Disney+ 'The Full Monty': Women of Sheffield make big moves in nostalgic new series

Back in 1997 we saw Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, Steve Huison, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Barber bare it all in the Oscar-nominated film The Full Monty, and 25 years later the story continues with an eight-episode series (streaming on Disney+ in Canada and the U.K., Hulu in the U.S.).

Much of the story of the film surrounded this group of jobless men who live in the Sheffield, England, where many lost their jobs at the steel mills. But this new series, still with Simon Beaufoy at the helm (working alongside Alice Nutter), expands the storytelling from the movie to really integrate the women to lead the narrative forward. Most present is Jean, still played by Lesley Sharp.

“In the original, Jean was a satellite character who was there to validate Dave and to try to shore up his lack of self-confidence and lack of self-esteem,” Sharp told Yahoo Canada. “But having said that, what was great about the film is that you got a glimpse of something that was really golden between the two of them.”

“So what was very, very pleasing was that Simon and Alice, given that they've now got eight hours to explore all of the characters, have introduced new female characters who are terrific, both older and younger."

In this new series, husband and wife duo Jean and Dave (Addy) both work at the local school. She's the headteacher and he's a caretaker, but their relationship is far from secure and even on the verge of completely crumbling amid significant grief for the couple.

“Of all of them, from the original, arguably Jean, the female, is the one who's gone the furthest in terms of realizing her career ambitions,” Sharp said. “But then you've also got a really multidimensional story between her and Dave, because neither of them have been able to explore, properly, the grief of losing their baby.”

“So one of the big take ups between the pair of them through the series is whether or not that is going to knock their relationship into a place from which there is no recovery. So the stakes are pretty high because in 1997, Dave and Jean were the sort of standard by which most people would hold a relationship. They both had each other's backs and loved and adored, and would go the extra mile for one another. In 2023, we're seeing something else. They're sad. Both of them are sad in different ways and attempting to cover that up.”

A great addition to The Full Monty mix is Destiny, played by Talitha Wing. Destiny is the teenage daughter of Gaz (Robert Carlyle) and she's very much a version of her father, with similar traits to what we saw from him in the film.

The series begins with Destiny reconnecting with her father. She's been living with her mother full-time, but as things get more stressful and unsafe at home, that reconnection becomes more permanent. Destiny isn't the best student, not shocking if you're familiar with the character of Gaz, but she's very much a product of her circumstances. She loves music but with a lack of support and funding for the arts in schools, she's not a motivated student.

“It was really a privilege to be able to play a character that has so much going on. She's very bolshie and very guarded, but deep down she's quite soft," Wing said. “She also has quite a tough time. Family dynamics, the school is flooding and has no funding for the one thing that she loves, which is music."

"She's a bit of an outsider and she has these two twin sisters who she looks after and cares for. So she's got so much going on, I think as many young people do, and I think the systems, like school, that are meant to sort of keep her on the straight and narrow, because she doesn't have that outlet, she struggles.”

Father-son relationships continue to be explored

One of the most endearing aspects of The Full Monty series are the moments when Dave starts to become a pseudo father figure to a young boy at the school, Twiglet (Aiden Cook).

“The old adage never worked with children or animals doesn't ring true for me,” Addy said. “Little Aiden, who plays Twiglet, it was terrific, no pretension to him at all.”

“We just got on and we play the scenes together, and it was a lot of fun. ... I think [Dave] would be actually quite a good dad. It's sad that he didn't have the opportunity, but even this attempt at it has to be kind of squashed in a way by Jean, which doesn't help their relationship really. It’s great having the luxury of time to explore these elements in detail, which is what Simon and Alice have done in the brilliant writing.”

But The Full Monty has a reputation for featuring really endearing, lovable and witty children to tell its story. For the series, Wim Snape returns as an adult Nathan, the son of Gaz who we saw throughout the 1997 movie, watching his dad and his dad's friends develop their striptease performance.

While Gaz is very much not a rule follower, Nathan went in the complete opposite direction as an adult, becoming a police officer enforcing the law.

Speaking about being able to reprise his role as an adult, Snape called it "an actor's dream."

“I was 11 years old when I played Nathan in the original film, ... it was my first ever acting gig,” Snape said. “At 11 years old you don't know what you want to do with your life, but from the moment I stepped on set, watching these incredible actors and learning from these incredible actors, I think very quickly I decided that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

“Revisiting Nathan 25 years later, after all the life experience that I've had, including going to drama school and learning my craft, it's a true privilege to be able to go back to this blueprint of the original film, and look at how Robert played Gaz and Emily Woof who played my mum in the film, and look at how they adapted their characters. And take snippets and characterizations from them, as you would naturally with your parents."

'Things have been tough in Britain for a long time'

One thing about The Full Monty film that's often highlighted is that Beaufoy was able to create this comedy, set around an odd premise of these men performing a striptease act for money, but it's grounded in the economic realities of working class men. Jumping to 2023, a lot of those issues have still not been resolved and are very much front-and-centre in this new narrative, including systemic issues with access to government-run public services, like access to disability funds and mental health resources.

For Carlyle, he stressed that this is exactly the right time to explore these themes again.

“Things have been tough in Britain for a long time, for many, many people, particularly the working class,” Carlyle said. “There's been 25 years of a conservative rule in the country, 25 years of austerity. That has really chipped away at the very fabric of the country.”

“So the show itself kind of brings these problems to the front. There's problems in the health service, there's problems in schools. ... The benefits systems as well is another thing that we look at. So that was what really interested me. It's a good time to do it. It's a good time to address these issues.”

But while The Full Monty series really amped up the emotional moments, Beaufoy and Nutter still worked to maintain that comedic element audiences really gravitated to from the film as well.

One of the early moments of the setup for the series revolves around Destiny stealing a dog that recently won Britain's Got Talent. In another moment, Steve Huison, as Lomper, sends everyone into a frenzy after smuggling a famed racing pigeon to Sheffield from Amsterdam.

For Huison, that balance between drama and comedy is something that has stuck with him since his work on the 1997 film.

“When we shot the film, I learned a lot through Simon's writing of the importance of finding light in the dark,” Huison said. “Since then I've gone on, I've worked a lot in theatre, … I've looked at some very dark subjects, but I thought, it only works if you find the light.”

“That method of working is instilled in me since 1997. I always look to work in that way.”

The new The Full Monty series is quite an epic reunion for fans of the cult classic film. While there isn't any actual stripping in this show, there are still plenty of nostalgic moments and elements of the movie to grin about.