‘Adolescence’: Stephen Graham on the most important drama you’ll watch this year

There is a striking moment, just minutes into the first episode of Adolescence, when an armed police unit boot down the door of an unassuming family home in the north of England and undertake a dramatic dawn raid with such force you’d assume they were about to snare a drugs kingpin. 

As the rifle-toting cops race upstairs to detain Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy who has just wet his pyjamas, it becomes clear that this new Netflix project, written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham — who also stars as Jamie’s father — is dealing with the timeliest of issues. In it, we see the fall-out of a teenager being charged with stabbing one of his female classmates to death. 

Liverpool-born Graham, one of Britain’s most celebrated actors and a favourite of Martin Scorsese, insists that his show isn’t here to make any political statements. Although that may not be his explicit intention, Adolescence certainly holds the largest of mirrors up to a major issue blighting British society in 2025. 

The central plot comes at a time when the Prime Minister has said that the country faces a serious threat from “loners, misfits [and] young men in their bedrooms”. The horrific events that occurred in Southport last summer may spring to mind, but it speaks volumes of the problem at hand that this bold new drama was envisaged long before that atrocity occurred. 

“There had been a number of incidents where young boys were stabbing and killing young girls, and I’m calling them young boys because they’re not developed to be men,” Graham tells Rolling Stone UK from his home in Leicestershire. 

“They’d happened up and down the country, and my objective was merely to ask: ‘What’s going on? Why is this happening? Can we just have a look at it because this kind of thing didn’t happen when I was a young lad.’” 

Reflecting on his own childhood, Graham warmly recalls how moments of mere smut and innuendo on 70s staples such as The Benny Hill Show had been enough for him to be sent to bed at his Liverpool home. 

“There was no way I could have seen that, so in that respect the parents had a way of deciding what you watched or how you were influenced in the home,” he says. 

In contrast, Graham’s new show — filmed in one continuous shot with the team who employed the same pressure cooker technique on Boiling Point — is one where the word ‘incel’ is mentioned in hushed tones and hangs like the darkest of spectres. It’s a portmanteau of ‘involuntarily celibate’, and while not by any stretch the sole motivating factor for the spate of real-life attacks, it reflects the waves of young boys who have been radicalised in their bedrooms by violent misogyny lurking in the darkest corners of the internet. 

By presenting Jamie’s parents as hardworking, everyday Britons, Graham and Jack Thorne hammer home the inconvenient but terrifying truth that this could happen to any family across the land. 

“I’m 51 years of age, and I’m in a good place mentally, spiritually, physically, and I try not to judge in any way shape or form, but when I hear these things on the news, I know I’m not alone in blaming the parents sometimes,” says Graham. 

“And then I thought to myself, ‘What if it’s not the parents?’ I wanted the dad to be a hardworking man, the kind of man that I was brought up with, like my uncles and my dad, who used to go to work at, like, six in the morning and not get home till 8 o’clock at night, Monday to Friday. I didn’t want him to be a violent dad who would raise his hand to his children. It’s the same for the mum too; we imagined her as a manager for John Lewis. Let’s take all of those normal common denominators away from the table, and let’s just concentrate on something that’s happened with the boy here.” 

It’s clear that this is an issue that all of society needs to confront, but for Graham — the father of a teenage boy himself — you sense it’s deeply personal.  

“You just can’t tell what they’re doing in their rooms some days, do you know what I mean?” Graham ponders for a moment. “Even for my own boy, when I’ve walked past his bedroom and heard him shout colourful language while he’s playing a game with his mates, and I’ve opened his door and gone ‘OI! Who are you talking to?! If your ma catches you saying that…!’” Graham recalls in his trademark Scouse brogue with a level of conviction in his voice that makes you feel like you’re being directly addressed by one of the formidable characters he’s played. 

He adds: “It was just about looking at the influence that certain people can have upon our children without our knowledge, do you know what I mean? Boys are very influenced in many ways, and even if the relationship with your father isn’t a tactile one or you don’t see him regularly, if there’s a slight fraction in that relationship, then surely, you’re going to seek that somewhere else, you know what I mean?” 

You sense there’s no such cracks to be found within Graham’s strong family unit. He’s the proud father to teenagers Alfie and Grace, who he shares with his wife, the actress Hannah Walters, who co-produced Adolescence with him. It was his kids, Graham explains, who helped educate him about his understanding of incels for the show.  

“I was looking online at a workout thing that our Alfie sent me, and it was a good workout. Three or four days later, the algorithm — which I don’t understand — showed me the same gentleman again, and he was telling me his misogynistic opinions and views,” he recalls. 

“I was able to say ‘Yeah, that’s not for me,’ but what if I was a 13-year-old boy who didn’t really have an ideal relationship with my father, and all of a sudden I’m seeing this man who has everything I aspire to have — a fancy car and loads of money — this man who is everything I, maybe, aspire to be. If you’re influencing the youth with your own views and opinions, then surely you know that we need to be mindful of what’s being said?”

In the show, newcomer Owen Cooper portrays Jamie, who soon drops a mask of naivety to deliver an incredible tour-de-force of misplaced, furious anger as a result of being radicalised online.  

But, as ever, it’s Graham who will devastate viewers as Eddie, a man slowly — and very much reluctantly — coming to terms with the magnitude of what his son is facing. It’s the kind of performance that should force parents into immediate action. 

“I’m very proud to have been a part of it,” Graham affirms. “I just hope it can raise some extremely important conversations.”