Trivia / Skins

• Cast the Runner-Up: Luke Pasqualino, who eventually won the role of Freddie, originally auditioned for Tony.
• The Cast Showoff: A great many of the actors in Generation 1 are also great singers, with Nicholas Hoult (Tony), Mitch Hewer (Maxxie), April Pearson (Michelle), Mike Bailey (Sid), Joe Dempsie (Chris), Aimee-Ffion Edwards (Sketch), and Siwan Morris (Angie) all showing it off at various points.
  • Mitch Hewer is also a great dancer, which was kind of a necessity to play Maxxie.
• The Danza: Josie Long playing Chris' career counsellor Josie.
  • Humorously averted with the Fitches. Katherine Prescott plays Emily while Megan Prescott plays Katie.
• Dawson Casting: Averted with the main cast. Played (justifiably) straight in series 6 with Poppy, the 14-year-old Alo has sex with without realising she's underage, who's played by a 19-year-old.
  • Holly Earl, the girl who played Poppy Champion who was supposed to be 13 and who had a pedophilic storyline revolve around her, but Holly is in fact a year older than Will Merrick, who played Alo. She is 23 while he's 22.
  • The American version found out the hard way why so many teen dramas employ this trope — Moral Guardians accused the show of being child pornography for putting its 17-year-old actors in risque situations.
• Directed by Cast Member: Harry Enfield directed two episodes of series 2. Daniel Kaluuya, aka "Posh Kenneth," also wrote Jal's S2 episode and Thomas's S3 episode.
• Enforced Method Acting: When JJ blows fire in his S3 episode, when he's in the shed with Freddie, Effy and Cook. While Ollie Barbieri was learning the trick, Luke, Kaya and Jack were put under the impression that the fire would be added in with special effects, so their shock when it happened was completely genuine.
• Fake Nationality: The Polish student from the pilot episode. It's obvious from even from her pretty much "niezrozumiale" (incomprehensible) "Ostatnio! Prawdziwa chłop przybywa." that Polish is not the first language of the actress. Judging from her actual skill (...Or So I Heard) in Italian, it's not her second either.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Highly controversial Russian series Shkola (School) is basically Skins IN RUSSIA with the Serial Numbers Filed Off. However, while it's been accused by some of having the profanity, sexual content and general crapsackiness of Skins cranked up to eleven, others state that it's actually much tamer than Skins and the profanity isn't even as rampant (pointing out that there are even episodes without any sexual content at all), but rather that inappropriate content is just a lot more strictly monitored there - and depicting daily life in the country in a less-than-pretty way is frowned on.
  • Additionally, the BBCThree show Coming of Age is Skins WITH MORE BAD SEX JOKES AND ONE-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS!. It's widely considered to be crap, but still gets enough viewers to get renewed. Alternately, it's considered to be Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps WITH KIDS! Yeah, because somebody thought that was a good idea.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: If you want to see the original uncut episodes, yeah. Due to music costs, the dvds cut all the licensed music. This includes replacing Tony's singing On The Street Where you live with an original song, and completely removing the climactic Wild World music finale of series one. A petition for the original music is underway at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/region-1-dvd-box-set-of-skins-generation-1-uk/
• Lying Creator:
  • Matty DOES have ties to a character in Season 5, Nick (his brother).
  • The writers said in an interview toward the beginning of S3 that Naomi was not gay.
  • Many lesbian fans saw all the hyping of Tea as a super-confident lesbian, after she started sleeping with Tony, repeatedly, as this trope.
  • Jamie Brittain said that the pattern of having a kind of light season followed by a Darker and Edgier season wouldn't happen for Generation 3. S6 is probably the darkest season yet, with a main character in a coma as of the first episode, and dying in the second, a character that ran away and is wanted by the cops, a pregnant girl who really doesn't know what to do and can't even admit to herself that she's pregnant, problems with Russian mafia, and most of the characters being troubled psychologicaly by grief. And from what we've seen from the previews, it's not going better to be better in the last 2 episodes. It doesn't.
• Reality Subtext: Ironically, while at the end of series 2, Anwar is the only member of the main cast who isn't 'going somewhere' with his life—but immediately after leaving the show, Dev Patel was cast as the lead in Slumdog Millionaire. Not bad.
• Screwed by the Network: E4 cut the budget for series 4, resulting in there only being eight episodes. For nine characters. Series 5 was also limited to eight episodes, although at least the creators were prepared that time. It was fixed with the upcoming Series 6, which has been confirmed for ten episodes.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The US version almost had this, when Moral Guardians started asserting that the show violated child pornography laws and threatened to get law enforcement involved. The show didn't actually violate any laws, though, so all it resulted in was the loss of some gullible advertisers. Enough, however, for MTV to cancel the series, so they won.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • Nicholas Hoult and Kaya Scodelario are very convincing on-screen siblings with those Icy Blue Eyes, their pale skin and dark hair and as a credit to their acting, they manage to have also the same mannerisms;
  • Chris' father is played by Mark Heap, who definitely looks like Joe Dempsie, as Jal lampshades in-universe.
• What Could Have Been: Had S4 had the full 9-10 episodes instead of getting Screwed by the Network, Pandora and Naomi would have had their own episodes. In fact, the finale was initially planned to be all Naomi's, but because of the shorter season they had to use it to wrap up some other storylines, too.

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