Below is a taster from the interview which is out now. Juice is available on BBC iPlayer.

 

 

MAWAAN ON SNACKING ON BOILED EGGS: “Boiled eggs and carrots. 'Cause I don't like snacking on crisps and unhealthy stuff. Yeah, nut no one- apparent- apparently it doesn't make you a popular person when you're in, in a, in an edit room and you pull out a boiled egg. In an airtight room, apparently. With no windows. My dad does it, it's from- I come from a long lineage of boiled egg men.”

 

MAWAAN ON HATING CHEESE SAUCE: “I hate cheese sauce. You know when you go to like a festival stall. And they put cheese sauce, even though the menu said cheese? That ain’t cheese, man. That's watered down.”

 

MAWAAN ON HIS RECIPE “Yeah, yes, um, you taking notes? So-Instant noodles. Put a burrata in it. And that- there you have it. You have it. But do wait a couple of minutes, because what you don't want is you don't want the burrata to be cold from the fridge. Right, you want the, the, the soupy liquid of the instant noodles to just like soften and melt a bit. And it is actually amazing and it strings in the, in, in the noodles.“But room temperature burrata, I can't say this enough. If I go to a restaurant and you're giving me cold burrata…That's not good enough. Don't put it in the fridge, right?”

 

MAWAAN ON THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF: “I did Paul Hollywood [as my hero in biscuit form]. Yeah. I mean, do you know what… is he my hero? I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you an exclusive here: No. But I was doing some classic sucking up, like I wanted to get those points-and I wanted to get the, you know what I mean? Um… And I do love his blue eyes, like…You know, they do a lot for me. Insane. Like really crazy. You should see them- you should see them in biscuit form, I mean…Whoa.”

 

MAWAAN ON JUICE: "I was pitching it around for ten years trying to get it made. But I think everyone was like, ‘Ah, it's too weird. It's too weird.’ I'm like, guys, it's not even that weird. It's actually just about a guy stumbling into love, you know? Um, but just he does it literally and there's a lot of stumbling and a lot of physical comedy and, and the walls start moving and when, you know, his emotions peak the world around him physically starts warping. And I think, uh, it's hard to make a TV show that- where people can't see an example of it already out there. So it's harder to sell. But it's more satisfying when you make it.”

 

“I was doing other stuff at the same time. D’you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh… and that helped, or, you know, I was doing the stand up and I was doing- writing other scripts and, and, and doing acting jobs, and it just helped me actually it, the idea like aged like fine wine, you know? Over time, I think it, it, the idea matured, even from series two to series one. I feel like it's got somehow more, uh… innocently childish and sophisticated at the same time. You know, like the emotions in it, I feel like are a bit more grown up, series two, but the, the imagination is even more vivid and immersive. I think, uh, I think the team around me really helped as well, it's all people who worked on it who are like, yeah, I wanna make something different. You know, everyone wants audiences to be flicking through the channels and it looks like nothing else that's on.”

“It was weirdly freeing because the first show was based, uh, on a live show. The second series was like, well, it can be anything now, d’you know what I mean? So I kind of weirdly found it freeing and actually it really took off and the world building just really became its own, because I wasn't tied down to, ‘Well, I must hit this story.’”

“I look on my notes of all the ideas that have sort of collated over the last few months of little nuggets of things. I kept having this like fever dream of like, ‘I think I need to, I need to fight a demon clown version of myself.’ And I just-I dunno why, but I have to do that. And then it's like, well, okay, well what's the story?”

“‘I, I, I have to get swallowed up by a s- sofa, and then end up in this sort of sofa underworld, tunnel land, and I dunno why, but it's, it is, I think we need it.’ And, and often those weird kind of like, conceptual ideas, like ofs- often have an emotional reason to it. And I was like, oh, I think I was trying to get the character to feel grief, or I was trying to get them to feel, you know, vulnerability and love and that's why I'm thinking of this squidgy world or whatever.”