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I was checking my Instagram yesterday, when it recommended that I follow someone named Alfie Williams. Never heard of him. This is the first time Instagram has recommended someone other than a fitness trainer or bodybuilder. I figured it must be either because he plays a gay character or he is gay in real life.
In the small photo on my cell phone, Alfie looked like a guy in his 20s, but when I checked his Instagram on my laptop, he turned out to be a young teenager. 14 in 2025.
So, an out-and-proud 14 year old, or playing an out-and-proud 14 year old?
Turns out that research wasn't at all difficult; there are a lot of interviews and articles about Alfie.
He was born in 2011 in Gateshead, across the river from shipping and partying center Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England. His father is Alfie Dobson, an actor and bodybuilder with nine credits listed on the IMDB.
Alfie Jr. broke into acting with the short film Phallacy (2021): a 12-year old boy wakes up to find his penis missing. Doctors say there is nothing they can do (transmen get a working penis from their vaginal tissue, but the boy doesn't have anything to work with). Don't worry, when you grow up, you'll find a lot of things to do in the bedroom that don’t require one .
Sounds like a lot of LGBTQ symbolism and hegemonic masculinity going on. An inclusive start to your career, Alf.
Next came Ghost Theo, a resident of the Land of the Dead in Episode 3.5 of the dark fantasy His Dark Materials (2022). He only has one line.
An unspecified character in BBC Radio 4's adaption of the soap opera Our Friends in the North, about four Newcastle blokes whose lives intersect from 1964 to 2022.
Young John Henry Sayers in A New Breed of Criminal (2023). The adult John Henry Sayers (played by Alfie's Dad) and his brother Stephen (Steve Wraith) were real-life gangsters who ran the city of Newcastle in the 1990s.
But it is Alfie's starring role in 28 Years Later (2025) that prompted the flood of interviews and articles.
I saw the original 28 Days Later (2002), where bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) gets into an auto accident, and wakes up from a coma "28 days later" to discover that he's a survivor of a zombie apocalypse. He meets two other survivors, Mark and Selena, but one is immediately killed. The other announces that just because they're the last two people left on Earth, they're not going to f*ck; but they do. They fall in love, adopt a survivor girl, and escape to an idyllic rural future together.
Guess which is killed, and which falls in love.
Right. Offensively blatant erasure of gay potential in order to promote the myth of universal heterosexual desire and practice for the 10 millionth time.
In 28 Years Later, 12-year old Spike (Alfie) is living with his parents in a survivor community on Lindisfarne, a tidal island that was home to a famous Medieval monastery and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes him to the mainland for a coming-of-age ritual, and they are separated for some reason.
Left: Aaron Taylor-Johnson's d*ck.
Later he takes his sick Mum to the mainland to see a doctor (Ralph Fiennes, right), who says that she is dying of brain cancer and must be euthanized. We see it happening. That settles it: I'm not watching this movie. F*ck the Sadness.
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