Jacks Are Wild in Lord of the Flies (2026)

There is a moment in Lord of the Flies (2026) where Jack Merridew’s face is half-covered in war paint, while the other half is still a child’s, and if that image doesn’t win Lox Pratt an Emmy then the Television Academy should be dissolved and rebuilt from scratch by Nina Gold personally.

Child actors in prestige television are usually the weakest seam in the illusion—over-directed, painfully aware of the camera, speaking in rhythms that belong to the 40-year-old who wrote them. They deliver lines like students reading aloud in class. They cry on cue and you feel nothing because the crying was scheduled.

The boys in Lord of the Flies are different.

These boys are so different it’s making me angry, because now I have to take child actors seriously and I was not prepared for that adjustment.

Jack Thorne—fresh off his Emmy sweep for Adolescence—has done something I didn’t think was possible: he’s written children who sound like children and behave like monsters and both things are true simultaneously. The dialogue doesn’t feel written. It feels overheard. When Piggy tries to talk about toilets and the younger boys can’t stop giggling, that’s not a scripted comedy beat. That’s a school playground transplanted onto a tropical island and filmed with the gravity of a war documentary.

And then there’s the structure. Each episode belongs to a different boy: Piggy. Jack. Simon. Ralph. Four perspectives on the same collapse. Four lenses on the same beast. The show doesn’t tell you civilization is fragile. It shows you four children discovering it in real time, each from inside their own specific nightmare.

Let’s talk about Piggy.

David McKenna plays intelligence the way child actors almost never do—not as precocity, not as a writer’s ventriloquist dummy delivering wisdom beyond his years, but as a burden. Piggy is smart in the way smart kids actually are: inconveniently, exhaustingly, at the worst possible moments. He knows things. He sees things. And no one listens because intelligence without power is just noise, and Piggy has never had power. He has glasses. The glasses are the power. And he never thinks to keep them.

McKenna—who is making his acting debut, who has survived kidney transplants, who Thorne describes as having “this insane buoyant spirit”—makes you feel every moment Piggy is ignored. Not with melodrama. With patience. With the specific frustration of a child who keeps being right and keeps being punished for it. When he dies—slower in this adaptation, devastatingly slower, saying sorry—the weight of it isn’t the death. It’s the apology. Piggy dies apologizing for existing in a world that never made room for him.

Now. Jack.

Lox Pratt has a face that was built for this role the way certain instruments are built for certain music. Angelic at the start—choir boy, wide eyes, the kind of beauty that makes adults trust you automatically. And then the paint goes on. And the beauty doesn’t disappear. It reorganizes. It becomes something predatory wearing something pretty, and the transition is so seamless you can’t identify the exact frame where the boy became the warlord.

That’s the performance. Not a switch. A slide.

Jack never enforces directly. This is the detail that elevates Pratt’s work from good to extraordinary. He doesn’t throw the rocks. He tells Roger to shut Piggy up, and Roger throws the rocks—the same Roger who threw rocks at the littluns in Episode 1, practicing cruelty the way musicians practice scales. Jack seduces. He offers fun, meat, paint, power, freedom from Ralph’s endless rules. He makes savagery feel like a party. He makes civilization feel like homework. And the boys choose the party, because they’re children, and children will always choose the party.

In the book, Jack arrives with almost no backstory. He simply appears, leading his choir, and begins his arc toward tyranny. Here, Thorne gives us just enough to wonder: Jack arrives with no one. No parent, no context, no origin story. Even Piggy asks whether his father is coming. We don’t know if Jack was neglected, if he was cold long before the island, or if he’s simply an asshole. The show refuses to explain him, which is exactly what makes him terrifying. Monsters you can diagnose are manageable. Monsters without backstories are permanent.

And then there’s what Jack performs. Leadership on this island is not authority—it’s theater. Ralph performs responsibility and loses his audience. Jack performs freedom and fills the seats. The war paint isn’t camouflage. It’s a costume. The moment Jack puts it on, he’s no longer a boy pretending to hunt. He’s a boy who has discovered that violence, properly dressed, becomes charisma.

The casting is Nina Gold’s work—the same woman who cast Game of Thrones, The Crown, and Baby Reindeer. She doesn’t miss. Every face in this series tells you exactly who that boy is before he speaks. Ralph’s brown doe eyes—innocent, earnest, doomed to be betrayed by his own decency. Roger’s flat stare—Jack’s weapon before Jack even knows he needs one. And Simon.

Simon, who writes in his diary that he has feelings for Jack.

Let’s talk about what nobody is talking about.

The camera lingers on Simon watching Jack longer than the show strictly needs it to. Not once. Repeatedly. Simon is the only boy who consistently observes Jack instead of merely following or fearing him. He calls Jack a “scared, worried warrior”—not a monster, not a chief, not a rival. A warrior who is scared. That is the language of someone who sees through the performance to the person underneath and loves what he finds there anyway.

