Inbetweeners reunion on the cards as lead star says ‘all of us’ want to return

Joe Thomas, who played Simon in the cult sitcom, said cast are all on same page

Joe Thomas, who played Simon in the cult teen sitcom The Inbetweeners, has said that the lead cast is keen to film a reunion.

Airing from 2008 to 2010, the Bafta-nominated Channel 4 comedy followed a group of four socially awkward sixth-formers as they navigated their way through adolescence.

Speaking in a new episode of the Always Be Comedy podcast, Thomas revealed that the main cast members were on the same page about their desire for a potential reunion.

“All of us feel it would be nice to do," he said, in reference to his co-stars Simon Bird, Blake Harrison and James Buckley, who played Will, Neil and Jay in the series, respectively.

He added that one idea for the reunion could be a group trip to Las Vegas, following their previous lads holiday to Spain and Australia, which happened in the series spin-off movies, released in 2011 and 2014.

“We’re all still around, we’re all still in each other’s lives. We all still like each other. And if it was something that came up, I think we would want to do it,” explained Thomas.

Thomas said that each actor has had time to come away from the success of the Channel 4 sitcom, and prove their own individuality – but now would be a good time to come back to it.

The lads: James Buckley, Blake Harrison, Joe Thomas and Simon Bird in ‘The Inbetweeners Movie’, 2011 (Bwark Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock)

“We’ve all been able to go away and get various monkeys off our backs, in terms of things that we felt we needed to do other than The Inbetweeners to prove something to ourselves,” he said.

However, he said that there would be pressure to match the success of the original series.

“Everybody’s anxiety would be, ‘Will it be as good?’ That is what we would be going in with,” he said.

While the show officially ended in 2010, fans were then reunited with the hapless friends for The Inbetweeners Movie and The Inbetweeners 2.

The co-stars came together for The Inbetweeners: Fwends Reunited reunion special in January 2019, but some viewers described it as “awkward” at the time.

Buckley later admitted on his podcast, Completed It Mate, that he had “come across as a complete moron” on the show.

James Buckley, who played Jay Cartwright, during the filming of 'The Inbetweeners' (PA Archive/Press Association Images)

Thomas’s comments come as a shock to some fans, since several cast members previously swore off the possibility of another reunion.

In 2022, Buckley said “there’s not enough money in the world” to convince him to return to the series. In a radio interview, he said that while playing the sex-obsessed Jay Cartwright was “the best job in the world”, he had no intentions of returning to a hypothetical revival series.

“I don’t want to go near it anymore, not because I don’t think I would have an amazing time doing it, because I know I would,” he said.

The four hapless friends in ‘The Inbetweeners Movie’ (Film4 Productions)

“I love the boys, I love the writers. Doing The Inbetweeners was the best job in the world. All we did was muck around all day long and they filmed us doing it, and, at the end of the day, we might have had an episode... or a film or something.”

However, he said that he wouldn’t want to ruin the legacy of the series by trying to reboot it.

“I’m getting older – it’s looking like it might be the only thing that I do professionally that is universally loved. There’s not enough money in the world for me to spoil that.”

The Independent has contacted Channel 4 for comment.