One look at the Instagram page of a budding tattoo artist named Ramona Márquez is enough to prove that she is working hard to make a name for herself.
There are sketches of flowers, foliage and barbed wire (the latter being his first successful commission for a client) for those who (in his words) “want to join his tattoo journey”.
With her own designs, including a fire-breathing dragon to commemorate her 18th birthday, liberally inked across her torso, legs and arms, the dark-haired 23-year-old cuts a striking figure.
It’s even more surprising when you consider her transformation from the cherubic-looking Karen Brockman in hit BBC comedy Outnumbered.
With her blonde curls and her incessant questions (‘what is a sociopath?’, ‘why do people take pictures of their food?’), Ramona turned out to be one of the comedy’s breakout stars.
Spanning five series since 2007, Outnumbered followed the riotous exploits of the Brockman family: embattled history teacher Pete, his wife Sue and their three wayward children Jake, Ben and Karen.
Now, after eight years away from our screens, the Brockmans return for a Christmas special. Promising a maelstrom of “neighbors, hyenas and bus replacement services”, it depicts the chaos that ensues when Sue and Pete try to gather their children (plus a new granddaughter) for a traditional family Christmas.
Fans would expect nothing less, of course. But the adventures of the show’s real-life stars have proven to be as colorful as their on-screen antics: from run-ins with gangsters and accusations of drug use to marriage breakups and bold statements about sexuality. It’s certainly safe to say that these mischievous youngsters are all adults, as Ramona goes to prove.
(Clockwise from left): Daniel Roche, Hugh Dennis, Claire Skinner, Tyger Drew-Honey and Romana Márquez in this Christmas TV special.
After eight years away from television, the Brockmans return for a Christmas special
She began playing the chatty and inquisitive Karen at the tender age of six, becoming the first child to be nominated for the British Comedy Award for “Best New Actress” two years later.
But, despite his initial success, spending his adolescence in the public eye took a negative toll. In 2016, when she was 15 years old, she was falsely accused of using drugs and was a victim of trolling on social media.
“It’s pretty disturbing,” he posted on social media at the time. “I just don’t understand why people feel the need to be assholes.”
Since then, she has lived a life away from the spotlight, taking time away from acting to study Mandarin and Spanish at the University of Manchester.
However, she contributed an essay to the 2020 feminist anthology Women Don’t Owe You Pretty where, with a candor that her fictional alter ego would applaud, she passionately criticized the “male gaze” and “heteronormativity” (the idea that women relationships between men and women are the “norm”).
He also revealed that he had “fallen intensely in love with several women.”
Today, she describes herself as “lesbian, vegan, and a sober girl” on her personal Instagram account. It’s a markedly different path than Tyger Drew-Honey, who plays his on-screen older brother, Jake.
In the show, he was last seen heading to New Zealand after planning to break up with his girlfriend (played by a then-unknown actress named Daisy Edgar-Jones…).
But the life of Tyger, who turns 29 next month, is as far removed from his fictional suburban alter ego as possible.
Her father Ben Dover (real name Simon Honey) is a veteran porn star who has starred in over 130 X-rated movies and once boasted of sleeping with exactly 1,792 women. (Among their back catalog are the classics Ben Dover In London and Ben Dover’s Yummy Mummies).
Tyger’s mother, Linzi Drew, also worked in the industry and published a tell-all memoir, Try Everything Once, Except Incest And Morris Dancing, three years before her only son, Tyger, appeared. Although she stopped working in porn when she became a mother, she went on to edit the British edition of X Penthouse magazine.
Despite this, Tyger has emphasized that he enjoyed a conventional childhood of “good schools and good holidays”, growing up in the family’s £2 million home in Surrey and attending Danes Hill School, where fees cost almost £9,000. pounds sterling.
But her parents’ jobs almost ended her chances of landing her famous role, as she revealed in a recent interview.
“My father had made some kind of bad deal in the porn industry,” he told actor Louis Strong on the Headstrong podcast.
The Brockmans on the BBC show in 2010
“We basically had gangsters hanging around our house in blacked out Range Rovers in the middle of the night, every night.
