The Rage of ‘Adolescence’: Inside the Single-Shot Sensation Blowing Up the Manosphere

Stephen Graham is mulling over the right word to capture the past month of his life.

“Catastrophic,” he lands on. “In an amazing way.”

It isn’t an overstatement to say Graham is beloved in the U.K. A household name (with credits including Peaky Blinders, Line of Duty, This Is England and Snatch), his unique combination of Liverpudlian charm and acting prowess has made the 51-year-old actor a legend of British television and emblematic of its greatest qualities: raw, rousing and real to the nth degree.

“I’ve been very blessed,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve worked on a lot of film sets and television shows and I’ve had wonderful experiences on 99.9 percent of them. But this was something special.”

He’s referring, of course, to Netflix’s limited series Adolescence. Philip Barantini’s four-part show — each episode filmed in one long, meticulously choreographed shot — has not only dominated the cultural zeitgeist since its March 13 release, but spilled over into politics, parenting and even ignited fears the British prime minister couldn’t ignore: “I’ve got a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl,” Keir Starmer told Parliament ministers the week before last. “It hit home hard.”

So what’s got the PM spooked? Adolescence, now the fourth-most-watched Netflix show of all time and the most popular U.K. title ever a mere four weeks after its premiere, follows Graham as Eddie Miller, whose entire world is upended when the police — led by Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) — bash in his front door to arrest Eddie’s 13-year-old son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), on suspicion of murder.

The audience is forced to kick their social media-damaged attention spans into fifth gear. Adolescence, lauded as a TV masterpiece by critics and undoubtedly an Emmy frontrunner with its Baby Reindeer-like success, is unrelenting.

We are party to every grisly detail: Jamie’s panicked parents pacing the police station hall as their son is strip-searched and later, interrogated; in episode two, we follow Bascombe and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) winding their way around the local school attempting to piece together a motive for the stabbing of a fellow classmate, Katie. A show-stealing Cooper leaves mouths agape in the third act when he battles with a child psychologist (Erin Doherty) sent to assess him, and Graham, alongside Christine Tremarco portraying Jamie’s mother, Manda, brings it home in the final episode as we witness the fallout; a family left to reevaluate every parental decision that led to this life-altering event.

Adolescence examines, in almost excruciating detail, a parent’s worst nightmare. It becomes clear that Jamie’s time on the internet has shaped a radicalized, rageful teenager. He is seduced by the online “manosphere,” where misogynists prey on the insecurities of young men and boys to popularize their hostile inclinations toward women. The world of incels — a portmanteau of “involuntarily” and “celibate,” often used to define men who are frustrated by their lack of sexual experience and blame women for it — has become something of a safe haven for a child who is bullied by the girls at school. Jamie tells Doherty’s psychologist that he considers his victim lucky she wasn’t sexually assaulted. “Most boys would’ve touched her,” he says. “So that makes me better, don’t you think?”

All of a sudden, Graham and co-writer Jack Thorne pose a question all parents would be horrified to have to answer: What if your child’s burgeoning worldview is manipulated by online creators you can’t police, turning an otherwise ordinary youngster into one capable of carrying out a heinous act of violence?

“This is an examination of male rage, of boy rage,” Thorne tells THR. “It takes a village to raise a child [and] it takes a village to destroy a child. Adolescence looks at the different huts that took Jamie down, and the people that could have saved him.”

Graham describes his and Thorne’s collaboration as a Frankenstein-esque task. “I had a skeleton, he gave it a spirit and a body. Then everybody else injected the soul.” This early version skeleton for Graham was inspired by the stabbings of two young girls in the U.K., one of them in his hometown of Liverpool. “They hurt my heart,” he says. “I thought, ‘What’s happening today with young boys?’ Because they are boys. These are not men who are committing these kinds of acts.”

Some viewers — “a minority,” according to Graham — have misconstrued what Adolescence is about. This corner of the internet believes the program to be inspired by the Southport stabbings, where in July last year a Black teenager named Axel Rudakubana stormed a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class and took the lives of three girls. The crime devastated a nation, but it also emboldened some to enter into a conversation on race and religion. Later, viewers of Adolescence were arguing that Cooper’s casting turned Adolescence into “anti-white propaganda,” an inaccurate depiction of a story they took to be tackling knife crime. The flames of misinformation were fanned by X owner Elon Musk — because of course — who replied to a post by someone pushing this narrative with: “Wow.”

