Exclusive: Director Jack Howard on His Journey from Comedy to Award-Nominated Short Film 'The Second Time Around'
- Alex Gilston
- 12 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Alex Gilston - October 30, 2025
Jack Howard made his way into the public eye through making YouTube videos with his friend and collaborator Dean Dobbs. Over the years, the pair made dozens of comedy sketches for a huge audience and even went on to make their own TV show called Jack and Dean of All Trades. Since then, Howard has been working on various projects, including music videos, TV shows, and adverts, as a director. In September last year, he launched a crowdfund for his first short film, The Second Time Around. After getting the film funded through the community, he went on to make it, and it is now nominated for Best British Short at the Iris Prize festival. Film Focus Online sat down with Jack to discuss his jump from comedy to drama, the film itself, working with Caroline Goodall and Hannah Onslow, and more.
Overcoming Self-Doubt: The Birth of 'The Second Time Around'
Howard had the idea for The Second Time Around about three years ago, but he found himself getting in the way, “It was basically that inner critic in your head. It was that little voice that said: why would anyone care about this? You're only known for making comedy. If you're not making something with the intention of making somebody laugh, it's not going to be worth anyone's time and no one's going to care, and you're going to be bad at it.” It was only when he had written the first draft of the film that he saw a way forward with it, “It was one afternoon where I eventually sat and bashed out 10 pages as a first draft. But because it had been living in my head for so long, that first draft was already pretty close to what you ended up seeing on screen, essentially, I just had to kind of get over my own insecurity that it wouldn't be worth anyone's time and just go for it anyway.”
The Second Time Around is a work of dramatic fiction, and Jack discussed the transition from his comedy work. In his own words, Howard is “a big cinema guy,” Anyone who follows his work will know he has long collaborated with film critic Mark Kermode on his podcast Kermode on Film. The comedy side of things didn’t come to mind as much as his filmic inspirations, “I wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with the stuff that I was really inspired by and see if I could make something that didn't require a punchline in order to work.” But he realised that the structure of The Second Time Around was informed from his comedy work, “I didn't think about this until I'd already made it, but the structure of the film is not that dissimilar to a comedy sketch, with a setup, the bit in the middle, and then a callback joke. But in this case, the callback joke isn't made to make you laugh. It's meant to hit you in the soft, gooey bits.”
Howard went on to discuss where the initial idea for The Second Time Around came from, discussing his relationship with Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and how he drew his inspiration from it. “There's a specific scene that Robert Pattinson shares with John David Washington and there's all this kind of energy and this hint that they might know each other and it's all kind of, quite obtuse and suppressed in terms of what they're doing, and I wondered if you could tell a story like that, but bring all of the emotion up to the surface.” It’s through this that Jack produces his film, not hoping solely for audiences to have that eureka moment, but more about following the emotional journey of the central characters, “Obviously, I don't want to spoil it too much for anyone who hasn't seen it because it's 10 minutes and I want them to have as pure of an experience as they possibly can when they do watch it, but ultimately, hopefully that dawning of what the mystery is will only unlock the emotion more.”
Playing with Genre and Expectation
The Second Time Around uses genre initially to shroud its true purpose, and Jack discussed his intentions with this, “The theory was that if you start in that place where you're not sure what genre you're in and it feels potentially dangerous or threatening and you’re wondering who Caroline’s character is. Is she a vampire? She’s asking to be let in”. There is an eeriness to the beginning of the film. It’s dark and raining. Elle is on her own closing up a cafe and suddenly you see a scary figure out of place in the door frame. “All that stuff will not only throw you off in terms of what's really going on, but the theory was that if you start there and then 10 minutes later, it reveals itself to be more tender, hopefully the catharsis of that, from one to the other, is stronger because you didn't think that's where you were going to get to.”
Jack also plays around with the idea of unsaid words, there is a balance between information provided and information left out, his decision to not over explain things makes the film more impactful. “It was a difficult balance to get because I'm trying to make it clear to the audience what is going on, but I also wanted to completely trust that the audience could put two and two together. But it also had to be very truthful to how I thought the characters would behave.” The Woman, played by Caroline Goodall, goes back to see her lost loved one with the intention of giving a message to her, but their meeting doesn’t quite play out the way you’d expect. “My theory was that if you really were going to come back in time to see somebody that you loved, and they were gone now, you might have everything written out that you wish you could say, and then you would be faced with the situation and your brain would just go blank.” Instead of having The Woman come clean with her intentions off the bat, the tension bubbles until the film’s final moments. “Those last words that she says before she leaves became all I needed, and it was maybe the last addition to the script before we shot. Caroline doesn't want to freak her out, but then I was like, something has to kind of vomit out, and we just kind of got to that moment quite naturally.”
Frequent Steven Spielberg collaborator, Caroline Goodall, and star on the rise Hannah Onslow star in The Second Time Around, and Jack spoke about working with them. “It was a dream, utterly fantastic. They both had such difficult jobs as well because it wasn't like they could be in the scene with each other, and the entire conflict of it is what they both want out of the scene. So, Caroline's coming in and all she wants is 5 minutes to be present with this person.All Hannah wants to do is for this woman to leave so she can go home. That conflict makes it difficult for them to form any kind of rhythm with each other as actors, because they basically don't want the same thing from the scene, which also makes it very interesting to watch.”
Queerness at the Heart of the Story
The queerness at the heart of The Second Time Around was something that Howard always considered, “The honest answer is it was always two women. I can look back logically now and go, well if Caroline's character was a man, I think that horror feeling that you have at the beginning maybe wouldn't have gone away if an older man was forcing himself inside a cafe and seemed a bit obsessed with this young woman. I don't think you would have ever felt safe and really woken up to what the actual story was about if that was different.” Jack’s intention with the central character’s queerness went beyond this more logistical reasoning however, “It's about two queer women but it's not a story about that. Queer women, and especially older queer women and, actually, queer people in general, if they're in stories, it's usually about how tough it is to be queer. I'd rather just be like they can be in these stories that we love as well. Why can't we have a Back to the Future or something like that where the character just happens to be gay instead of it being about the fact that they're gay. So yeah, I just didn't ever second guess it.”
The Second Time Around has been on the film festival circuit where it has since been nominated for the Best British Film award for the Iris Prize, which means that it’s now available to view on Channel 4. Jack spoke about how it has felt having his film out in the world for audiences to view, “It's definitely been a little secret for a long time, and when it's been showing at festivals, the reception has been lovely, and all of that has been a very nice experience, especially personally seeing it in a cinema a few times now is always surreal. But now that it's on Channel 4 and more people are able to see it and are talking about it, there are even reviews on letterboxd and everything. It is very overwhelming in a very positive way. I was just scrolling on the Channel 4 app just to see it and just being like, this was one day just in my head and now it's there. I can't really describe how it truly feels.”
Finally, Jack spoke on the rewatch value of his film. “The film is called The Second Time Around for a multitude of reasons, but one of them is because I am a massive re-watcher of films, and if a film is not as good or doesn't give me something new the second time that I watch it, I always feel a bit like it was designed for a roller coaster experience; you just want me to go through this one time and then the second time I watch it, all those moments of tension are gone now.” Unlike the type of film Howard mentions The Second Time Around takes on a whole new meaning through a repeated watch, “The first time something is off, something scary, something's not quite right, and Caroline seems wacko, and the second time, hopefully you see more love and you feel more relaxed, and you can pick up more on what's really going on rather than wondering what's around the corner.”