How Stephen Graham Carried the Weight of Adolescence
Spoilers follow for the Netflix series Adolescence, all four episodes of which began streaming on March 13.
You may think you know what a Stephen Graham performance is going to be like. The British character actor who started his career working with gangster-mythmakers Guy Ritchie and Martin Scorsese can be relied upon for a certain amount of machismo. Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, an underground crime lord and boxer in A Thousand Blows, a neo-Nazi play-acting at being a father in This Is England, a coolly unemotional dystopian leader in Bodies. Graham’s filmography is dotted through with dudes who have a short fuse and the fighting skills to back it up. But in Adolescence, the four-episode Netflix series about Jamie Miller (newcomer Owen Cooper), a budding 13-year-old incel who stabs a female classmate (Emilia Holliday) to death, the swagger some might associate with Graham is absent. In its place is a raw wound of regret, vulnerability, and confusion, which Graham, who also co-created and co-wrote the series with Jack Thorne, uses to play Jamie’s father Eddie as he struggles with the truth of what his son has done.
Each episode of Adolescence was filmed with one camera in one uninterrupted take, and that level of immersion makes the characters’ emotional highs hit harder. The series banks on us being shocked by Jamie’s transformation after seven months in a youth facility in “Episode 3,” which centers on a psychologist’s interview that sends Jamie into bursts of rage and bitterness. But it breaks our hearts in “Episode 4” by spending its entire final installment with the Millers, who on Eddie’s 50th birthday learn that Jamie has decided to plead guilty.
Jamie’s phone-call confession sends Eddie into a teary existential crisis, one that ends with Eddie in Jamie’s bedroom, where his teen son tumbled down the social-media rabbit hole and peed his pants when cops came to arrest him. Graham’s version of Eddie’s achingly analytical, Everyman masculinity was informed, he says, by observing his father and uncles, hearing relatives’ stories about growing up with corporal punishment in schools, and parenting his two children with wife Hannah Walters, who produced the series with Graham under their banner Matriarch Productions. “Eddie was trying to hold it together, constantly trying to hold it together, from that moment where he sees in “Episode 1” that his son has done it,” Graham says. “He’s poleaxed and will never be the same again.”
In Episode 4,” Eddie and his wife Amanda (Christine Tremarco) speak to each other about Jamie with a lot of questions. You ask her, “We’ve done nothing wrong, have we?” She asks you, “But we made him, didn’t we?” Why did questioning feel right for this dynamic, now 13 months after Jamie killed Katie?
If you listen to conversations, man and wife are constantly asking each other questions, in many ways. And in this situation, they’re trying to find the justification, but also seeking that kind of reassurance. “We did do the right thing, didn’t we? We do see this the same way, don’t we? We are on the same page here? We have tried everything we could try?” Jack writes the human condition beautifully.
How we worked was, we had a full week to go through the script. We sit down for one day and talk and read and talk and read. For the first day, we sat in the living room. The second day, we walked around the house. We had Jack with us for the first three days of every rehearsal week. We could really dissect the language and pick out every single nuance. It was about trying to make the conversation as naturalistic and as free-flowing as possible. That’s the beauty of this particular process that we’ve managed to find, this one-take process. You’re in a state of flow. You start at the beginning, the whistle goes, and we’re all off. The language becomes really rhythmic. There’s a real kind of nice melody that happens with Jack’s writing.
In the second week, that’s when Matthew Lewis comes in, our amazing DOP. The first day, it’s just him and his camera team, and we spend the whole day moving through the space and being with Matt and Lee David Brown, our other camera operator. They’re passing the camera to each other. It’s choreographed with meticulous detail. The next day, all of the crew were in. Now we’re all together. I don’t wish to sound pretentious, but I can’t help it. [Laughs.] It’s like you’re building a little symphony. It just builds and it builds and builds. You’ve got the sound operators hiding little mics in certain places where they can’t be seen, and you’ve got the props department coming in and putting things down and then making sure that they’re not there when you move away.
“Episode 4” is set 13 months later. I’m curious about how you wanted your physicality to be different. How did you approach communicating how the passage of time might have changed Eddie?
Weight — weight on his shoulders. From the get-go, Eddie was supposed to be mowing the garden. I think the crew were a bit shocked at first because I actually fucking mowed the garden. [Laughs.] Before we did the very first take, I mowed the whole garden to get me into it. Not that I’ve never mowed a garden, but I wanted to be in Eddie’s garden. He’s 50. As he puts the mower in the shed, he sees the bike he bought for Jamie; I wanted a specific BMX with mag wheels because it was the bike he never had when he was a kid. Eddie’s reliving his childhood, or trying to capture the childhood that he never had, through his son — and just that looking at it and holding that for a moment, that weight. You’re trying to escape it by doing a mundane thing, mowing the garden. I’m going to have a good day today. And then I see the bike: He’s not here. Fuck.
To maintain the oners, the camera is moving around — it’s being handed off to someone at the top of the stairs in the Millers’ house, it’s being placed on a drone, it’s being mounted on the hood of Eddie’s defaced van. Was there one technical thing about the process that required an even higher level of choreography and finesse in the fourth episode?
The first moment when we come out of the house in order to shut the door and get in the van and go. There’s a rig set up on the van, and they have to take the camera and attach it to the rig seamlessly. We time it. Don’t forget you’ve got to get it off the rig as well. So it’s both of those moments. At the beginning, you’re rehearsing everything. In the scene where Eddie goes through a fence to chase the teen boys who graffitied his van, I used to go, “Matt, I’m not happy with you trying to get through that hole in that gate. Can we lift the wire up a little bit?” It’s very quick, and it’s not a big gap! So for the first couple of takes, you’re kind of like, Whew! We’ve made it through the gap. And then you hit that state of flow, and it’s like, I know he’s going to make it through the gap. I know he’s going to get there. You have that confidence in the fact that it’s all going to be okay.