Graham is setting the record straight. “They’ve completely got it wrong,” he tells THR about Musk’s butting in. “Because if they were to look at their facts, they would see that the horrific thing that happened in Southport happened after we finished our [show]. It just doesn’t make sense. So they’re using this to pursue their own agenda. I understand the whole concept of freedom of speech, I get it, and I see what they’re saying. But I think there’s a fine line between freedom of speech and hate.”

“Some people have said it’s ‘woke ideology,’ and they’ve taken it to an extreme,” he adds. “It was never about race … It was just meant to be a representation of a normal family that could live on your street. It could be your sister’s kids or, God forbid, your own kid. All of the stuff I was influenced by was social realism.”

***

Brad Pitt, an EP on Adolescence, and the team at his production company Plan B Entertainment, caught Graham’s one-shot work with Barantini on the 2021 thriller Boiling Point. And it wasn’t, THR has learned, Pitt’s idea to do the same shooting technique for Adolescence. (THR has not heard back from Plan B on its request for a comment from Pitt.) “If I’m completely honest, they said, ‘We want to develop a character and do eight one-hour episodes around Stephen.’” The kicker? Graham didn’t fancy that. He went back to them with an alternative plan.

“I swear, call it divine intervention, or you know how musicians say they tap into the ether? I just went: ‘But this is what I want to do.’” Thus, Adolescence was born, becoming a springboard into the stratosphere for a now-15-year-old Cooper in his first ever acting gig.

“I haven’t watched the show fully,” Cooper confesses to THR. (Graham is also coy, saying with a giggle: “I still haven’t watched it, either.”) He says: “I just don’t like watching myself. And now Jack says it’s going into schools … that’s my worst nightmare!”

He’s right. With the support of the U.K. government, Netflix has vowed to screen Adolescence for free in schools across Britain. “I’m not watching it in my own school,” Cooper tells THR during the recent photo shoot. “No chance. I’d watch episode one, maybe two and four — but not three,” which, ironically, is where the teen’s acting chops take center stage. But all his friends are buzzing about it, Cooper adds. His beautifully teenage reaction — red-cheeked and self-effacing — to his mates seeing him in Netflix’s buzziest TV show is joyful; this is the kid who’s just shot Emerald Fennell’s upcoming Wuthering Heights, playing a young Heathcliff opposite Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

“It was amazing to meet Margot and Jacob and hear what they have to say [about the show],” Cooper says to THR. And Robert De Niro congratulated him on BBC’s The One Show. “But no one’s reached out to me.”

A beat. “Steven Spielberg [got in touch]!” says Graham. “Forgot that one, didn’t he? Only one of the finest directors that has ever breathed air.” Cooper smiles. His parents, who tell THR their son is taking the abrupt introduction to fame in stride, perch nearby, ready to run him home after the shoot. He has school tomorrow.

On casting the part of Jamie, Graham marvels at the good fortune in discovering complete unknown Cooper after sifting through hundreds of auditions from professional child actors: “Phil and [casting director] Shaheen Baig looked through over 500 takes … Then at the end, we narrowed it down to five, and we did a day’s workshop. [Owen] came in the room. We had a little conversation. I remember looking him straight in the face and saying, ‘Right, from now on, I’m your dad, and you’re my son.’” He pauses to recall the immediate chemistry. “I can’t explain it, I just went, ‘That’s it. This is a different level.’ I went outside and I said, ‘He’s the next Robert De Niro.’ Ash [later] said, ‘I think he’s a plant!’”

Planted by who? Adds Walters: “I don’t know! I was like, ‘He’s too good.’ And they kept on saying, ‘He hasn’t done anything before. He’s got no experience.’ I’m like, ‘No way!’”

Cooper keeps his eyes lowered, shyly appreciative of the praise. Doherty (best known to audiences for her turn in The Crown) says acting opposite Cooper reaffirmed her love for the profession. “This industry is so full of fluff, it’s nice to be brought back to earth and it [being about] turning up, being in a room with people and trying your best.” The cast camaraderie is palpable. This is a group bonded by the dizzying heights of global acclaim, yet hell-bent on protecting the young boy at its center. “He’s my little boy,” Graham beams.

Walters notes that despite the weighty material, the cast was always looking out for each other. “That doesn’t happen as much as people think it does in normal TV shows or films,” he says. “People can be quite selfish. Even the best people, because you’re focusing on your lines. This [show] required us serving each other … and doing it with love.”

