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Early on in his career, Stephen Graham learned not to take himself too seriously. It helps that his wife, fellow actor and producer Hannah Walters, and their two children, keep him in line.
“Hannah quickly knocks me down to size,” he says of the few times he has gotten wrapped up in a role. “One time, I told her it was a really hard day, [that] I did a really heavy, emotional scene. She was like, ‘OK. I woke up and the dog shit all over the living room. I had to go shopping with the fucking car and I got a flat tire. The kids got off school early because the school was flooded. So, tell me again about your hard day.’”
He recalls the story through laughter. Graham created, stars in and co-wrote Netflix’s “Adolescence,” possibly one of the heaviest series of the year. But you wouldn’t know it by his cadence. We laugh together at least a dozen of times during our interview and bond over our love for our families.
Walters and Graham have a daughter, Grace, 20, and son, Alfie, 18. They are at the core of his creativity.
“I tell them every single day how much I love them — every single day,” he says of his kids. He thinks back to a few years ago, when his son was leaving the house and he gave him his usual kiss on the cheek. “His friend was in the room and got quite emotional. I think Alfie was about maybe 14 then. His friend said, ‘My dad’s never done that to me. He’s never cuddled me. He’s never held me and told me that he loves me.’ I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’ And that’s one of the things I wanted to carry into Eddie.”
In the series, Graham portrays Eddie, a working-class father of two in England whose 14-year-old son (played by an excellent Owen Cooper) is arrested for murdering his female classmate. The show is four episodes, each shot in a single take, capturing different stages of the arrest and the aftermath.
Eddie never touched or cuddled his son, which was “a conscious decision” between the team. The first time he actually touches his son is after he’s been strip-searched. Discussing this scene, which took place 37 minutes into the first episode, is the only time that Graham gets choked up during
our conversation.
As Jamie is strip-searched by the police, the camera remains on Graham’s face. Jack Thorne wrote it that way purposefully, as the episode was designed to be procedural. “He said that my face can tell a thousand words,” says Graham of his writing partner. “There were also complications we had with Jamie, being a young lad of a certain age, having to be mindful and respectful, and rightly so. He went behind the curtain. So when I’m doing it, I’m looking at a curtain, and I’m listening to what he’s saying, but I’m visualizing my Alfie.”
Holding back tears, Graham takes a breath and recounts how he was affected by the presence of his son, who was on set that day. “He gave me that, to get through that whole thing,” he says.
In fact, his family was a big part of the entire process. During the last scene of the final episode, Eddie enters Jamie’s room for the first time since the arrest. After looking around the room, he lays in Jamie’s bed and breaks down crying.
“It was the very final day. It was a beautiful, sunny day. It was the final take,” he says. “It’s the end of summer camp for me, and I’m very blessed as an actor. The sets, the jobs I’ve worked on have been wonderful. I adore the crew. Without a crew, we don’t exist.”
Despite the dark tone of “Adolescence,” Graham says it couldn’t have been more of a “wonderful experience.” There was even a tent set up for the younger kid actors to hang out, have card games, play football and just spend time together. Which meant it was tougher when the show ended.
They had done one full take of the final episode that was “really good,” but thought they’d do another. “We said, ‘Let’s see what happens. This is a freedom take. We have it. It’s beautiful. Let’s just see what happens.’”
What happened was magic: “The bit between me and Christine [Tremarco] upstairs that’d never been so good. There was just a different energy there. It was palpable. Amélie [Pease] was brilliant when she comes in and she takes control of the situation.”
Then it was time for Eddie to go into Jamie’s bedroom. Little did he know, director Philip Barantini and Graham’s wife had hung photos of their family around the room, with notes from their kids that read, “We love you, Dad” and “We’re so proud of you.”
“As they open the door, I’m aware of where the camera’s gonna come around. I turned and I just saw on the closet, I saw my kids, quickly read the thing, and then just made it as if I was looking around the room,” he recalls. “But already inside, I’m saying, ‘Don’t you cry. Don’t you cry. Eddie doesn’t cry.’ Then, pop. The emotion just came out.”
It’s not unheard of for a limited series to debut, do extremely well, then turn into a drama with multiple seasons. And saying “Adolescence” has done well is an understatement. The show topped Netflix’s Top 10 list in all 93 countries where the Top 10 list exists. No one saw that coming.
“It was always made very intently as a little British story, and I think that was the beauty of it,” says Graham. “We didn’t expect it to transcend the way it did, but we were very true. I think it was because it was made with truth and integrity and respect and a lot of love. I think that transcended it.”
The themes in the series were things that everyone could relate to, inspired by real events. Graham had read about many cases of violence through the years young British teens — including one in Liverpool about three young boys who stabbed a young girl and another about a transgender girl who was lured into a park and killed. During filming, another incident took place during which a young Black boy stabbed his girlfriend at a bus stop. After “Adolescence” came out, Graham said some viewers believed it was inspired by the bus stop incident and interpreted the story through the lens of race.
“Some people seem to take on their own agenda and bastardize where the story came from. They tried to make the story about race. It was never about race,” he says. “It was just about a normal family who had this horrific experience. This boy who, for all intents and purposes, came from a normal background … what gave him the drive to commit this tremendous act? It was a story that people could relate to — that could have been your next-door neighbor. That could have been your sister’s son. That could have been your friend’s brother. That could have been your son. So, there was that kind of essence of relatability. But it was never about race at all.”
I’m surprised that was ever an assumption, but Graham tells me that rumor became “a big thing” in England. Before explaining, he notes he wants to be “mindful” about what words he uses. “Maybe people who have slightly far-right views about the fact that…” he drifts off. “Someone even actually said that we ‘cast the wrong color.’ They thought it was based on this case of a lad at a bus stop. No. Look at the timeline.”
Now that it has garnered over 100 million views on Netflix, will the story continue? Less than a month before our interview, one headline claimed the streamers and producers were “in talks” about a Season 2.
“It still is a possibility,” Graham says. But he knows that kind of success doesn’t usually strike twice. “That’s once in a lifetime. We tapped straight into the zeitgeist. You’ve just had something that’s gone everywhere. I mean, No. 1 in Brazil? No.1 in Saudi Arabia?”
“If we were to go again, would I like it to go again? With a different story completely? Yes,” he says. They’d likely focus on a new family. I float the idea of showing the family of Katie, the young girl who Jamie killed. That idea was never discussed simply because of the format Graham and Thorpe had come up with.
“Rightfully so, if we were a conventional drama, you would look at it from Katie’s perspective and we’d see the aftermath of Katie’s family,” he says. “But I felt like we’d have seen that. We’ve seen that many a time. We haven’t really seen this side.”
This side was cut and dry: “I wanted to make sure that Jamie didn’t come from a household where the mum was an alcoholic, or the dad was violent, or he’d been molested by one of his uncles. No disrespect, but. thematically, those are things that happen in conventional dramas which are understandable. I just wanted to shake the box a little bit, see what else we could find in there.”
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