Tyger Drew-Honey rose to fame as Jake in Outnumbered, but he struggled to find more work after the show ended.
He was just a teenager when he landed the role in the beloved BBC sitcom, and later this year he’ll be reprising the role in a Christmas special alongside on-screen parents Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner, and fellow child stars Romana Marquez and Daniel Roche.
He admitted despite the show’s success from 2007, he has found himself working on building sites in between jobs to make ends meet.
‘My acting career over the years has just been… I have done some good things but then their have been times that I’ve worked on building sites,’ he said.
He admitted his ‘dream’ is to be able to keep making a living from acting, and he hopes the upcoming special can be a turning point.
He told The Sun: ‘I just dream of having constant acting work and I really hope the hype and the momentum of this special continues so that we can all have a really successful next year because the last three or four years have been tough for this industry.’
Away from Outnumbered, Tyger made appearances in shows like Midsomer Murders, Death In Paradise and Citizen Khan.
As well as big screen roles in Horrid Henry: The Movie, Up All Night and Me, Myself and Di, he has also appeared on reality shows like The Case, Celebs Go Dating and Celebrity Mastermind.
Before this year’s upcoming special, his most recent TV role was as Malcy Smith in one episode of Grantchester in 2021.
Tyger – who hopes the Outnumbered return can prompt more episodes in the future – admitted after having early success, ‘you think it’s going to be easy as an actor’.
‘Then you become an actor, and then you become an adult, and you’ve got a mortgage and different things and then sometimes the boat doesn’t always come,’ he added.
Tyger told Metro.co.uk in 2021 that Celebs Go Dating was a terrible idea for him, admitting he didn’t think much about his ‘chat-up lines’ on the show.
‘I had such bad anxiety about how I was going to come across. I hated every minute of it,’ he said, adding: ‘I have a girlfriend now who I love very much.’
It’s unclear if Tyger is still in a relationship with Fluke Chotphuang, who he dated for several years and was last photographed with in 2023.
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