There are plenty of questions you can ask an actor who has spent almost two decades appearing in everything from Hugoand The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas to Sex Education, but when I finally got the chance to interview Asa Butterfield, I decided there was one mystery that urgently needed solving: does this random bloke from Reddit actually look like him?
The answer, surprisingly, was yes.
I caught up with Asa for The Movie Dweeb to talk about his new film Our Hero, Balthazar, but somewhere between discussing toxic masculinity, nearly being flattened by enormous trucks in Texas and planning a hypothetical Carpool Karaoke spin-off with Jack Black, I confronted him with a Reddit post that has been quietly sitting on the internet waiting for this exact journalistic investigation.
And after 20 years of interviews, apparently nobody had ever thought to show Asa Butterfield somebody else’s boyfriend and demand that he assess their facial similarities.
Asa Butterfield Finally Meets His Reddit Doppelgänger
The original Reddit post was shared by user tikicheese, who uploaded pictures alongside the brilliantly straightforward declaration: “My boyfriend gets compared to actor Asa Butterfield all the time.”
Naturally, I brought the photographic evidence directly to Asa.
“There is someone on there that claims their boyfriend looks exactly like you,” I explained, before revealing the pictures and asking Asa to decide whether Reddit had discovered his long-lost double.
Rather than immediately dismissing the comparison, Asa genuinely studied the man’s face and started identifying similarities. “He’s got my eyes,” he said, before adding: “Yeah, he’s got my eyes and he’s kind of got my head shape.”
And, to the enormous relief of one Reddit user’s boyfriend, Asa ultimately gave the comparison his seal of approval. “If you saw him walking past the stage, like, he’s not — he’s not far off, you know? I’ll give her that. He’s not far off.”
I then asked whether this was something that had been repeatedly sprung on him throughout his day of interviews, because I naturally assumed every professional journalist had prepared a folder of men who vaguely resembled Asa Butterfield.
“That is honestly a first, Dan,” he replied. “And I’ve been doing this for 20 years.”
I’m a real journalist, baby.
Our Hero, Balthazar Gave Asa Butterfield One Of His Most Challenging Characters Yet
The actual reason we were talking (before I turned the interview into Long Lost Family) was Our Hero, Balthazar, a darkly funny and deliberately uncomfortable film starring Asa as Solomon, alongside Jaeden Martell as Balthazar.
I told Asa that one of the things I loved most about the film was how difficult it is to pin down. It can be genuinely funny one minute and deeply uncomfortable the next, shifting between comedy, tragedy, satire and social commentary without giving the audience the comfort of knowing exactly how they are supposed to feel.
That unpredictability, according to Asa, was one of the reasons getting the independent film made was such a challenge.
“It could have gone in the wrong direction with the wrong guidance and the wrong hands kind of moulding it,” he explained. “It’s a comedy. It’s also a tragedy. It’s a social commentary. It’s satire. It’s quite hard to say what this movie’s tone is because it’s deliberately a bit of everything.”
Asa plays Solomon, a young man he readily described as “misogynistic”, “abrasive”, “manic”, “rude” and “kind of a bit gross”, which presented him with a particularly difficult acting challenge: finding the vulnerable person underneath all of those qualities without excusing the person Solomon has become.
“The challenge was, how do you get the audience to empathise with this character and get under his skin and see that really he’s just lonely?” Asa said. “He just wants some affection and wants a friend.”
He explained that Solomon represents something increasingly relevant to young men who feel they have no community, support system or positive figure to turn towards, leaving them susceptible to the toxic online spaces that promise them belonging. Asa described these as “incredibly toxic” cycles involving violence and toxic masculinity, with the film attempting to unpack how somebody can end up trapped inside them.
His relationship with Balthazar only makes things stranger. Solomon believes he has finally found the friendship he desperately wants, but has to construct a false version of himself to maintain it, while, as Asa rather succinctly put it, Balthazar is “an actual psycho”.
The result is what Asa described as an “absurd buddy comedy tragedy” about two spectacularly misguided young men, which is probably as accurate a description of Our Hero, Balthazar as you are going to get.
Asa Butterfield Loves That People Don’t Recognise Him In Our Hero, Balthazar
Solomon also looks so different from the Asa Butterfield audiences know from Sex Education that many of the reactions to the trailer have essentially consisted of people discovering, in real time, that they have been looking at Asa all along.
For an actor, that turns out to be pretty much the dream.
“I love it,” Asa told me. “That is the dream compliment.”
He then revealed that the transformation worked a little too effectively at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. At the afterparty, Asa found himself chatting to somebody who had just watched Our Hero, Balthazar, only for her to ask what he was doing there.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I was in the movie.’ She was like, ‘Were you?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I was that guy.’ She was like, ‘What the f***?’”
She had quite literally watched the entire film, met its star immediately afterwards and still didn’t realise Solomon was Asa Butterfield.
Rather than being offended, he loved it. “Honestly, that is the greatest compliment you could have given me,” he recalled telling her.
Thankfully, she also hadn’t spent the previous five minutes telling him how terrible she thought Solomon was.
Filming In Texas Was Apparently Slightly Terrifying
Our Hero, Balthazar was partly filmed around Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas, where Asa spent roughly three and a half weeks shooting, and, because I want to now become best friends with Asa, I asked him to plan our hypothetical night out.
His suggestion was what he described as the biggest honky-tonk in the world: an enormous venue filled with barbecue, pool tables, darts, beer, live music, line dancing and an actual rodeo.
“It was one of the wildest places I’ve ever been, both good and bad,” Asa said, explaining that the rodeo itself was something he found “pretty disturbing”.
