Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne praises Stephen Graham’s ‘extraordinary’ idea

By Charlotte McLaughlin and Casey Cooper-Fiske, PA

Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne has praised his fellow writer and actor Stephen Graham for the “extraordinary” idea for the show.

Each of the four episodes of the Netflix crime drama about a boy accused of killing his classmate – written and created by Graham and Thorne – was filmed in a single shot in Pontefract, West Yorkshire.

The show sees This Is England star Graham as Eddie Miller, the father of 13-year-old Jamie, played by newcomer Owen Cooper, who sees armed police burst into his home to arrest his son.

Eddie is then chosen as Jamie’s appropriate adult, accompanying him at the police interview, and learning the extent of what his son is accused of doing.

Speaking about the show’s topic on BBC Radio 2 with Jo Whiley and Graham, Thorne (46) said: “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to look at, and I thought it was a very important thing to look at.

“The first thing I said is, what if we wrote it together? And would you be prepared to put on a different hat with me for the first time?

“We’d done five things before together as actor and writer, but working with Stephen as a writer was so exciting.

“It was so interesting to have a totally different conversation with him before words were on the page and we had to look into ourselves.

“We had to, in order to understand this problem, in order to look at male anger, male rage, we sort of had to understand our own anger and our own rage, and our own problems and our own cruelty, and the ways that we have been less than perfect.

“And Stephen and I were able to have some very honest discussions, and we went to some very dark places, and I think that honesty hopefully shows on the screen.”

It came after Graham (51) explained the idea for Adolescence had come from a short film called Boiling Point, also directed by the show’s director Philip Barantini, which was nominated for Bafta and Bifa awards.

 

The Kirkby-born actor said: “So we knew we were going to do it, and I just wasn’t too sure what it was going to be about at first, and then all of a sudden, it hit me like a lightning bolt.

“I read an article in the paper about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl, and then a few months later on the news, there was a piece, and it was, again, it was a young boy who had stabbed a young girl, and they were opposite ends of the country.

“When I watched the news article, it really hurt my heart, not just as a father and as a parent, but I kind of just wondered what was going on with society, where this kind of thing is something that’s happening quite regularly.

“So I knew that that was what I wanted to make it about, and straight away, I said to Hannah [Walters, actress and Graham’s wife], ‘this is kind of what I want to do’.

“I had a rough idea of what it was, and I said, I know who I want to write it, I’m going to ask Jack to write it, because I knew if there was anyone that could pull this rough idea that I had within my head out and bring it to life, that would be Jack.

“So that’s kind of where it came from.”

The show has already earned critical praise and a number of celebrity fans.

TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson singled out the second episode, which follows Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe as he tries to find a possible motive at Jamie’s school, before the final shot pans out to travel to the place of the young girl’s death, and Eddie leaving flowers.

Clarkson wrote on X: “Adolescence. The camera at the end of show two. How on earth did they do that? It’s impossible.”

Explaining how the shot was done on the Netflix Tudum behind-the-scenes site, director of photography Matthew Lewis said that he found a “way to make the camera fly”, by attaching it to a drone.

The streaming site also said on X that the director of photography was carrying the camera, until the production team attached it to a drone.

They added that this “then flies a distance of 0.3 miles across the site to the murder scene, where it comes down to a camera operator and team of grips who smoothly catch the camera and transition into a close shot of Stephen Graham, easy”.

A video posted by Netflix on X shows videographers running to film the chase scene between Jamie’s friend and DI Bascombe, before the drone is placed on top of the camera to lift it into the air and bring it to where Eddie is paying his respects.

The cast also features Top Boy star Ashley Walters as DI Bascombe, and Chloe actress Erin Doherty taking on the role of Briony Ariston, the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case.