Lucas Jones

Shirt, vest and trousers by Simone Rocha. Belts by Dolce&Gabbana

Sitting down to talk to Lucas Jones was a rare pleasure. Instantly engaging, completely present and unwaveringly down-to-earth, he sat down with 5'ELEVEN” to talk about his soon-to-be-published book, I Still Believe in Miracles. We spent time discussing nomadic upbringings, rewriting the school curriculum and musing on the creative process. 

Jones is a poet who's an actor, an actor who directs, a director who writes screenplays – in short, a storyteller. His poems, which he performs in short videos uploaded to his Instagram account (which has, incidentally, amassed over half a million followers), capture the zeitgeist in a way that few art forms do. Their subject matter, which ranges from mental health to modern masculinity, carries a duality that is somehow both urgent and laid-back, and has made Lucas Jones a name you'll want to follow - if you don't already. 

Words by Carla McCannon

Photographed by Ana Orozco. Styled by Andrew Burling. Grooming by Natalie Stokes at Carol Hayes using Nars. Photographer assisted by Ben Parish. Lucas Jones appears courtesy of Prosper PR

Coat, waistcoat and trousers by Kenzo. Vest by Sunspel. Shoes by Grenson

Can you tell the readers of 5'ELEVEN” a bit about yourself? 

I'm an actor and a poet and a filmmaker. I was born in London, moved to a place called Letchworth, then moved to a place called Huntingdon, moved back to Letchworth, and then back to Huntingdon and finally to London.

I felt very much like a new kid all the time, because I moved around so much. I'd lived in seven homes by the time I was fourteen. I thought that was how things were. I really had the sense that you go somewhere for a bit, you're a new kid, and then you just fit somewhere else, and you're a new kid again. I've heard in my adult life that that's a really common trait in actors: people who have the ability to enter a new space and feel quite relaxed, maybe even adjust themselves slightly or code-switch to be able to fit into whatever environment they're in. I definitely remember thinking, “In this school, they support this football team, so I guess that's who I support now.” 

It also makes you really open to newness and quite excited about the idea. I loved moving house as a kid. And still, it's one of my favourite feelings.

One of my most favourite nostalgic memories is picturing a room that's just been emptied with boxes ready to go. It's this whole new horizon: an exciting world that's about to begin. Also, when I was a little kid, I was very shy and sensitive, so having another chance to start again and maybe try and present myself differently was appealing. I remember when I moved to one school thinking, maybe I'll just get everyone to call me a different name - maybe I'll get people to call me Ice! [Laughter] 

Great choice!

I still love the opportunity to reinvent myself a bit. Especially in my early adult life, because you're always searching for identity, and especially if you're a very sensitive, naturally creative person, exploration of identity and the existential crisis of being alive is always very present. I remember being in school and being five or six and thinking - “What is this?” - and feeling really odd about how I was quite self-aware of it. I think [moving around] gave me quite a nice sort of drifting perspective of the world, even though I was only moving from small town to small town, but I was always the new kid. 

School is so important to your ecosystem as a kid, and you don't have to go far, I think, to get that experience of being the new kid. 

Yes. I hated school so much. I remember being in year four, thinking I can't believe I have to do this for another nearly ten years. I look back as an adult now, and I think I was right. Obviously, the fundamentals of reality are important. So learning, absolutely. But Pythagoras?

 I remember one time thinking, there's no way I'm being gaslit into thinking that this is important for me, because there's no way - in my life at least - that I'm going to use this. I still feel if you put me in that class now as an adult, I would behave the same way. It wasn't going to benefit my life in a way that it might have benefited some other kids. Maybe they were loving that in the way that I was loving drama and music, which were amazing. 

As a system, education is focusing, I think, partly on the wrong things. It's so focused on IQ, but how about we evolve it to focus on EQ as a priority - mindfulness and how to talk and how to listen to each other? And that ties into the themes of what you write about: hope, respect and compassion.

Yes, I completely agree. Something I'm really grateful to my parents for - specifically, I'm thinking of memories of my mum - is that she knew that if I had the right emotional sense of the world, I could work the rest out.  I'm really grateful for her ability to see through the fact that whether you've done your homework or not is an indicator of whether you're kind and whether you're going to have a fulfilling life.

