by Gill Pringle in Los Angeles
Launching his tough guy career in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Stephen Graham today sheds his swagger to portray the heartbroken father of a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a teenage girl in Netflix drama, Adolescence.
It’s a four-part series from which no parent can turn away, watching the fall-out as the family struggles to deal with their new reality.
If it’s a ‘well, that would never happen to us’, scenario then – in the current climate of social media and its deadly grip on our children – it plays out like it actually could happen.
Because, instead of falling upon the usual tropes of alcoholic or abusive parents, Adolescence portrays the Millers as a family that looks just like your family; regular, hard-working, loving parents.
“What’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare,” says Graham who, fresh from the success of playing a troubled chef on popular drama and TV series, Boiling Point, was asked if he had any ideas for a totally different series.
“So I came up with this idea because I’d read in the newspaper about a young boy who had stabbed a young girl to death, and then a couple of months later, there was another incident of a young boy stabbing a young girl to death, and they were both at opposite ends of the country,” says the actor.
“It really hurt my heart, and I just thought, ‘what’s happening in today’s society where a young boy does something like this?’ And it’s not a one-off incident or a lone attack. There seemed to be a few of these cases up and down the country, and I just thought that would be a really interesting story to tell, and to raise awareness to the possibilities,” says the father of two.
With his strong Scouse accent and built physique, Graham frequently portrays tough guys in a career that includes the Pirates of the Caribbean and Venom movie franchises, This is England as well as on TV with Line of Duty and playing Al Capone in hit series Boardwalk Empire.
Which is why his performance in Adolescence is so surprising – playing heartbroken father Eddie Miller as a man who is an inherently decent and loving dad.
While Graham has a close relationship with his own family members in real life, he asked himself, ‘what happens if you have a young lad like Jamie who maybe doesn’t get on anywhere near as well as I do with my father, or as well as I get on – thank God – with my own son, Alfie?’
“In our story, you can see that there is a bit of disconnect between father and son, although Eddie doesn’t want there to be one, but he doesn’t know how to bridge the gap. And maybe this boy, not being able to talk to the grownups about his situation, is a key part of our story,” says Graham, 51, who is married to producer/actress Hannah Walters.
Ostensibly a crime thriller, Adolescence asks and raises many questions about modern-day parenting and the struggles kids face in navigating social media. “But it’s not a whodunit. It’s a why has he done it? And in the context of this, it’s like it takes a village to raise a child, so it’s that aspect of looking at who is accountable, and why would a young boy go to these lengths and commit this horrific crime?” says Graham whose screen wife Manda is played by Christine Tremarco with Ashley Walters as a police inspector and Erin Doherty as a child psychologist.
For Ashley Walters [below], he was keen to witness what really happens in such arrests, even going on a real-life raid in preparation for his role as DI Luke Bascombe, a police officer struggling with raising his own teenage boy.
“At that point, it was all about, how does this procedure work? What do the police do? How did they act? That’s what I was obsessing over until I got on set and started rehearsing, and it dawned on me that this isn’t about being a copper. I think it is for Bascombe, until he burst through that little kid’s door, and he sees that kid and, at that moment, it’s about him being a dad. And that’s the heart of it – because he’s scared about his own kids going down that road,” says Walters.
“I think every parent that watches this is going to feel the same way. It’s just a really important thing for us to talk about. And I think the place we are now in society, where connection is being lost. It really threw up questions for me about how I deal with my own kids, how I talk to my own boys, and do I need to spend more time with them? Just connecting, because you’re doing all the great things, right? As a father, you’re out there, I go to work, I make the money, I pay the bills, we go and kick a ball on the weekend or whatever.
“But how much do you really get to sit down and talk to your kids about what’s going on inside them? That’s what it threw up for me. And it was emotionally draining by the end of it. But actually, it did help me to talk to my kids more and I hope it brings those questions up for other parents,” he says.
Casting the right boy to play 13-year-old Jamie Miller was not easy, the team spending nine months looking at 500 boys before discovering newbie Owen Cooper, now 15.
“Owen is a million miles away from Jamie,” says Graham. “He’s one of the loveliest, sweetest kids you’ll ever meet. His mum and dad are adorable. He comes from a wonderful family who were so supportive, loving and caring. So, we worked intensely on pulling this performance out of him, because it’s alien for him. He’s not the kind of kid that stands and shouts in anyone’s face, so it’s about the duality within that; the light and the dark of every human being.”
Placing importance on also telling the story from the perspective of the boy, Graham says, “We wanted to eliminate the cliches of a normal drama of this ilk, and have it be the kind of dad who never raised his hand; a dad who wasn’t violent and mum was not an alcoholic. And nor has the boy been abused physically, mentally or sexually by one of his uncles or another member of the family,” says the actor/creator who admits to an obsession with documentary series 24 Hours in Police Custody.
His first project as a co-writer, Graham gives kudos to his award-winning writing partner Jack Thorne. “Jack really delved into this and looked at the dark side of the stuff that’s out there on social media, and that’s where the whole INCEL construct came from,” he explains.
Not that he claims to have any quick-fix solutions for the existential crisis facing our kids. “We’re not pointing a finger at anyone. We’re not saying this is the solution. We don’t know. We don’t have the answers, but we can at least begin the conversation about how we go about solving this because, let’s face it, it’s not as if we’ve created some alien drama on Mars, about something that will never happen?
“It’s about reality and truth, and people can question what it is. But ultimately, these incidents have happened. Young boys have killed young girls. So, it’s not as if we’ve made this thing up; this thing is happening within our society. I think it’s something that as a culture, as a society, we need to have a look at. And I think we all have an obligation to take some responsibility and some accountability of what happens with this next generation,” says Graham who, next up, will be seen playing Bruce Springsteen’s dad in upcoming Boss biopic, Deliver Me from Nowhere.
Adolescence is streaming now on Netflix.
