🎧 Stephen Graham’s Emmy Night Plan: A Double-Decker Bus
The triple Emmy nominee and ‘Adolescence’ creator tells me the backstory of his transformative Netflix smash
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Stephen Graham is certainly not the first person to describe his TV collaborators as a family — but he may be the first to get a family-sized vehicle that has room for all of them.
“I want to get us a double-decker bus,” the English-born actor tells me when I ask about his Emmy night plans on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “When I first went to drama group in Liverpool, we used to get the bus to the youth theater. So what better way to honor that than getting on the bus to go to a big, glittery, shiny, beautiful, bright award show.”
A theater troupe may be the best description of the team Graham, 52, gathered to make Adolescence. The smash hit Netflix limited series — it’s currently the second most popular show to ever stream on the platform (after Wednesday, based on Netflix’s internal metrics) — earned 13 Emmy nominations this year, including three for Graham as the co-creator and co-writer, alongside Jack Thorne, and as its lead actor. Many of the people involved with Adolescence were previous collaborators, including fellow acting nominees Christine Tremarco and Erin Doherty, as well as director Philip Barantini. He and Graham first got their starts together as actors way back on Band of Brothers in 2001. When Barantini pivoted to directing, he and Graham tested out a wild idea together: filming an entire series in a single take.
The result was the 2021 U.K. show Boiling Point, which caught the attention of Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner at Plan B, who asked Graham and Barantini to tackle something new. “Originally, I think they wanted to do it about one character and eight episodes,” Graham remembers now. “That’s when I went, I don’t wanna do that. I wanna do something completely different.”
One of the many marvels of Adolescence is the way that it takes a vital topic not often seriously considered in narrative storytelling — the radicalization of teenage boys online — and brings it to the masses. The show focuses on a young boy (Owen Cooper, who, at 15, is the youngest person ever nominated for supporting actor in a limited series) accused of murdering his female classmate. Yet despite its dark and tragic subject matter, Adolescence has been watched by millions around the world. Graham is clear that his goal with the show was to start a conversation, but even he couldn’t have imagined just how far it would spread.
“We knew it was going to be a difficult watch,” Graham says. “All we could do was try to play it truthfully and as authentically as possible. I think it caught the zeitgeist because we were true to the story that we told. It’s like those old, beautiful fables — they’re universal.”
Hear much more from Graham — including a preview of the Pittsburgh accent he’s learning for his next project, an Apple TV+ crime series, on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. But, wait, there’s more — at least for members of our Prestige Junkie After Party paid tier. Those who have smartly signed up for $5 a month or $50 a year can access a video version of the whole episode, which also includes the second part of the fall movie preview series with my After Party collaborator, Christopher Rosen, and special guest Tyler Coates. No time like the present to join us: Head here for details on how to subscribe.