Break Clause, Channel 4’s hit new romcom, succeeds where others fail because its premise – two young sweethearts graduate from university, move to London, split up immediately but are forced to see out their tenancy agreement – leaves room for both wonder and cold, hard, hilarious reality. Ben, played by Samuel Bottomley (last seen in musical biopic California Schemin’), offers up the bulk of the latter, making ends meet in lieu of any hoped-for writing work by bin-diving and taking part in medical trials. It is Ben who does the cheating the day before the big relocation.
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His will-they-won’t-they partner Lil, meanwhile, injects the sadness and frustration of the situation with moments of wide-eyed optimism and a determined joie de vivre. In one memorable scene in the first episode, arriving in the capital before their dream comes tumbling down, Lil spots a street dance group and jumps in to join them. “Sorry about that, big misread on my part,” she fumbles, backing out when her excitable whimsy is unsurprisingly left unreciprocated.
Played expertly by Mexican-American comedian Lara Ricote in her first leading role, there is clearly much of the actor in Lil. “I have a positive relationship to being alive,” Ricote beams when she meets NME for a coffee in east London. At first glance, with her hair tucked into a baseball cap, Ricote presents like a burgeoning star trying to fly under the radar. Then, she animatedly points out that the cap is actually a piece of Break Clause merchandise. “So people will be like, ‘It’s her! From the thing!’” she jokes.
Ricote might still be able to order a flat white in peace, but 2026 has undeniably been a game-changer for the 29-year-old. Break Clause has received nearly unanimously positive reviews. Its star is flattered but not totally surprised by the response. “I did know that it was good because I read it and it was funny and sweet, and Jess [Bray, creator and writer] is really thoughtful. I wasn’t worried about it,” she says. Her most recent comedy show Inkling, meanwhile, was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show – a hefty next step on from her Best Newcomer win back in 2022.
In both arms of her current creative endeavours, Ricote injects the same sense of curiosity and boundless energy that bursts out of her even on a rainy Wednesday afternoon in Hackney. She’s the sort of person that believes you get out of life what you put in. “And you would not even believe the energy I’m putting in,” she nods. “When I get to the toilet after being out, my mouth opens wide and I drop my bones [in exhaustion]. That’s the way I’m operating.”
While Lil is still only 22, and trying to navigate an unexpected life curveball that’s depicted with all the knotty grey areas left in, Ricote has spent her recent years digging substantially deeper. In a dreadful – yet perversely useful – act of serendipity, the actor also went through a weighty breakup just before filming. “I really felt like I didn’t have the emotional intelligence necessary to play this character when we shot the pilot – and then my life happened and then I had it. The timing was good for Break Clause, but it was hard,” she concedes. Yet for Ricote, that breakup was the end of one thing but the start of something else.
In her Newcomer-winning Edinburgh show GRL/LATNX/DEF, Ricote actively leaned into her intersections: a woman of Latin American heritage who is hard of hearing. Now, with Inkling, she’s pushing herself to go further. “I think being a standup is trying to catch whatever moment of your narrative you’re in right now and I think I’m good at that,” she muses. “Everyone’s been nice to me my whole life about having hearing aids. We’re pro-difference in a very small way in this industry, as long as it’s not too big of a burden – and mine isn’t,” she notes wryly. “But I don’t know how I would feel if people were different to me about it. What is it that I genuinely feel about being hard of hearing? What do I genuinely feel about everything? I had a big period of looking at myself.”
Like Ricote, Lil also wears hearing aids but they’re not referred to until a throwaway moment halfway through the series. For Ricote, being hard of hearing is “a fundamental part of the way I engage with being alive. It’s a fundamental part of why I am the way I am, why I lean forward so much, why I’m so aggressively out there,” she says. Yet it was also important for her to incorporate it into her character in a way that didn’t feel like a trope. “When I watched Undone with Rosa Salazar, she has a cochlear implant and the first time we notice it is when she gets in a fight with her boyfriend and takes it off in episode four. That made me cry, I felt so moved by it.”
Raised in Miami, in a creative and close-knit family that includes her telenovela actor mother, Ricote also made her screen debut in one of the Mexican soap operas at age 13 (her character died dramatically in a car crash). She didn’t love it – and was convinced that she would follow a more traditional path. “[For a long time], I thought I was a serious person that wanted to study and work for social enterprises and take it all really seriously,” she recalls.
Then, when she was 21, Ricote tried standup for the first time, “and the feeling I had was: ‘I’m gonna do this forever’. I really felt it.” She continues: “Historically, to allow myself to be perceived as stupid was kind of my worst insult. But standup felt like a place where I could be smart and be stupid. It felt like freedom in a way. Because I clearly am stupid, but I also care a lot, so I can put all of that together in my standup and do all my thinking in a way that’s also fun.”
In her standup, in Break Clause and in conversation, Ricote is both considered and effusively fun. She’s the sort of person that can nail an audition, as she did for Lil, centred around a scene about a yeast infection. “There was a bit about peeling off the lid of a yoghurt and saying, ‘I’m gonna take this lid and put it in my pussy’ because she had thrush. And a lot of actors who read it did it seriously, which is obviously crazy to do that,” she laughs. But she’s also thoughtful and actively engaged in the funny old business of being a person in the world.
It’s a winning mixture and Ricote feels like a multi-pronged talent who’s only just settling into herself and getting started. “It feels like I’m in a zooming out phase of my life which is something you have to do when you’re making sense of yourself. At first you’re like, what am I? I’m a girl, I’m hard of hearing and I’m a Latina so that has to have something to do with what I am. And then after a while you’re like, wait a minute! I’m a human being! I have a soul, so what does THAT mean?” she wonders. “I’m trying every year to make [work] that I couldn’t have made the year before, in terms of what I was able to talk about and who I was able to be. I don’t know what I’m going to make next, but [to me] I’m just responding.”
‘Break Clause’ is out now on Channel 4
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