***

An obsessive talking point for fans of Adolescence is, naturally, the one-shot. A three-week block was cut out for each episode. The first week was all rehearsal: Barantini, the cast, cinematographer Matt Lewis drawing up a rough plan to get the actors comfortable. The second week was reserved for tech and a dress rehearsal. “We’d actually shoot it as well, with no pressure,” Barantini says. “We’d get through the whole thing.”

Then shoot week would arrive and the team would get through one take on either side of lunch each day, plus any more they could fit in. Barantini says the one-shot approach was meant as an intentional challenge to the addled attention spans of viewers in the TikTok era. “We’re so used to these five-second, 10-second reels on our phones. Everyone’s doom-scrolling on social media. I wanted people to just stop and watch for an hour, really pay attention and go on a journey.”

The first episode filmed was Doherty and Cooper’s standoff in episode three, circling the pair for an hour around a table at a child detention center. It was the last take, the 11th, that made the final cut — to Cooper’s dismay. “I didn’t like take 11,” he admits. “I don’t know. I feel like there were better ones that were more interesting.” Doherty considers what made it the right choice. “Basically, we got to Wednesday and they loved it. They said, ‘These next two days, you can just play with it.'”

She turns to Cooper: “Then we just entered that space every day with complete abandon because we thought, ‘They’ve got it.’ We were then throwing even more things at each other. You were yawning in my face! You wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t [feel free]. I just feel like there was an element of great realism: ‘Let’s see how well we know this script, how well we can push each other.’”

“I wasn’t even aware in the moment,” Cooper says of his spontaneity. “It wasn’t till after that I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I did that. I had no awareness of it. I think when I said, ‘Look at me now!’ That’s not in the script. I remember thinking, ‘Have I actually just said that?’ Because I had no plan. It just popped in my head and I thought it was a powerful thing to do. Then it came out and I’d use it in every other take.”

When it comes to the first episode, following Jamie’s detainment and first interrogation at the police station, Cooper is much happier with the decision. “Take two was my favorite. I don’t know what it was. It was just the first one where I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve done really well there.’” Graham reveals that it was this episode where the team were furthest into a take when an irrevocable incident occurred: The lights in the police station cut out. Back to the start.

Another memorable moment is the last few minutes of episode two. It ends with an audacious, bravura ground-to-sky (and then back to ground again) drone shot just before the credits roll, where the audience is lifted from the school and across town to see Graham’s character lay flowers for the murdered schoolgirl. “It was magic,” Graham says, confirming that sometimes, the perfect take was simply at the behest of mother nature. “That was the only time that the drone actually got to go up without the wind having a bad effect.”

He again falls into a fit of laughter recalling how Walters’ lines went out the window after chasing one of Jamie’s school friends down — at a full sprint — minutes before. “He was knackered!” bellows Graham. It was in this episode where the mammoth practical feat of Adolescence was on full display. Walters and Marsay find themselves weaving in and out of hundreds of school kids, some of them now Netflix extras by way of simply going to school. It’s juxtaposed with the compactness of Doherty’s outing, shot (almost) entirely in a single room — no breaks and nowhere to hide.

“They require different skills,” the actress considers, maintaining that Walters’ school-set episode would have been the more daunting task (he disagrees, he thinks Doherty and Cooper, acting opposite one another in a room for 50 minutes, pulled off a greater accomplishment). “It’s working different muscles. In my head, your episode was by far the hardest to shoot. But for [Owen and I], the minute we stepped on the roller coaster, we had no choice but to be present. The moments of breath would have freaked me out even more because then I would have been trying to anticipate stepping back in.”

Arguably the most gut-wrenching moment across the entire four episodes is Eddie’s final few minutes, sitting in Jamie’s bedroom and breaking down on his son’s bed. When Walters first watched Graham’s performance, he found himself becoming emotional. “I’m a dad,” he says. “That’s what this whole thing has been about for me. I love my kids dearly. I would hate to see them go down that road. I know Steve loves his kids as well. And to think about me being in that situation, I don’t know how I would handle it. So yeah, it just touched me.”

Graham says Barantini and the crew pulled a small — but powerful — prank on him by putting up pictures of his own children, Alfie and Grace, in the frames on Jamie’s bedroom wall for that segment. His kids wrote on a bedroom cupboard: “We’re so proud of you Dad, and we love you.”

