James Maguire

James is the English cousin dumped on the girls' Catholic school because his mother didn't think it safe for him to attend the boys' one during the Troubles. Gentle, anxious and permanently out of his depth, he just wants to survive being the only boy in a school full of teenage girls without further humiliation.

Llewellyn plays bewilderment as a full-time occupation, and the show mines endless comedy from James being simultaneously mothered and tormented by the gang. His outsider status lets Derry Girls needle at Irish-English tension through petty schoolyard cruelty rather than lecture, which is funnier and sharper than it sounds.