“An alteration in our relationship with technology is required”: Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, Ashley Walters, Christine Tremarco, Philip Barantini and Jack Thorne on Adolescence

After an advance screening of the Netflix drama’s first episode at BAFTA 195 Piccadilly, actor-creator Stephen Graham, co-stars Owen Cooper, Ashley Walters and Christine Tremarco, director Philip Barantini and co-creator Jack Thorne took the stage for a Q&A. During this time, the team established their intent with the series to “present different angles on a problem”. With the premise and predicament of newcomer Cooper’s central character established in the taut premiere, the audience was told that over its next three episodes, the series would be tackling the education system, the young boy’s brain and, finally, his family in this order, with “no easy answers” ultimately afforded from any one source.

According to Graham, the project’s origins were conceptual, with him and his Boiling Point collaborator Barantini asked to deliver another one-shot, real-time piece and news stories regarding adolescent boys arrested for knife crimes against girls serving as the foundation for its material. The actor-creator then sought out Thorne as a creative partner, as he “writes the human condition”. The technical specifics of the production – in which each of the four episodes unfolds in a single take – were then discussed at length by the team, who disclosed that “each episode had a three-week block”, with shooting taking place in the last week. “We’d shoot it twice every day for five days”. Apparently, what the audience had just seen in episode one of the finished Adolescence was Take 2.

It was then Walters’s – who stars in the series as a police detective – turn to discuss how his involvement in the series came to be. According to the actor, he had reached out to Barantini shortly after seeing Boiling Point in the hope they could work together, and was connected with this new project by Graham while co-starring with him in the Disney+ series A Thousand Blows. Of Graham, Walters said, “He has a heart of gold (….) to work with people you love (…) it’s so rare in this game.” While Walters discussed preparing for the role when the team “sent me on a raid”, he claimed that ultimately this research was “all irrelevant”, as the character’s core was “about him being a dad”. The actor cited a new love for the craft of acting gained from his experience on Adolescence.

The discussion then turned to the selection of Cooper from 500 tapes of young actors trying out for the role. Graham said, “We didn’t want someone who had lots of experience,” and that as a recourse against the “cutthroat” nature of the industry, the four other, unselected finalists for the role were nonetheless included in the series. “Each one of these young lads are in our film,” he said, singling out the school-centric episode two as the point at which they appear. Cooper said that the series’ third episode “was the first one I did”, crediting his scene partner for much of the episode, Erin Doherty, with teaching him “how to be natural”, and also thanking the chaperone and child psychologist that were present for his every episode. “All thanks to them. I couldn’t have done it without them”.  Graham praised his young co-star, saying, “The character is a million miles away from him.”

As the Q&A drew to a close, Thorne answered candidly when discussing the research conducted for the show’s portrayal of a troubled, chronically online British youth. Through exposure to misogynistic rhetoric on TikTok, Instagram and the dark web, Thorne claimed that the thing “which frightened me most was, I could understand the logic of it”. Identifying with the seclusion and isolation felt by many adolescent boys like the character of Jamie Miller in the series due to his own adolescence, Thorne said, “The things that I saw, I was attracted to. And I hated that.”

For final summarising thoughts on the takeaways they hope viewers have from the series, Walters surmised that technology has “taken something away from us” and that having “Sunday lunch with your kid” and preventing them from becoming secluded may be a way to combat the issue. Just as it is widely said that it takes a village to raise a child, it was said that one of the series’ primary conclusions is that it “takes a village to destroy a child” as well. Thorne also spoke damningly of failures of government due to them being “frightened of Elon Musk”.

“An alteration in our relationship with technology is required” (indeed, earlier in the Q&A, Graham had cited the absence of technology in his own upbringing), and as spotlighted by the series, parents, schools and government all must play a role in making this alteration a reality.

Thomas Messner
Images: Craig Gibson/StillMoving for Netflix

Adolescence is released on Netflix on 13^th March 2025.

Watch the trailer for Adolescence here: