Stephen Graham says his life has changed after the success of Adolescence, which has become one of Netflix’s biggest shows ever.
The 51-year-old already enjoyed a high-profile career prior to the one-shot mini-series, which follows Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, a young boy who has killed a girl in his school. The family are forced to reckon with the incident following Miller’s actions and Graham’s writing and performance, as Jamie’s father, have received critical acclaim.
Graham, who hails from Kirkby in Merseyside, had previously starred as Combo in the Shane Meadows-directed This is England, and as fiery head chef Andy Jones in Boiling Point, also directed in one shot by Adolescence’s Philip Barantini.
The show has become a global success, becoming Netflix’s most-watched UK title ever with 66.3 million views within the first fortnight of its release.
“It’s dead hard getting round the Tesco these days,” joked Graham in an interview with Deadline.
“We thought it would just be a lovely little colloquial British story. You can see it’s made with love, compassion and respect and we served our story properly and stayed true to the subject that we’re covering. But, sometimes, those kinds of dramas obviously just resonate.”
He added: “I’ve always tried to pick stuff that I do on television which can create conversations. This one, particularly, was a beautiful little stone. We threw it in the middle of a lake, and it caused a tsunami.”
Graham has previously expressed his interest in multi-faceted stories about working-class communities, telling The Independent that British television misrepresents the culture as overwhelmed by misery: “It’s very condescending. Things can be hard, but there’s also a lot of laughter. My childhood was full of it.”
However, he told Deadline that news of friends’ children and grandchildren being affected in school made him see that the issues affecting young people were far more widespread.
“It has nothing to do with culture, nothing to do with class. Something’s going on with the young lads that are asking for pictures of these girls,” he said. “I just thought that was really interesting as well, and when I had these little ideas for this patchwork quilt, I said, I’m going to ask Jack to write it.”
