The golden rule to treat others as you would like to be treated doesn’t always hold true in life. But it was a necessity on “Adolescence.” The demands of shooting episode-length single takes require weeks of rehearsal and the kind of intuitive, balletic coordination we normally only see on sports fields – and unlike on a lot of sports teams and film sets, co-creator, executive producer, and star Stephen Graham was in a position to make sure there were no dicks on the team.
To its absolute credit, the Netflix miniseries is a meditation on the fallout after a 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper) murders one of his female classmates (Emilia Holliday) rather than a whodunit or a breathlessly titillating true-crime rehash of the violent event. Speaking to IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, Graham said that the idea to interrogate how incel culture online leads to violence in the real world was inherently a collaborative one. It took a village to fail Jamie; it would also take one to tell that story with unflinching honesty.
“We’ve all earned the right to have the opportunity and to be there. And you must treat people as you would expect to be treated yourself. So that was one of our key components: To make sure that there [were] no dicks on set, you know what I mean,” Graham said. “Then it was putting a team together that we wanted to spend time with, but also we knew were massively creative.”
Graham had a leg up as his chief co-conspirators were all longtime collaborators. Director Phillip Barantini and director of photography Matthew Lewis had worked with Graham on multiple other single-take projects, a short that eventually became the film “Boiling Point,” and co-creator Jack Thorne has written for Graham as far back as his “This Is England” days. There are several returning faces behind and in front of the camera from “A Thousand Blows,” including executive producer and Episode 2 guidance counselor Hannah Walters, and Episode 3 psychological evaluator Erin Doherty, in addition to the “Boiling Point” alumni on Lewis’s camera team.
It’s one thing to make movies with your friends. It’s also to “Adolescence’s” credit that Graham wanted to craft the show to champion both actors and craftspeople in new ways, giving them the kind of challenges he knew they could absolutely knock out of the park, but that the industry wasn’t likely to offer them. Just one example is with Ashley Walters, who plays arresting officer DI Bascombe.
“I’ve known Ashley for over 20 years, [and] I always felt that we hadn’t seen Ashley’s true potential. Look, he’s a young black man from London. I’m a young Scouse mixed-race lad from Liverpool. We can only play [the] characters that people are writing in order for us to be able to play those people,” Graham said. “Predominantly, he had played characters from a certain background, you know what I mean? And I always knew there was a lot more to Ashley as an actor, and I wanted to take this opportunity to show the world what he’s capable of.”
Another example was Christine Tremarco, who plays Jamie’s mother Manda and who Graham has known for most of his life, but had never gotten the chance to act with. “What she brought to the role was so beautiful. She has that desperation of every parent and every mother, and she carries herself so beautifully and has a wonderful kind of nervous energy as that character,” Graham said. “ That’s what it is. It’s creating an environment, putting us all in the sandbox and giving us all a load of toys and saying, ‘Now make a castle.’”
Graham credits casting director Shaheen Baig with the herculean effort of assembling the right mix of adults and finding the right children to live in the “Adolescence” castle. Baig spearheaded the massive search for Jamie, winnowing it down from over 500 auditions to about five finalists, but Graham and the filmmaking team were determined to find parts for all the actors and make what can be a brutal process as supportive and affirming as possible for these young people from non-professional acting backgrounds.
“ What was great about Owen was that he hadn’t done any professional acting before, but he went to a little drama club in Manchester called Drama Mob. That’s where Shaheen found him. So we wanted to try and create opportunities for young boys and girls, as you see that we have in Episode 2, who hadn’t had lots of experience, so we went to smaller managers and agents,” Graham said. “99.9 percent of your work in any piece is done during casting, I think.”
There’s a supportiveness and a kindness behind the making of “Adolescence” that never shows up explicitly on screen, but can be felt in the level of detail, thoughtfulness, and simple presence that every person on the miniseries was able to bring to it. Maybe nothing exemplifies that better than the fact that one of the most impactful lines in Episode 2, spoken by Bascombe’s partner DI Frank (Faye Marsay), came out of a conversation between Graham and makeup supervisor Clare Ramsey.
While working in the makeup chair with Graham one morning, Ramsey reflected that something really tough about these kinds of stories is that the perpetrator always gets the front line and the victim gets forgotten. After he heard that, Graham told Ramsey to get a pen. “I just went, ‘write down what you’ve just said.’ And so she wrote it down. And this is where, within a piece like this, the best idea wins or the best idea is selected. I just quickly phoned Jack,” Graham said.
Thorne was also blown away by Ramsey’s observation. “He was like, ‘That’s genius. That’s beautiful.’ He said, ‘I’ll find the right place.’ So you see, that’s what I mean by there were no egos on this at all whatsoever. Jack can take a line from a makeup artist and incorporate it into the piece because he thinks it’s a beautiful line.”
That line — “Everyone will remember Jamie. No one will remember her” — is as beautiful and sad as “Adolescence” itself. If there’s anything hopeful in it, it’s that it took a team effort to bring it to life. “ I always use the analogy of being a football team — sorry, a soccer team. You bring people in who are wonderful within their positions because you know the qualities that they will bring, and then it’s [about] creating a space and allowing them to be able to do what they do,” Graham said.
“Adolescence” is streaming on Netflix. Subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview at the top of the page or on IndieWire’s YouTube page.
