‘I didn’t speak until I was 10

When Bradley Riches landed the role of Lewis Barton, the first neurodivergent character on Emmerdale, he knew first-hand how needed it was. “It was like, finally! An autistic actor actually playing an autistic role.”

Lewis, the long-lost son of Emma Barton, half-brother of Pete, Ross and Finn, arrived on the ITV soap last year. For many viewers, it was their first glimpse into what autism can actually look like – Lewis wears ear defenders to reduce the stress of loud noises, laughs after speaking to hide his nerves and has a forthright, matter-of-fact manner. In one pivotal scene, he had an autistic burnout during a shift at Café Main Street. He’s also, crucially, a fully formed character away from his neurodiversity – he has friendship, romances, a life.

“He’s embedded himself into this community now,” Riches says. Emmerdale, he adds, is a blueprint for how society should treat autistic people. “Lewis has been welcomed with open arms. He’s got a job. He’s got all these little things. It does open your eyes to be like, why can’t real life be like that?”

Acting is what helped the 24-year-old find his voice – literally. He was diagnosed with autism aged nine, and was non-verbal until he was 10. “I would use sounds, movements and communicate with the world that way,” he explains. Bright lights, loud noises and strange textures overwhelmed him. Teachers initially assumed he was just shy or developing slowly, while his parents first tried their own strategies to bridge the communication gap. After he was stuck on an NHS waiting list for eight months, Riches’s nan paid for him to have a private diagnosis. Then, his nurturing parents signed him up to a slew of activities (judo; basketball) in the hope of finding a space where he could belong. None felt right; all were “overwhelming”.

It was his beloved nan who, counter-intuitively, suggested an after-school drama club in his home county, Surrey. It was here, during a game of Splat, that 10 years’ worth of words rolled out in one. Pointing at a classmate, he yelled: “Splat!”

“I think it was because I like patterns and repetition. I heard ‘Splat!’ said a thousand times,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘It’s my go. I’m ready.’” The club led to a school performance in Bugsy Malone, then to a role in an Anadin advert and ultimately to his star-making role as James McEwan in queer Netflix phenomenon Heartstopper. “Now, you can’t shut me up,” he says, laughing.

Outside of that transformative club though, school was “hell” and understanding was scarce, as he writes in his new self-help book, Autistically Me. He was bullied by his classmates, who couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t speak. He could put on accents and connect with people in drama, but he “would take one step forward and then three steps back”, he says. His school days were spent at the back of class with his support teacher.

“As a kid, it was quite hard to get my head around why I felt so ‘me’ every Wednesday after school, but then eight hours a day, why I felt so not ‘me’, like a shell of me,” he says. He was masking, he explains, a term describing the exhausting process of hiding autistic traits to put others at ease. “After school, I would go home and have breakdowns because I was pretty burnt-out by pretending to be someone else the whole day.”

Self-acceptance came slowly. “It was a long journey. At the beginning, the main objective was, ‘Will I be able to have a job? Will I be able to live by myself? Will I be able to communicate in the way that society tells [me] to?’” He started speech therapy, tried self-compassion exercises and acting became his “escapism”.

At 16, Riches realised that he is queer. Though his family had been in his corner throughout his autism diagnosis, he kept quiet about his sexuality. “It was the first time that I felt really alone,” he says. On social media, he has opened up about “imagining a world without [him] in it” during that bleak time. “I was pretending to be someone else, and that has a mental impact,” he says now. “Especially when you look around and you go, ‘Oh my God, the couple of friends that I have right now, they actually like me, not actually for me, but they like this fake version of what I’m portraying.’” That was his “lowest point”.

But when he did come out, Riches’s parents embraced his sexuality, like they embraced his autism. We’re speaking days before he marries his partner, theatre director Scott Johnston. “I feel like nothing’s gonna change,” he says of impending married life. “We’re just enjoying life together.”

Coming out, says Riches, “was definitely the stepping stone [to] being fully proud to be autistic and how my brain works”. A musical theatre degree followed, and in 2021, Riches bagged his role in Heartstopper. After initially auditioning for the lead, Charlie Spring – which ultimately went to Joe Locke – Riches was given the role of the sweet, nervous teen James. It’s a minor part, but one he’s scaled into a full-blown entertainment career.

He can’t say much, but James is returning for the film finale Heartstopper Forever in July. “It’s a show that made me feel proud of who I was, made thousands of millions of people feel proud of their identity as well,” he says wistfully. “For that to come to an end is obviously sad, but also it’s always going to be there.”

Heartstopper was a springboard to Riches’s Celebrity Big Brother appearance in 2024, which then led him to the Yorkshire Dales. In late 2024, at the National Television Awards, Riches was waiting for a taxi when he bumped into an Emmerdale producer. She asked Riches for a video for her daughter, a Heartstopper fan, and he made the faux pas of asking who she played in the soap. “She was like, ‘I’m the producer.’ I was like, ‘Great! Great first interaction…’” he laughs. “I’d had a couple of proseccos by this point. Social anxiety out the window.” They swapped emails, and Riches initially auditioned for the role of Dylan Penders, but it “just wasn’t a right fit”. A few months later, he was cast as Lewis.

Online chatter about Lewis has not always been kind – viewers called him a “weirdo”, and found his nervous laughter “annoying”. Ebullient as ever, Riches takes the “debate” about Lewis as a positive. “I am a sensitive person but I thought I would get more upset by [the comments]. I look at them and part of me is like, ‘Ah, bless them’,” he says. He’s responded to the remarks online, taking the opportunity to teach people who have “no idea why sensory overload is a thing” or how autism manifests. “I definitely see it as a way to educate, not [something] to be upset by.” Besides, countless parents have messaged, thanking him for representing their children on screen.

That’s why he wrote Autistically Me, a guide for those with autism and their loved ones on how to understand and embrace their neurodiversity. Writing it made him realise “how much of an outcast, how much of an alien” he really felt growing up, having no one to look up to.

He considers how young Bradley would have felt if he had representation on screen or a book like his to hand. “I think it would have been a big stepping block into my self-acceptance journey,” he smiles. “If [the book] could help one person feel less weird and different, but also see difference in a positive way, then that’s definitely what I’ve wanted.”

‘Autistically Me’ is published on 9 June

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