Franky Fitzgerald

Francesca "Franky" Fitzgerald is a fictional character from the third generation of the British teen drama Skins. She is portrayed by Dakota Blue Richards.

Characterisation
Before the start of the series, Franky had been living in Oxford with her new adoptive fathers, where she was regularly bullied by gang of local girls, led by a girl named Riga. In one particularly nasty incident, Riga's gang had stripped her down to her underwear, thrown eggs and flour at her, snapped pictures of her in this condition, and posted them on the internet, leaving her tied up in a bathroom, before vandalising her home and her father's car. In retaliation, her troubled and somewhat thuggish only friend, Dean, had ambushed Riga outside her home and threatened to burn her alive unless she stayed away from Franky. As a result, Dean was imprisoned and Franky's fathers had decided to move somewhere else and get a new start.

Franky is a complicated character, having been described in series 5 as an "androgynous and super-intelligent" girl who acts "strange". She dresses in gender neutral clothing, wears her hair short and close-cropped and, although quite aloof, tends to be quite timid and low key. In series 6, she loses her androgynous and passive nature in favour of a more feminine, headstrong and blunt personality. Nevertheless, a defining feature of her character is her troubled past, something that plagues her throughout the series and occasionally causes concern from her friends. Very little of Franky's past is explained until towards the end of the series. It is known that her mother, Maria, had put her up for adoption when she was six years old, after a comment she made suggested that she was mentally disturbed (although it is later suggested that her mother was mentally inadequate herself). Although Franky's mental state has caused concern from her friends, particularly Liv, it is never addressed in detail. She identifies as pansexual.