I Swear: "I could see that it was a complex condition right from the start, and that’s what fascinated me"

When director Kirk Jones first saw a BBC documentary about John Davidson in the late 1980s, he filed it away as a story too extraordinary to ignore. Davidson, a teenager growing up in Galashiels, Scotland, lived with a then barely-understood condition: Tourette’s syndrome.

The documentary followed him as he tried to navigate adolescence, relationships and a community baffled – and sometimes hostile – to his involuntary outbursts. Jones, who would go on to direct Waking Ned Devine, Nanny McPhee and Everybody’s Fine, never forgot him.

“I just thought, he seems like a lovely guy,” Jones recalls thinking. “And now that I know him, he’s one of the gentlest, sweetest, politest, kindest men I’ve ever met. But what comes out of his mouth is homophobic, racist, sexist, and it will incite anger and violence and aggression. So I could see that it was a complex condition right from the start, and that’s what fascinated me.”

And so Jones has returned to directing after a 10-year hiatus with I Swear, a fictionalised retelling of Davidson’s story. The film, which stars Robert Aramayo, has already drawn rapturous reviews. It is part tragicomedy, part character study, which follows John as he transforms from a confident 13-year-old, to a teen labelled as a trouble-maker and degenerate for shouting obscenities, spitting, and physically lashing out.

It’s only when, as an adult, he meets Dottie (Maxine Peake), a mental health nurse who takes him in, that John starts to find a community of accepting and loving people, before going on to educate the public about Tourette’s.

Credit: Graeme Hunter

For Aramayo, best known for inhabiting vast franchises like Game Of Thrones and The Elden Ring, I Swear was something else entirely: intimate, difficult, and rooted in one man’s reality. The director was determined to find the essence of John himself, while also capturing the complexity of his condition and coping mechanisms.

“The tics are the least interesting thing about John,” says the 32-year-old actor. “John is a fascinating, amazing, wonderful man. But I was really keen to think about was, what are the masking techniques he’s picked up that become engrained? How have they evolved? It was those things I was keen to identify, but you’re absolutely right that I didn’t want to make it about tics. It’s about John. And actually John is way harder to play than the tics.”

Jones did consider having Davidson play himself, even screen-testing in Scotland, but for various reason, it didn’t work out. Davidson’s Tourette’s makes him do certain things, like looking straight into camera, and the overstimulation that comes from trying to deal with the demands of film work on top of his condition.

“I was worried he would be upset because I thought he was getting quite excited about the prospect, but he said, ‘I am so relieved, that was a nightmare for me. I could never have done that.’ And, you know, that was just working in 45 minutes.”

The film, however, does feature many individuals with Tourette’s, capturing the variety of expressions of the condition. Both director and actor admit they carried assumptions into the process.

“The two things I held were the perception and the stereotype that people with Tourette’s always swear,” Jones says. “And only about 10% of people swear. I think we’ve made that pretty clear within the film. And the other thing is that I learned within the first two minutes of meeting John not to respond to the tics. So when I first met him, he said, ‘Come on in’. And I said, ‘Shall I take my shoes off?’

“And he ticked and said, ‘Let’s have sex!’ And I said, ‘Shall I take my shoes off first?’,” Jones laughs. “Because that’s my nature – to make light of it a bit, to take any embarrassment off him or make a joke about it. And then two minutes later, he said, ‘If I say anything like that again, please just ignore it. Don’t comment on it.’ Because it isn’t coming from John, it’s coming from somewhere else.”

I Swear is available to stream on Netflix from Tuesday, March 10.