‘Adolescence’ Creator Stephen Graham on Why He Had to Make the Netflix Hit

“Is all this for just us, then?”

Five minutes prior, Stephen Graham had entered a Middle Eastern restaurant in midtown Manhattan, shook hands for an introduction, and quickly excused himself to use the restroom. An hour ago, the stocky British actor best known on these shores for playing tough guys and gangsters was on a morning talk show, after having chatted with Jimmy Fallon the previous evening. Roughly an hour from now, Graham will be whisked away to do a live radio interview. He’s has only just returned his seat at a tiny corner table when he suddenly notices the massive tray of dips sitting before us on an elevated stand. His eyes widen, a grin breaks out across his face, and for a second, Graham looks like a cross between a kid on Christmas morning and the world’s busiest man finally catching his breath. “Awright then,” he says in his Liverpudlian accent, reaching for a pita. “Let’s have us a conversation, shall we?”

Graham wasn’t supposed to be in New York; we’d been set up to talk via Zoom a week before. But that was before Adolescence, the four-part limited series made by Plan B and his production company Matriarch, was officially released on Netflix on March 14th. Over the course of a weekend, the story of a 13-year-old boy (played by Owen Cooper) arrested for murder, and the fallout that ensues, became something close to an overnight sensation. By Monday morning, it was the most viewed show on the streamer, had received rave reviews, and was inspiring dozens of think pieces about the impact of incel culture on young men. A number of high profile TV-appearance requests had flooded in, which meant Graham — who acts in three of the four episodes, and cowrote the entire series — was now pressing the flesh in person. He’d expected the project might cause a bit of a stir in his native country. Graham had no idea that, only a handful of days after the premiere, it would have the impact it had all over the world.

“I got a text from a mate of mine, telling me how big Adolescence is in India,” he says. “And my first response was, ‘Hold on… did you say India?! Did I hear you correctly?’ Apparently, it’s really striking a nerve there. But it just seems to have struck a nerve in a lot of places! The thing you have to understand, when we set out to do this… it was very colloquial. But it’s like we dropped a stone into this pond, and the ripple effect it’s produced has been unbelievable.”

To hear Graham tell it, the basis of Adolescence begins with a car ride — although really, he quickly adds, you can trace it even further back to a phone call. An old actor friend named Philip Barantini was trying to kickstart a directorial career, and he rang up Graham to ask about starring in his first film. Graham politely declined, then gave a counteroffer: get your sea legs behind the camera, then come back when you’re ready to do your next one. When Barantini showed him Seconds Out, his 2019 short about a boxer suffering from mental health issues, Graham was impressed. The filmmaker reminded his buddy of what he’d promised and pitched him on his next short, based on Barantini’s time working in a restaurant. He wanted Graham to play a chef. Oh, and one other thing: The whole thing would be done in a single take.

The result would become a test run for Boiling Point, Barantini’s 2021 breakthrough feature that expanded the idea of following a chef on the verge of a nervous breakdown via one long, continuous shot to a full 92 minutes. “Cut to the BAFTAs,” Graham says, referencing the British equivalent of the Oscars. “The movie is up for a bunch of awards. It’s attracted a lot of attention. The folks at Plan B had approached me about doing something on TV that would be, like, eight episodes of following someone around in a single shot. Similar to Boiling Point stylistically, but different. I told them thanks, it’s a nice compliment, but I’m not sure I’d want to do that. I mentioned this to Phil on the car ride back after the awards show, and he goes, ‘Well, fuck — that’s a pretty fucking good offer, mate! What would you wanna do?’

“And I swear on my late mother’s life,” Graham continues, making the sign of the cross and and blowing a kiss heavenward, “that in that moment, I experienced what my musician friends have described to me when I ask them how they came up with a song. They’ve told me it’s just like they’re pulling the melody and the lyrics out of the ether, as if it was already there waiting for them. I don’t want to sound pretentious — that’s my working-class roots showing, mate — but in a single second, I had the entire show in my head. Like, the whole thing. I just turned to Phil, ‘Ok, so here’s what it is….’”

Graham had remembered reading a story about a boy who had stabbed a young woman in a village not too far from where he lived. A few months later, he was watching the evening news when a segment came on about another teenage girl being attacked with a knife. “Not just a completely different case,” he notes. “It had happened on the other side of the country! Mind you, this was before the incident at Southport” — in which three young women were stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class — “but it was already like four or five occurrences that were similar enough to go: Ok, what is happening here? These aren’t men committing these crimes. They’re boys. That had been lurking somewhere in my subconscious for a while.”

So he began pitching Barantini on the idea that you’d start by following the police as they arrest and detain a teenager who’s been accused of murdering a classmate. (“There’s a show in England that I’m obsessed with, called 24 Hours in Police Custody — I knew it’d be something like that.”) Then they’d shift gears and examine the case from different angles, ranging from how students reacted to the tragedy to a therapist’s assessment of the boy’s mental stability. Each of them would adapt to a distinct genre of storytelling: the police procedural, the psychological thriller, the teen drama, the family melodrama. Each would also unfold in real time, with the camera following the participants in what would appear to be an unbroken single shot. He’d play the boy’s dad. Barantini immediately went, Yes. Let’s do it.