Teenagers can do cruel things. When Eddie’s got hold of that boy, Eddie realizes it’s wrong. But in the same respect, everything Eddie’s saying to this kid is right: “You don’t do that. You don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know what’s happening in here.” Eddie opens up to that kid more than he probably has at home. Then he becomes aware of the fear that he’s putting into this kid, and that frightens him.
On the way back from that, the camera is no longer on the hood of the van, but in the backseat, looking at Eddie, Amanda, and their daughter, Lisa, when Jamie calls to tell Eddie that he’s pleading guilty. You don’t see a lot of Eddie on the way back. You’re very compartmentalized emotionally, and you’re outside of the frame.
You don’t. When we’re in the car with Jamie (in “Episode 1”) — this was a conscious choice — you don’t see Jamie’s face. You see the side of his face. You don’t see the true impact it’s having on him. We didn’t want to show you. We didn’t want you to try to have a look into his soul. But what’s lovely about having the camera in the back (in “Episode 4”) is that Lee can move across the seat. If it was a conventional drama, we’d have had one camera in the back, two on the side, one at the front; cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, let’s see, let’s see. But I think we need to treat the audience with intelligence and with respect. As an audience, you’re really listening to what’s being said, and you’re just watching for a bit. You’re looking to see the faces, and you’re looking to see what’s going on. We’ve been given all of that back-of-head and side-of-head space and then as Eddie opens the door to take the plant out, you see his face. He’s crushed. He’s absolutely crushed. We give you that one little tiny moment, and you see: boom.
My favorite bit of all is we then go in the house with Christine, and she hangs the coat up. It’s some of the most beautiful acting I have ever seen. She reminds me of my mother, my grandmother, my auntie, my wife: that strength. She’s trying to hold it together for the family, and it just breaks for a second, and she crumbles as she’s hanging the coat up — and then she pulls it back together to go upstairs.
I have to ask about the ending, where you kiss Jamie’s teddy bear and tuck it into his bed. I know this moment wasn’t scripted, and came to you in rehearsal. Talk to me about that.
One of my favorite bits is when Amélie goes downstairs, and Eddie says, “How did we make her?” And then Christine says, “The same way we made him.” That line has so much gravity, but also, it’s so honest. I remember that, and walking into the bedroom for the first time and saying, “What are we going to do, Phil, when I come in here? I want to come in and have a look, because this is where it all started.” And then Phil put the teddy bear on the bed, and I went, “What’s that for?” He said, “I’ve just got this idea.” It just slowly comes to me to hold it. I’m very close with my children. I feel so blessed. I’m very tactile with my kids. When I used to tuck them in bed, I’d cuddle them, kiss them on the forehead and say “good night” — and it just happened. In the rehearsal process, it was just a feeling. And then when you immerse it within the context of the whole scene and the whole shot, when we’re doing this whole thing together, the energy just overtakes you.
But what Philip did do —
This is placing your family pictures in the bedroom so you could see them as you’re filming on Jamie’s bed, right? He got you really good.
[Laughs.] Yeah, he did, and in a beautiful way. He’s a very dear friend. That’s where Philip has his geniuses. He’s a proper actor’s director. You think you’ve gone as far as you can go, and you think you took it to a certain place, and he just has this wonderful ability to point you a little bit further. He can normally do it through very subtle means, but in this particular case, it wasn’t subtle at all. He had these beautiful photographs of my children, and a “We love you, Dad, we’re so proud of you” message. For Stephen to see that and for that to hit Stephen, but then to stay in the context of Eddie — that was the key thing for me. It was the last take of the very last day we were shooting.
Do you feel like you had another take to give, or did he understand that you were there?
No, no, no. I think he knew that that was it. We already had it a couple of takes back. We all knew we had it, so there was no pressure — not like in “Episode 2,” where we didn’t have it, and it was the very last take that we got it. This one — let’s just enjoy it. Let’s throw this one up there and give it to the great gods of creativity and say, “Thank you for this beautiful experience,” and let’s see what happens.
What happened with “Episode 2”? Was there something with the drone?
Well, the drone only got brought into it by Wednesday of shooting. [Laughs.] Toby Bentley from Netflix was lovely, wonderful. He said, “I think we need to see Eddie again, at the end. I want to connect Eddie to our story. But I think he should be over by the flowers. See if you can work it out.” I wasn’t allowed to rehearse that day. I’m an executive producer, but I’m not booked as an actor to do that. I’m like, “Let me just get on, then. It’s my production.” They were like, “No. We have to clear it through the right channels.” We had to rehearse it with Phil’s brother. [Laughs.] There’s a take out there with Phil’s brother, bless him.
That was on a Wednesday, and then on Thursday, we go for the first time and it’s quite wobbly. The second time, the wind’s too strong; we can’t fly the drone. We have to finish it with him by the school. On Friday morning, we got one up, but it was quite wobbly. Friday afternoon, it’s the last take. It’s the last chance. We can’t come back on Monday because we have new locations set up. We’ve got a really good take from the second take on Monday, but this new ending doesn’t exist. What are we going to do? And then — boom. It just hit like poetry. Every single performance had that kind of beautiful fluidity. It’s like jazz. It just went together lovely.
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