  I'm so frustrated when I think about not just my experience of school, but the structure in general, and actually, pretty much children in general, because you're made to believe that because you are younger, you aren't able to comprehend the complexity of certain dynamics and how these social structures should be. I actually think you can see it more clearly. I remember once seeing a teacher screaming and thinking, “There's no way that you are the arbiter of what's morally correct between us. Just because you're older and you've seen more things, doesn't mean you have a clearer scope than us.”

But there's a sort of self-gaslighting, where you think, “But I'm just a child.” I think that's really dangerous. I really want to encourage children to trust their instinct and their sense of the world. It's also probably the thing that's going to be the most beneficial to you in your life: I was in trouble in school for chatting and attention-seeking, and now my full job is talking and writing and chatting and acting. So you are who you are, fundamentally. It's a very twee message, but it's true. 

Yes, I think it's about validation, isn't it? I think that's just such an important word. Validating a child can make them so strong emotionally. It reminds me of your famous poem, “I'll teach my boys to be dangerous men.” Who is the next generation going to be, and how can they be as compassionate and kind as possible? Because, as the title of your book says, these are difficult times. 

Absolutely. They really are. I love that everyone's convening and saying, “Things have always been difficult, but this is especially difficult, isn't it?” We can all agree that this is a specifically weird time that hasn't happened before. 

Coat and trousers by Loewe. Shoes by Grenson

Your love of the written word and cinema started at school. Have they always coexisted? 

Oh, absolutely. That's a perfect observation of the crossover. 

 I wasn't really engaged at school apart from drama, and maybe a little bit of PE. But then I had one English teacher who showed the validation you were just talking about in a creative writing exercise. She was very key, because that one little drop of validation from an adult you trust saying you're good at that, or you should consider that a bit more, or try and be even better at that, goes an unbelievably far distance for a child.

The very next thing we did in that class was write a film review. My dad was always showing me films and saying, “You've got to see this classic.” Some of my favourite times [growing up] were spent at the cinema.  So, I thought, ”Oh, I get to be creative about a film. Amazing.” I wrote this pretty thorough review and got an A star for it. It was the first time I'd ever been given an A star in anything. It felt very validating. Also, I genuinely enjoyed it, and I thought, “Oh, so I can enjoy doing something that I'm rewarded for and told I'm good at in the world. I think I'll try and do that forever!” 

We got into poetry shortly after that. I went through the whole anthology we were studying in my spare time at home, annotating poems. That's when I fell in love with it.   

I'm working on a feature at the moment - I finished the script at the beginning of this year, and now we're working on the very long, logistical production of getting it made next year. I obviously put myself in it [as an actor]. [Laughter] I didn't see much difference between writing a poem and writing a film. 

I always have this perception of being creative as an energy that you have to release in some form, and whether that's into poetry or film or music, the source is the same. It just comes out in different colours at different times, depending on where you're at and what's available. I think they're very married up to me, those two things, film and poetry, they're very entwined. And I love them both. 

I like that visual idea of creative energy: as different lights shine on it, it comes out in different forms.  

Yes, a lot of creative people have OCD and anxiety, and someone said if you're not creating outwardly, you just start creating inwardly. I think that's the nail on the head. If I'm not able to access writing poetry and acting, I get quite unwell.

I start internally collapsing under the weight of the creative force. I don't think you have a choice, and I'm sure as a writer, you understand that feeling. 

Absolutely. I feel that I become a better version of myself on every level if I am deeply engaged in a writing project, 

Yes, writing this film, for example, I've been really deeply involved in the characters. And when I am, I feel as though I'm presenting to the world in a better way: I'm a bit more confident, a bit more eloquent, a bit more able to keep the ball in the air socially. All I've done is self-generate [that confidence]. It sounds very grandiose or arrogant, and I don't mean that, but you sit alone and create this world, and then you are somehow able to bring it into your actual life and be a bit more interesting at a party or something! [Laughter] It's really fascinating. There's something mystical about it, something slightly spiritual. I think in this day and age, we're so postmodernist and cynical, it's as though we're pretending there's no magic because we've overcorrected and shut up all the magic, but the magic's real. The book's called I Still Believe in Miracles because of this. 