Graham quickly enlisted Jack Thorne, a playwright and screenwriter who’d worked on the This Is England series (a continuation of the 1986 cult film in which Graham played a racist skinhead) and director Shane Meadows sensitive 2019 character study The Virtues. After explaining the central concept to him, Thorne agreed to do it if Graham cowrote it with him. “This man is an absolute brilliant portrait artist of the human condition, and I’m the guy who does this,” Graham jokes, affecting a scowling look before breaking into a laugh. “I mean, I do not fancy myself a writer at all! But Jack felt that it would work if we did it together, so I’d talk out scenes and ideas, tell him that the camera would follow this person at this moment and then switch over at this point. Then Jack would just make it come alive, you know what I mean?”

After spending a good deal of 2023 shooting another project that he and his wife, actor-producer Hannah Walters, had developed with Peaky Blinders‘ Steven Knight titled A Thousand Blows — which included six months of the actor packing on muscle to play a Victorian era boxer — Graham and his partners began filming Adolescence in July 2024. A fairly unique method was set up to accomplish what Graham describes as “a combination of a theatrical production, a dance performance and a high-stakes film shoot” to accomplish the goal of getting everything working in sync for a single-take run-through.

“First week, you get Phil and everyone in the cast together, go through the script backwards and forwards,” he explains. “Jack would be there for a few days, to hear who his dialogue sounded. Matt Lewis, our director of photography, would be milling about, checking to see where he might put the camera or see how he can movie from one bit to the next. We’re not doing this in some room, mind you; we’re doing this on the sets and locations, testing how things are going to feel in the actual space. Everybody is adding there own bits and pieces.

“Second week,” Graham says, “the crew comes in, starts figuring out where the lights are going to go, how we’re going to pull off a moving-car shot. At this point, for the actors, it’s in our blood. It’s like we’re just practicing tennis, swinging away and hitting balls from sheer muscle memory. Which is good, because when they’re trying to figure out where the boom mics are going to go or you have a sound person going, ‘Is this microphone ok, can you move it to over here?’ — you can just go ‘yeah, all good, mate’ and not break stride. We’d do a dress rehearsal on Friday, so that going into the third week, everyone knows every beat instinctually. Monday morning, we’d do two full takes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Two takes. That was it.”

Episode 3 was shot first, so that Cooper — who’d never acted in anything before, and who Graham, Barantini and a casting agent discovered through a youth drama club — could adjust to the process and being on set. (That would be the chapter in which the then-14-year-old actor and Erin Doherty, playing a psychologist, perform what’s essentially a two-hander and audiences get a glimpse of how damaged this youngster really is.) As for Graham’s everydad character, he initially acts as the audience’s surrogate, trying to negotiate a parent’s nightmare as his child is put through the paces of the penal system. By Adolescence‘s final episode, which focuses on how the family is (or isn’t) processing the fallout, his father becomes a case study of repressed anger and guilt. It’s the sort of explosive yet nuanced work that both longtime fans of Graham and those who simply remember him as Al Capone on Boardwalk Empire, or the mobster who offends Al Pacino by showing up to a meeting in shorts in The Irishman, have recognized as being a class unto itself.

When it’s mentioned that Graham, who first caught audience’s eyes in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 crime thriller Snatch and is part of the “Lock, Stock generation” of actors who came up in that era, could have simply carved out a nice, long career playing variations of tough guys in track suits called “The Guv’nor,” he laughs and vigorously nods. “Working actors go where the work is, and there was a lot of that back then, for sure,” he says. Graham partially credits Brad Pitt and Martin Scorsese for helping him avoid that. His Snatch costar told him that he “already saw a lot of characters in me before I’d done much, and I never forgot that. His early encouragement meant a lot. And when I put myself on tape to audition for Gangs of New York, Marty saw something in me that he said just grabbed him right away. On one of my first days on that set, he went” — Graham slips into Scorsese’s rapid-fire voice — “‘So I think maybe you could be the British Joe Pesci.’ Then I did the scene, and he suddenly burst out out of his chair and yelled, ‘Cagney! It’s like watching Jimmy Cagney!!! Oh, good, good, GOOD!’”

What some people outside of the U.K. don’t understand, however, is that a series like Adolescence isn’t the exception to the rule for Graham — it’s closer to the norm, and goes back to his formative influences. “Growing up, it wasn’t just American movies and actors like De Niro and Pacino that made me want to become an actor, although that’s part of it,” he admits. “It was the social dramas you’d see on British television, and the Play for Today showcases where directors like Ken Loach and Alan Clarke did amazing work. These were tough, humanistic stories about working-class people and real issues, real problems. And because they’d air on TV, they’d reach a huge audience.

“That was really what I wanted to go for with Adolescence as both a writer and an actor,” Graham adds, as gets ready to head off to his next press event of the day. “I didn’t set out to make a ‘hit.’ I wanted to make one of those social dramas for right now. Because we have a real crisis going on with young men today, and we’ve got to start talking about it right now. It affects all of us. I just wanted to start a conversation about this, a real conversation. I didn’t know if people would be ready to talk about it. But I think they are. And hopefully, this is just the beginning of the conversation.”