharpe. Born in London, Sharpe lived in Tokyo until he was eight years old. When he returned to the UK to go to elementary school, there was a lingering sense of culture shock that he can still remember now. “It took me a minute to figure out the sense of humor or how you’re supposed to be in social settings,” he says. “People don’t always say what they mean. When there’s shade being thrown, you have to figure it out a bit.”
Sharpe later attended Winchester College, an elite boarding school similar to the one Felix went to. As we see his character experience, the milieu wasn’t an exact fit. “I found my people, rather than ‘this as a whole is me,’” he says. “I’ve got some really close friends and I tried to make the most of it in a way, but there were definitely things about it that were sort of not ideal.”
