The Netflix miniseries Adolescence tells the haunting story of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie who is arrested for the murder of a girl from his school. Though the series is fictional, Stephen Graham, who co-created the show and also stars as Jamie's father Eddie, says it draws on similar crimes that happened in Great Britain in recent years.
"I read an article in the newspaper, which was about a young boy who had stabbed a young girl to death. And ... I was stunned by what I was reading," Graham says. "And then, about three or four months later, there was a story on the news ... about a young boy who had stabbed a young girl to death, and this incident was the opposite end to the country to the first incident that I'd read about."
Graham says his initial reaction was to blame the boys' parents, but then he began to reconsider: "Adolescence is a very difficult age, as we all know. You go through a lot of different things, physically, mentally, and even spiritually in the greater scheme of things," he says. "My main question was why: Why is this happening?"
As Adolescence shows, there's no easy answer to that question. The series paints a portrait of young people adrift in chaotic schools where bullying is rampant. Jamie's parents, though well meaning, are unaware of the degree to which social media, internet culture and toxic masculinity influence their son.
"There's a wonderful saying, which is, it takes a village to raise a child. And within that kind of complexity ... it's kind of like, maybe we're all accountable," Graham says. "When a child closed the door back in the day when it was me and you, we didn't have access to the rest of the world [via the internet], and we couldn't be influenced dramatically by other people and their theories and their thought processes. So that was what we really wanted to look at."
In addition to Adolescence, Graham is also starring as a bare-knuckle boxer in the historical drama A Thousand Blows on Hulu, which is set in Victorian London.
Interview highlights
On the process of capturing each of the show's four episodes in one long take
We have three weeks to shoot each episode, but what we do within that context is for the first week we rehearse the script and we go through the script like we're about to do a play. … So it was a beautiful position that we were in where we could tweak the language, we could adjust what was happening to our environment and in the same respect, me and [co-creator] Jack [Thorne] are not 14-year-old boys, but we can ask Owen [Cooper, who plays Jamie] what would he say in these particular situations. … We could get to use the real authentic language. But it's such a gift because you're able to marry both disciplines. So you have that spontaneity in the live kind of feeling and exhilaration of theater. But you have the technical ability and the kind of nuance and the realism of film and television acting. ...
Then the second week we worked with all of the crew … [and] we begin to walk through the pathway of what we're going to do, and where we're gonna go and how we're going to get there. … The sound department, they can plant mics here and there so we really, really meticulously go over and over and over and our movements and the third week is when we begin to shoot. So we do two takes a day so hopefully at the minimum we will have 10 takes. … With episode one, the take you see is take two. With episode two, the tape we used was take 14.
On the emotional final scene in which Eddie sobs on his son's bed
On that last scene, on that episode, it was the very last take. … So take 16 ... and it was the very last day of filming. So, again, my kids, both Grace, my daughter and Alfie were there and [my wife] Hannah was there for that day. And for that last take, when I go into the bedroom, I had no idea that they'd done it honestly I didn't and I had gone into that bedroom obviously 15 times and so I had a kind of idea of what I was going to do. … But what my kids and Hannah had done they put photographs on the wall of them and me and they just put, "We're so proud of you, dad. We love you so much." And obviously then you can imagine, I've told you I'm a very soppy person, I wear my heart on my sleeve. … It just all came out. And then when I'd finished that particular scene, they grabbed hold of me and didn't let go of me for a while. And I did cry for quite a bit of time after that actually. But we all cried on that set after that particular scene when we'd finished it.
On showing that Jamie has a good family life
I wanted to make [Jamie's dad] more like that ... kind of men that I was brought up with, like my uncles and my friends' fathers and stuff like that, who were beautiful, wonderful men, hard-working men who go to work, say maybe 6:00 o'clock, 7:00 o' clock in the morning and don't manage to get back home until 6:00, 7:00, 8:00 at night. The kind of area that they live in, it's a really nice housing estate. … It's far from upper class and it is a working-class household in a really nice area.
So I wanted to concentrate on the fact that they come from a good home and there's a lot of love in that home. The mother and father primarily are doing the best for their children, and his sister is an A-level student. She's a really hard-working conscientious student. Because it's unconventional for us to follow the story through the eyes of the family who are from the perpetrator. Normally, as you can imagine, it would be the victim's side of it, and rightly so. In that conventional drama, that's what we would see. But also what I wanted to try and do with this process was eliminate the possibilities of pointing the finger and saying, "Well, this is why."
On playing a kind of masculine father who isn't very affectionate
There's a lot of pain inside Eddie after he realizes what his son has done. What I wanted to try and achieve and try to accomplish with respects to Eddie, is that kind of old-fashioned archetypal man in many ways, who you know comes from a lineage of men who are not very tactile. … I'm very blessed to have two beautiful children and I hug them and cuddle them and I tell them I love them every single day. … But what I wanted to do was to play the polar opposite of that.
On training to play a bare-knuckle boxer in A Thousand Blows
I wanted to look like I was a fighter. I wanted it to look I was brawler. I wanted a look like that was capable of getting in the ring and fighting. … I had six months to prepare before we began to shoot. So I really trained and I trained like an athlete. I trained like a fighter. I had a wonderful coach who was my physical coach, who was also my dietician. ... We do five days a week. And on top of that, I was boxing three, four times a week with my boxing coach. ... So I immersed myself completely into that whole kind of physical aspect of it.
Lauren Krenzel and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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