Apparently there may have even been a shooting range, at which point I realised he wasn’t describing a night out so much as an extremely elaborate Red Dead Redemption side mission.
Texas also presented a rather more immediate danger during filming because Asa performed many of Solomon’s driving scenes himself, despite having only passed his driving test around four months earlier.
Not only was he suddenly driving on the opposite side of the road, but he was also trying to act, remember dialogue, change gears, maintain his position alongside a camera vehicle and embody a character who isn’t exactly known for carefully checking his mirrors.
“I’m trying to survive on the road with these huge, like, 18-wheeler trucks coming past me, but I’m trying to act,” he explained. “I’m trying to remember my lines.”
He described the sequences as “really quite stressful at times”, although that genuine sense of danger arguably helped the finished film. As Asa pointed out, when audiences watch Solomon driving and think “Oh God, are they going to crash?”, there may be a tiny bit more truth behind that anxiety than they realise.
Asa Butterfield Wants Jack Black For The Greatest Carpool Karaoke Ever
Naturally, hearing about Asa driving around America led me to pitch the obvious next stage in the Our Hero, Balthazarcinematic universe: Solomon’s Carpool Karaoke.
When I asked him to choose three dream passengers, Asa briefly considered recruiting somebody from one of the local Texas barbecue restaurants before I gave him permission to pick anybody, dead or alive.
“Jack Black,” he immediately answered.
Then came an important clarification.
“I know he’s not dead, but just Jack Black.”
For a horrifying fraction of a second, I thought Asa Butterfield had broken some terrible Jack Black news to me during my own interview.
Thankfully, Jack is very much alive, and Asa explained that the School of Rock and Minecraft star is actually the person he would most like to sit down and have a conversation with.
“I think Jack Black is my number one person I would love to just have a conversation with, let alone Carpool Karaoke,” he said. “He’s an amazing singer. He would have some bangers. In fact, screw the list. I’m only doing Jack.”
There was only one possible song choice after that, so Asa and I inevitably started singing Tenacious D’s Tribute together before deciding that our own musical partnership needed a name.
Tenacious D was taken. Tenacious C sounded ambitious.
So we settled on Tenacious B… B for Balthazar, obviously.
Picturehouse, the marketing campaign is yours for free.
From Hugo And The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas To Sex Education
It is particularly funny hearing Asa say that he has been doing interviews for 20 years because, at just 29, he has already amassed the sort of filmography that would make plenty of actors twice his age jealous.
One of his earliest major roles came in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, in which he played Bruno, the young son of a Nazi commandant whose friendship with a Jewish boy imprisoned on the other side of a concentration camp fence leads towards the film’s devastating conclusion.
He subsequently became the centre of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, playing an orphan living inside the walls of a Paris railway station in the director’s extraordinary love letter to the origins and magic of cinema. The film received 11 Academy Award nominations and won five, giving Butterfield a leading role in one of the most celebrated films of his young career.
He followed that with the science-fiction blockbuster Ender’s Game, playing Ender Wiggin alongside a cast including Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis and Ben Kingsley, before continuing to bounce between independent films and major studio productions.
For an entire generation, however, Asa Butterfield will probably always be Otis Milburn.
Across four seasons of Netflix’s Sex Education, Asa played the painfully awkward teenager who discovers that growing up with a sex therapist for a mother has inadvertently given him enough knowledge to begin dispensing advice to his classmates. The series became one of Netflix’s defining British shows and transformed Asa and co-stars including Emma Mackey, Ncuti Gatwa, Aimee Lou Wood and Connor Swindells into internationally recognised names.
Naturally, I therefore asked whether Sex Education’s resident teenage therapist could solve Solomon’s many, many problems if the two characters were given five minutes together.
“No,” Asa said immediately.
“Otis is good, but Solomon’s issues run far deeper than just a conversation with a teenage sex therapist. He’s got some real deep-rooted trauma.”
Which is disappointing news for the elaborate Sex Education x Our Hero, Balthazar crossover screenplay I had already started writing.
Our Hero, Balthazar Is A Very Different Asa Butterfield Performance
Perhaps that is what makes Our Hero, Balthazar such an interesting addition to Asa Butterfield’s already varied career. After growing up on screen and becoming synonymous with one of television’s most loveable awkward teenagers, Solomon gives him the opportunity to play somebody much more difficult, volatile and uncomfortable.
Asa told me that reactions from younger viewers have been particularly encouraging because they feel the film understands modern audiences and Gen Z without appearing as though somebody from outside that generation is desperately attempting to imitate them.
“People say that it really feels like a modern movie that understands modern audiences and understands Gen Z in a way that I think a lot of films don’t, or they slightly miss,” he said.
Perhaps most interestingly, Asa expected the movie to be considerably more divisive than it has ultimately proved to be. Given the subjects it confronts and the uncomfortable places it is willing to take its characters, he anticipated more viewers being angered or “triggered” by what the film had to say.
Instead, he said young audiences in particular have responded to its willingness to confront those subjects without sanitising them, with the reaction essentially being: “Finally, someone’s got the balls to make a movie about this.”
After nearly 20 years of watching Asa Butterfield jump from emotionally devastating dramas to Scorsese movies, science-fiction blockbusters, Netflix phenomena and now an extremely strange, dark and provocative independent comedy, that willingness to do something audiences aren’t expecting feels pretty appropriate.
And, crucially, we finally know that if acting ever dries up, Asa has three alternative career paths ready to go: driving dangerously around Texas, launching Tenacious B with me and tracking down the Reddit stranger who apparently has his eyes.
For more awkward celebrity encounters, wildly unnecessary investigations and interviews that somehow end with me singing Tenacious D with Asa Butterfield, follow The Movie Dweeb on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
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