(Credits: Netflix)

Every so often, Netflix releases a show that viewers simply can’t stop talking about, and right now its Adolescence, a searing drama all shot in one-take, co-written by and starring Stephen Graham. The actor was inspired by the alarming rates of male-on-female violence – particularly among young people – that don’t seem to be slowing down, with the show interrogating a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering his female classmate. 

The show has earned critical praise, further proving Graham’s brilliance as an actor who shows real concern for depicting the more brutal and complex sides of life, something that can be hard to watch but, at the same time, is totally necessary. He rose to prominence in public consciousness as Combo in This Is England after all, a violent racist who takes vulnerable and impressionable teenagers under his wing to spread his fascist agenda. The film aimed to highlight the way young people are brainwashed by terrifying ways of thinking, and Graham does a scarily good job of depicting someone so full of anger and hatred. 

Graham has a knack for playing complex, often criminal characters, like Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire or the hopeful yet stupid Tommy in Snatch. While he has dedicated much of his career to British projects, the star has appeared in his fair share of Hollywood movies too, such as Martin Scorsese’s gangster movie The Irishman, appearing alongside Robert De Niro. 

This must have felt like an exciting moment for Graham, because it was De Niro’s roles in several key movies that solidified the young actor’s desire to take his love for cinema seriously. Appearing alongside the star on The One Show, Graham revealed that “when I was 14 I said to my dad, ‘I want to do this acting thing properly.’”

Luckily, his dad was on board with his idea and decided to get Graham some films to study. “I got my coat, and we lived in a flat and we walked to Quarry Green video shop. Remember the days of video shops? They were like libraries. And we went in and he went ‘Right, come on’, and we were walking up and down the aisles and he picked three films.”

Two of these films featured De Niro in a leading role – Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. The actor’s performances in both of these films are simply terrific, and you can see why Graham was so affected by these movies. In Taxi Driver, for example, De Niro’s Travis Bickle, a war veteran who attempts to stave off his PTSD and insomnia by driving around the streets of New York – only to lose his grip on reality – is a complex figure: volatile, mentally unstable, desperate, heroic, deranged. It’s this kind of multitudinous character that Graham seems greatly attracted to playing, but who knows if he’d be the same if he hadn’t seen these revolutionary performances as a teenager?

The other movie was The Godfather, which was a landmark moment for Hollywood, balancing the line between accessible epic cinema and nuanced storytelling. While De Niro wasn’t in The Godfather, he played the younger version of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II to critical acclaim.

These movies opened Graham’s mind to the power of acting, encouraging him to train hard to become a talented performer. He continued, “And then we went home and we watched those three films and we watched them all over the weekend, so [De Niro] was the beginning of my whole love of favourite films, really.”