Jez Butterworth Reads The ‘Jerusalem’ Passage He Found Hardest To Write

Jez Butterworth Reads The ‘Jerusalem’ Passage He Found Hardest To Write

From Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa by Service95

April 14, 2026 · 6 min

About this episode

Dua Lipa interviews Jez Butterworth about his play Jerusalem and the challenges of writing a specific passage.

For the April edition of the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with playwright Jez Butterworth to discuss his modern masterpiece, Jerusalem. If you’ve never read a play before, this is the place to start. With its raw, visceral portrait of myth, rebellion and a nation wrestling with its own identity, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest British plays of the 21st century. In this special video, Jez Butterworth reads a powerful excerpt from the play featuring Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron dispensing life advice to his young son Marky – a rare father-son moment filled with folklore and the wild inheritance of blood and belonging. “It was, at that point in 2009, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted to write… It was a massive challenge for me,” says Jez of the passage. Jerusalem blurs the line between truth and myth, capturing Rooster’s attempt to pass down something larger than himself; an inheritance of wildness, belonging and belief. If you haven’t already, be sure to catch Dua and Jez’s full interview, too, available to watch now here. Join the club: 📩 Email us your thoughts – ⁠books@service95.com⁠ 📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 📚…

People in this episode

Host: Dua Lipa

Guest: Jez Butterworth

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Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Jerusalem

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