The queer subtext between Simon and Jack is not subtext in this adaptation. It’s text that the audience is choosing to read as subtext because acknowledging it would complicate their understanding of the story. Simon’s diary makes it explicit. The show makes it visual. And Jack—who lets the boys kill Simon during the frenzy—never addresses it. Never acknowledges it. The question the show asks and refuses to answer is whether Jack let it happen because he couldn’t stop it or because Simon saw too much of him.

Thorne has said, in the series’ behind-the-scenes documentary, that this is about “losing a generation of boys.” He’s right. But he’s also made a series about the specific violence boys do to the boys who love them, and that’s a conversation the discourse hasn’t caught up to yet.

And then there’s the island.

Everyone is talking about the collapse of civilization. Nobody is talking about the island as a character. The lush green that feels too green. The dark neon violence at night. The way the fire that burns half the island doesn’t feel accidental—it feels like the island relocating the boys to a more dangerous area on purpose, the way a game designer funnels players into the kill zone. The beast lives in the woods, but the island IS the woods. The supernatural isn’t lurking behind the trees. It IS the trees. The devil isn’t whispering from the darkness. The darkness is the whisper.

The boys feel it. All of them. They talk about the beast constantly—not as a theory but as a presence. Something behind them. Something on their shoulder. The show suggests something that the 1963 film and the 1990 adaptation both avoided: that the island is not neutral territory. It chose them. It wanted this.

The score understands this. The cinematography understands this. Every frame is composed with the awareness that beauty and violence are sharing the same space, the same light, the same children’s faces—and the camera doesn’t flinch from either.

Then rescue comes.

The officer steps onto the beach and says what the audience has been thinking: you’re British boys, surely you maintained some order. He says it the way adults always say it—with the assumption that civilization is default and savagery is deviation. He doesn’t understand that he’s looking at proof of the opposite.

The boys throw down their spears.

Immediately. Without discussion. Without transition. One second they’re hunting Ralph to kill him—literally seconds from murder—and the next they’re standing with their hands at their sides like children caught misbehaving at recess. The spears hit the ground and the war paint is suddenly just paint and the hierarchy dissolves because an adult is watching and the performance of innocence resumes automatically.

That’s the most terrifying moment in the entire series. Not the deaths. Not the fire. The speed at which the mask goes back on.

Ralph—coward Ralph, false-promise Ralph, doe-eyed Ralph who told Piggy’s name when he promised he wouldn’t—digs a grave. For Piggy. Because Piggy wanted the pilot buried instead of pushed into the sea. Ralph couldn’t protect Piggy alive. He can honor him dead. It’s too late and they both know it and Ralph does it anyway because guilt is the only currency he has left.

Jack watches from a distance. Jack, who always got along with Ralph. Jack, who only turned on him because Ralph helped Piggy escape. Jack, whose last words about the dead pilot called him “an error of a man.”

They always got along. That’s the worst part. The violence wasn’t born from hatred. It was born from a boy who discovered that power felt better than friendship and chose accordingly.

Lord of the Flies has never really been about children becoming monsters. It’s about how quickly people learn which version of themselves is rewarded. Jack learned that the painted version, the violent version, the version that offers fun instead of rules, fills the seats. Ralph learned that decency without enforcement is just a speech no one stays for. Piggy learned that intelligence without power is an apology waiting to happen. And Simon learned that seeing someone clearly is the most dangerous thing you can do on an island full of boys performing strength.

The makeup department alone deserves an award for the way these boys’ bodies tell the story their dialogue doesn’t—cut lips, sunburned shoulders, dirt embedded in skin that was clean four episodes ago. The progression from arrival to rescue is written on their faces before the script catches up.

Lox Pratt and Winston Sawyers deserve the Emmy. Not the nomination. The win. What they do with their eyes across four episodes is more honest acting than most adults produce in a career. Pratt is already cast as Draco Malfoy in HBO’s Harry Potter series, which tells you Nina Gold saw in him exactly what this adaptation confirms: a face that can hold beauty and cruelty in the same frame without choosing between them.

But I share the concern others have raised: don’t pigeonhole this kid. Draco after Jack is beautiful mean boy after beautiful mean boy. Pratt didn’t move me across four episodes because he played cruel. He moved me because he played the slide INTO cruel—every shade between choir boy and warlord, every micro-expression of fear disguised as power. An actor who can do that at fourteen has more range than half of Hollywood’s leading men. Give him the Emmy. Then give him a role that lets him be something other than the prettiest monster in the room.

Not a wasted moment. Not a wasted frame. Not a wasted boy.

Give them the Emmy. Then give them therapy.

No child should understand that much about violence that young.