“So we ended up moving into a hotel for about a month and a half while we worked out this pretty scary situation where
“We were being blackmailed and threatened.” Saying he almost didn’t audition for Outnumbered as a result, he went on to be cast as Tyler at the age of ten. Since then, he has made documentaries for the BBC, including one about pornography in which he interviewed his own parents, and appeared in the comedy series Cuckoo with Greg Davies.
But he has admitted that he has struggled to find work since Outnumbered ended, sometimes working on a construction site to make ends meet.
“I hope the enthusiasm and momentum of this Christmas special continues so we can all have a successful year ahead,” he said this month. “Because the last three or four years have been difficult for this industry.”
His on-screen brother has a quite different view. After seven years playing the mischievous Ben, a pathological liar prone to performing surprising experiments, such as destroying insects in a microwave oven, Daniel Roche made the decision to retire from the industry.
Daniel began playing Ben at the age of seven and was nominated for Best New Actor at the British Comedy Awards just two years later. But the talented rugby player stopped acting when he was recruited to professional rugby club Wasps as a teenager.
“This was at the same time as GCSEs, then A-levels, then university, so acting was always going to have to take a backseat for a while,” he told Vice magazine two years ago. years. “We told my agent not to actively put me out there looking for work.”
The Outnumbered Christmas special will air on BBC One on Boxing Day at 9.40pm
Still, he couldn’t stay out of the headlines. In 2016, he was filmed drinking at that year’s Reading Festival, when he was just 16 years old. This sparked a storm of underage drinking, although he later revealed that he had been “kidnapped” by fans who recognized him as a child star.
“About twenty people tried to tie me to a chair and I fought them off,” he recalled. ‘They made me drink a lot of alcohol while they were filming it. I was fighting them and I was terrified. But once I saw that it was all a good joke, that it was in good humour, I went along with it and found it funny.’
The following year, aged 17, he was photographed singing the name of the class B drug ‘ketamine’ in a leaked video from the Boomtown festival in Winchester.
Daniel, who still has Ben’s unruly curls, albeit with a beard, later studied history at King’s College London. After graduating with a first, he is now studying a master’s degree in international conflicts.
However, despite his academic prospects, he has revealed that he is ready to return to acting.
“Ultimately, you want to spend your life doing what you enjoy and I’ve always loved acting,” he said. ‘I just want to get back into the swing of it. I’m not saying I want to go on stage with an Oscar for best actor.
By the standards of their fictional children, the lives of the Brockman parents (Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner) have been fairly low-key.
Hugh has remained a familiar face on the comedy circuit since Outnumbered ended in 2014, appearing regularly on shows such as Mock The Week and comedy Not Going Out. His famous friends include Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, with whom he was pictured playing football last weekend.
Claire has also remained in the industry, appearing in small roles on television shows such as Vanity Fair and Ted Lasso.
They have both divorced since the show ended. Hugh, 62, divorced his wife Catherine Abbot-Anderson in 2015 and Claire, 59, split from her husband, director Charles Palmer, a year later.
But since then they have found love again… with each other. The couple revealed they started dating in 2017, although this ‘lovely little surprise of life’ (as Claire described it) didn’t become public until a year later.
But, in a move worthy of his on-screen alter ego, Daniel Roche at one point seemed to suggest that the relationship had lasted longer than they admitted. “They’ve been doing it for years, they’ve been dating for years,” she wrote in an Instagram story after the news.
He quickly backtracked: “I never meant to suggest that Hugh and Claire had been in a relationship for years and I wouldn’t have done that because it’s simply not true.”
This year’s Christmas special will mark the first time Claire and Hugh will work together on the show since becoming a couple.
But they are clearly delighted to be reunited. “It’s fantastic, it feels like we’ve never been away,” Hugh said in a recent interview.
It was a sentiment echoed by his on-screen daughter, Ramona. “It’s like getting back together with really good friends who you’ve known for a long time and just hanging out,” he says.
With the kids now in their 20s, and Jake the father of an energetic three-year-old, the Christmas special will continue as the Brockmans try to bring the clan together for a traditional family Christmas in their now downsized home.
Naturally, it wouldn’t be a Brockman reunion without a satisfyingly enjoyable impending catastrophe. After all, even though the Brockman brothers are grown, some things never change.
Additional information from LINA DAS.
- The Outnumbered Christmas special will air on BBC One on Boxing Day at 9.40pm