Top by Dolce&Gabbana. Vest by Sunspel. Trousers by Loewe

It's coming out really soon, and Penguin are publishing it. How did it all come about?  

I self-published a book in 2023, I made a hundred copies and thought if I could get rid of them to some friends, I'd cover my rent. Then I realised that strangers were buying it. People started engaging with the poetry really vividly. At the beginning, it was very positive and very negative at the same time.

I put these hundred books out, and they sold out really quickly. Over Christmas, it went really viral. Jesse J shared one of the poems, and then suddenly there was a lot of demand for the book. So, I started to create some infrastructure around it. By the time the second book came out, I had an office and staff. It's become this whole enterprise, which is amazing.

My now-agent got in touch with me, and fairly soon after that, the Penguin conversation came up.

I've spent the last year working on this, so it's really exciting. It's been a really positive, beautiful experience, and I'm obviously unbelievably grateful for every single person who has helped me build this. 

Congratulations! What's your creative process with poetry?

I'm still trying to understand what exactly it is, but the closest I've got is: I try and sit and think, “What's the truest thing I can think of at that moment?” And then I get out of the way of that thought and try not to lie and try not to worry, especially in this day and age, where you're very conscious of saying something that might offend someone. One of the most popular poems I've written is a poem called Some Good News If You Wish You Were Dead. It was in the first self-published book. And it's so funny because it's the one poem that I thought I might cut out because it's a bit too on the nose. I wasn't sure if some people might be upset because it's talking about the concept of suicide. In the end, I trusted my instinct and left it in, and that was the poem that really changed everything, actually. People still message me saying, “That writing found me on the day I was going to do something.” It was written in ten minutes, all the way through in one go. 

I honestly feel that it's as if you open a channel - and I know it sounds very woo-woo - but it's as though you're receiving a signal, and you have to not judge it and just allow it to be downloaded sincerely, and then try and relay that in the best way you can. You can never get exactly what you're trying to say, or very rarely. Sometimes, if you get a certain line or two, you think, “That is exactly what I'm trying to get”. But it's almost as if you imprint the image of this download onto the page, and sometimes, it's slightly misaligned, but you try and get as close as possible to it. I really think you receive these things, and you have to be open to them. And if you think, “I'd look cool if I said that” or “I'd be considered by this audience more if I said that”, it starts getting worse. The more you put yourself in, the worse it gets, I think.

Top by Hermès. Vest by Sunspel

That's interesting, and I really relate to it. I wrote a middle-grade novel, and at times, I felt exactly this sense of “I can't believe I've written this”, although obviously, they're my fingers typing and I guess it's coming from me, but there is something other, isn't there, in the creative process? 

Ah, I got goosebumps hearing you say that! Yes. It's why when people are really congratulatory or complimentary, I say thanks and feel as though, “I saw what happened as well, but I can't really take credit for it”. Then at the same time, if people hate it, that wasn't me; I was just offering it out. [Laughter] It's a really weird phenomenon. In a way, a little ego means I wish I did feel more like I could take credit. There are times when it feels that you have to shepherd something very gently and gracefully through a narrow passageway: it feels as if that's the bit you do. You sort of nurture it through this process, as if there's an idea there somewhere, but don't break it. You land it down gently, and think, “Cool. Managed to get there!” It feels as though you're pushing sand around, until you find [the idea]. It's beautiful. Very strange.

Looking to the future, where would you like to be putting your energy professionally in the next few years?

That's a lovely question - I think in the next few years I'll really just be enjoying chasing the waterfall of the opportunities that have opened up to me most recently. I'll put 'I Still Believe' out, I'll make this film (it's called 'Miss You Forever, Zara Drake' !), I've got a few pages of a novella that I'm pretty excited about. I love writing so deeply, but for me, first and foremost I'm always trying to get back on set and act and be in that space. And it's beautiful because all of those little avenues kind of lead to the same place, in a way; Trying to make sense of the world through stories and words.

This has been such a lovely chat. 

I feel like I've just been on a million tangents and talked about school for way too long.

 I feel like I take people on tangents! 

No, no, no. This has been lovely. 

I Still Believe in Miracles: Poems to Find Meaning in Difficult Times is published by Penguin on the 8^th of January 2026 – you can pre-order your copy now.