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The first few minutes of Netflix’s new drama Adolescence are among the most incredible you will ever see. Two police officers drive to a house, smash its doors in, sweep from room to room and apprehend a teenage boy suspected of murdering a female classmate. They load him into a van, drive to a police station then process him for arrest.
On the surface this sounds like any workaday drama, but the incredible thing about Adolescence is this: the whole sequence is conducted in one take. From car to house to van to station, the camera never leaves the action. Even more incredibly, the entire series follows in kind. There are four episodes, each without a single edit.
Adolescence is very much the baby of Stephen Graham, who not only stars as the boy’s father, but also co-created and co-wrote the series. “There had been a lot of cases of stabbings across the country,” explains Graham. “Some were incidents with young boys who were stabbing young girls.” These incidents started to meld with his love of the documentary series 24 Hours in Police Custody and his previous work in the one-shot film Boiling Point, and Adolescence began to take root.
But it was ambitious, and required a dream team. To build it out, Graham pulled from talent he’d worked with before. He cast his childhood friend Christine Tremarco to play his wife and, from his new Disney+ series A Thousand Blows, Erin Doherty and Ashley Walters.
“Steve was like: ‘You might think you’ve played this type of part before, but you will never have done anything like this,” says Walters, who stars as the lead detective. As much as he was excited by the challenges of the shoot, getting to work more with Graham was the real draw.
“He’s just a nice person,” says Walters. “He’s dedicated to helping others. I don’t think there’s a person in the industry that he doesn’t know, and I don’t think there’s a person in the industry who doesn’t like him. This might be breaking the fourth wall, but most people are not spoken about like that.”
Graham extended the same family attitude to the other creatives. The only choice to direct this was Boiling Point’s Philip Barantini. And as a writing partner, Graham chose his frequent collaborator Jack Thorne.
“We’ve developed this wonderful little marriage, me and Jack,” grins Graham of the prolific playwright. “We are like a combined Frankenstein. I bring him body parts – a torso, a head, some legs, a few hands – and he miraculously injects a spirit.”
“Steve’s starting point was not wanting to blame the parents,” says Thorne of his collaboration. “It was: ‘Let’s not make this about a kid who commits a crime because of an evil thing going on at home.’”
“I didn’t want his dad to be a violent man,” confirms Graham. “I didn’t want Mum to be a drinker. I didn’t want our young boy to be molested by his uncle Tony. I wanted to remove all of those possibilities for us to go: ‘Oh, that’s why he did it.’”
As a result, Adolescence takes us somewhere even more terrifying. Jamie, the show’s 13-year-old subject, is an outwardly normal, well-adjusted kid. But the conversations around him, at school and online, start to lean towards incels and the manosphere. Slowly, a picture builds about how this regular kid found himself radicalised without anyone even realising.
“Stephen and I talked a lot about the last few years in that family, and the moment Jamie just disappeared,” says Thorne. “It just happens. He’s gone. He’s locked behind the door, and he’s in another world, and the parents think it’s fine.”
“I also wanted it to be about how it’s affected everybody else around him,” says Graham. This was a smart, if grim, choice. Seeing a family uneasily try to put themselves back together after a moment of such unimaginable violence is nothing short of harrowing. If you have children of a certain age, on the precipice of getting their own phones, this will be particularly hard to watch.
Still, as heavy as Adolescence is, it also stretches the capacity of what can be achieved with a single take. One sequence in the second episode, which I won’t spoil, is so technically audacious it made me gasp. Barantini confesses that the logistics kept him awake at night. Where Boiling Point only required Barantini and a cinematographer, the scale of Adolescence meant that the camera had to be continually passed from operator to operator, getting clipped in and out of different devices by various teams as necessary.
He takes me through the show’s opening sequence. “When the episode starts, my cinematographer Matt is holding the camera,” he explains. “As we’re filming the actors in the car, the camera’s being attached to a crane. The car drives off, and the crane follows. While this is happening, Matt has gone in another car, driven ahead and jumped out so he can take the camera into the house. When we come back out of the house, the other camera operator Lee is sat in the custody van. Matt would pass Lee the camera, so now Lee’s got the camera while Matt drives ahead to the police station, so he’s ready to take the camera when we go inside.”
Such visual flashiness might suggest that Adolescence is purely a technical experiment, but that couldn’t be further from the case. “I never want the one-take thing to be at the forefront,” says Barantini. “I wanted this to be seamless, but not a spectacle.”
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To demonstrate this, the centrepiece of the series is the third episode. There’s no elaborate camerawork; the whole thing is largely confined to a single room. The only characters are the young suspect and Erin Doherty’s child psychologist – and it is absolutely bruising. “I said to Jack: ‘I just want you to write me your version of a David Mamet play,’” says Graham. “And he went: ‘Have you got any more notes?’ I went: ‘No, that’s it.’”
The result is remarkable, not only for how unbearably stressful it is, but in the way that it comprehensively introduces 14-year-old Owen Cooper – a young man with no previous acting credits – as a force to be reckoned with. His performance might qualify as the highlight of the whole enterprise. To watch him is to see a top-tier talent emerge in real time.
“This guy is hands down one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with,” marvels Doherty, grinning at Cooper. “Seriously, it blows my mind that this is your first job. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
“Erin was the first actor I’d ever worked with,” admits Cooper, who was hired after casting director Shaheen Baig looked at more than 500 boys for the part. I ask how he found his first audition. “I’d never had a job before, so I just sent a tape across, not expecting that much,” says Cooper, completely unfazed. “I got back from school and my mum told me I got the part.”
Was Barantini nervous about handing something so meaty to a first-timer? Not at all, he says. “There’d be moments where Owen really had to be quite evil and nasty to Erin’s character,” he says. “In rehearsals, he was quite scared to go there, because he’d never been that angry before in real life. There was one moment where he had, maybe not a panic attack, but he got quite emotional, and he couldn’t get out of it. I took him outside, and we just sat on a wall and chatted. And I was like: ‘You’re smashing it, you’re incredible. But now that you’ve felt that emotion, you know what it feels like and how to bring yourself out of it.’ It felt like a real turning point.”
With Adolescence now under his belt, Cooper’s career is starting to enter orbit. As well as one project he’s sworn to secrecy over (but will inevitably be enormous upon release) he has also filmed a new comedy with Aimee Lou Wood. “That was the first job I had where it wasn’t a one-shot,” he shrugs. “So I had to get used to that.”
But despite all this – the camera wizardry and the sheer heft of the performances – it’s the themes of Adolescence that will stay with you. “I hope we don’t make the question of male rage an easy question,” says Thorne, before becoming emphatic. “And I certainly hope the conversation around the show doesn’t become about Andrew Tate.” The name of the self-styled “misogynist influencer” comes up a few times during Adolescence, but Thorne is keen to make an important distinction. “Jamie never talks about Andrew Tate once. When he’s mentioned, it’s only by adult characters who are trying to understand him.”
After interrogating such a dark subject, I wonder if Thorne has located the secret of male rage. “I don’t think anyone would be interested if I did,” he says. “And it would be a bad drama if I did. I hope we pose the question well enough that there is conversation on sofas, and that parents have the chance to talk about this stuff with their children.” This seems inevitable. Adolescence is set to be a cultural touchpoint for young masculinity for years to come. What an astonishing thing these people have made.
Adolescence is on Netflix on 13 March.
