Deadline has partnered with The Brit List to profile some of the emerging writers who have made this year’s ranking of the best unproduced UK film and TV projects. Launched in 2007, The Brit List has previously featured projects including The King’s Speech and Responsible Child. In this piece, we profile Jack Holden, who has made the list with Revolting.
EXCLUSIVE: Writer-actor Jack Holden has always looked to true stories for his inspiration and the tale of how the Gay Liberation Front sabotaged a meeting of conservatives, Christians and anti-homosexuality activists at the 1971 Nationwide Festival of Light felt like the perfect jump off point for a TV drama.
He discovered the idea for Revolting, his Brit List 2025 entry, after reading an account of the incident in a book by British LGBTQ+ rights campaigning icon Lisa Power.
The barely believable but entirely true story saw gay rights activists trick their way into the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, London by dressing plainly and conservatively – one even went as far as dressing as nun, while another donned the garbs of a bishop.
As the speeches began, chaos consumed the day as air horns were blasted, pages from pornographic magazines thrown down from the balconies and white mice released on to the floor, before the ‘nun’ started dancing up and down the aisles shouting comic profanity.
“I read more around it and found testimony online, and it almost sounded too good to be true,” says Holden. “It struck me this would be a great basis for an alternative heist action-thriller.”
The infamous incident, considered a seminal moment in British gay rights, will be one of several such moments in time that Holden envisages for Revolting, as it tracks Power’s real-life experiences in the movement over two decades.
“Our collective consciousness of LGBT activism starts in 1980s, but it has been going on for a very long time,” says Holden. “It was much harder in the ‘70s. There weren’t Pride parades or public acknowledgement. It was a much braver and more radical thing to speak out and especially to enact this kind of direct action.”
Holden acknowledges that there is “an aversion to anything not set in the moment, which works against that plan, but says Revolting is not “deep period” and is really a story about “humanity.”
He developed the scripts with Rachel Harvey, the former Mam Tor development exec, and has taken inspiration from It’s a Sin, the Channel 4 and HBO Max AIDS/HIV drama set in London between 1981 and 1991, and advice from its writer, Russell T. Davies, who Holden met during a Channel 4 Screenwriting course. “Russell came to see my play Cruise in Manchester and has been very kind,” he adds. “He’s there to read things and bounces ideas off. He’s been a really good mentor.”
The telephone switchboard
As chance would have it, Holden and Power had separately volunteered at telephone service Switchboard LGBT, where a random call from a gay man served as inspiration for Cruise, Holden’s well-received one-man West End debut show. Having trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, he continues to work in theater and is currently on attachment at the National Theatre Studio in London. “It is keeping me busy for the foreseeable future,” he says.
Holden’s acting career was immediately successful, as straight out of drama school, he landed the lead role as Albert Narracott in War Horse, the West End version of the play that Steven Spielberg directed as a moving war movie in 2011. Cruise was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Play, while Kenrex: A True Crime Thriller has been lauded critically.
He has continued to act, primarily on stage, but also picked up screen credits for the likes of BBC drama Traitors and Ten Percent, the UK remake of Call My Agent!. This year, he wrote and directed short film Safari, which was produced by My Accomplice, the east London production company behind the likes of Prime Video Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams. The pair have teamed again for his debut full-length feature, Man Made, about the modern electronic music scene, and he is also getting ready for his adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty to run at the Almeida Theatre this fall.
He reveals he has projects in development with Line of Duty maker World Productions, one a political thriller set in Westminster following the results of a referendum result.
The script for Revolting, which was first developed during the Channel 4 course and is being represented by Independent Talent Group, is in solid shape, with feedback from numerous industry players helping its form. “It’s defined its own genre in a way, but it borrows a lot from Russell T. Davies,” he says of the tone. “There’s an evident social message there, but it’s wrapped in a funny, poppy plot.”
With 15 nominations, Revolting is one of the hottest projects on the Brit List this year, and Holden is hoping to join forces with a production company to develop it further. “I believe in the script and really would love someone who sees the potential in it to come and help with ideas for the rest of the season,” he says. “The grand ambition is that each episode leads up to a big set piece. It’s full of drama.”
The post Writer-Performer Jack Holden Channels ‘It’s A Sin’ For Raucous Gay Liberation Movement TV Drama ‘Revolting’ – Brit List 2025 appeared first on Deadline.