“The little shits played a trick, but it really helped,” he says. His depth of emotion was achieved by thinking about his own uncle Eddie, on whom Graham’s character is loosely based. “I remember he told me not long after my auntie had died, they were together since they were teenagers and their relationship was beautiful,” he recalls. “I think she’d been gone about two and a half years and he didn’t shed a tear at the funeral — he’s a very stoic man. I was chatting to him one time, having a cup of tea and it was just the most simple thing, he says to me: ‘You know what Steve? Sometimes I forget and I shout upstairs. I shout her name.’”

Graham puts a hand to his heart. “I thought that was the way to bring that emotion into Eddie, when nobody else can see.”

***

The lasting impact of Adolescence remains to be seen. After all, this program has only been in the world less than a month. An under-16 social media ban, as is the case in Australia, is legislation that Thorne supports. “Australia is a much more masculine culture than [the U.K.] and they’re implementing it. They’re prepared to look at it.”

He adds that the impact of social media on young people — boys especially — is a crisis that needs to be addressed urgently, with no time for half measures. “The online safety bill [legislation enacted in 2023 to protect children and adults in the U.K. from dangerous content online] needs to be much stronger than it currently is so we can genuinely protect boys from harm. Because it’s not just like if we shut down six accounts, suddenly the world is better. Musk is never going to shut down these accounts. These media icons [who] sat behind Trump at his inauguration are way too powerful. They’re not going to change it themselves. They’re going to resist change. So we need to do something quite radical.”

For the cast, they are satisfied that a debate has been started. “Hannah [Graham’s wife, also in the show] said something rather marvelous,” Graham begins. “She said, ‘What we have done is created an opportunity for parents to literally open that bedroom door and have a conversation.'” But the responsibility lies further afield, too. “With respect to the school system,” he says, “the school could do a lot more to educate [children] about the dangers within today’s society. I think the government is slightly responsible as well. You have to be mindful of freedom of speech, but maybe there are certain things that young boys should not have access to.”

It’s tricky pinpointing the kind of sinister content being consumed inside a child’s bedroom, but there are obvious culprits Adolescence spotlights. As Thorne points out to THR, Andrew Tate is name-checked by the adults in the show, not the children. Social media personality Tate, who along with his brother Tristan faces rape, human trafficking and tax evasion charges in Romania, the U.K. and the U.S. (and even more allegations as recent as March this year), is a pioneer of the manosphere.

The self-proclaimed “misogynist influencer” and YouTuber first rose to fame on the U.K. reality show Big Brother in 2016. Tate was removed from the house six days after footage emerged of him appearing to attack a woman. At the time, he described the “edited” video as “a total lie trying to make me look bad.” Now, he has accrued over 10 million followers on X, and, among other things, has said women are a man’s property, that rape victims “bear the responsibility” of their attacks and has regularly discussed hitting and choking women. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck,” he says in one video. “Shut up, bitch.”

It’s important to note just how young Tate’s online audience is. A 2023 YouGov survey found one in six boys ages 6 to 15 in Britain had a positive view of Tate; this number rises to nearly one in four in Jamie’s cohort, ages 13 to 15. Eighty-four percent of this group knows who Tate is.

Says Doherty: “I think Andrew Tate is representative of a dangerous mentality and how easy it is for people to fall into the cracks of jumping on a bandwagon, whether that be good or bad. That’s why it had to be his name, because this show is also about highlighting the realities of what we’re dealing with at the minute, and it is really scary.”

Cooper admits that the online manosphere world was a complete “eye-opener” for him, including the complex meaning of certain emojis among teens, which the show lays bare. “I was glad I didn’t have an idea of what was going on — the emojis and the meanings behind them. I had no clue. And I don’t think my friends knew, but it’s obviously happening across the country. It’s not a made-up story.” Could Jamie have been saved? “He could have been more protected,” the young star responds. “He’s speaking to the wrong people online, which his family obviously has no idea about. Eddie and his mum could have just told him to come off [his phone]. Simple things like that could stop someone changing their life, because Jamie’s life is never, ever, ever going to be the same again.”

The dangers of children having phones at school is another issue the show tackles, albeit subtly. In episode two it’s hard to miss the swathes of students fastened to their devices in the background, or exhausted teachers screaming, “Put that phone away!” offscreen. The challenges this presents to parents has clearly struck a nerve, says Graham, who adds that interactions with the public have been “nonstop” since the show’s release.

“One hundred percent of people that have approached have said, ‘Thank you,’” he says. “A good few dads have said, ‘It’s really made me look at myself. As soon as I finished watching it, I went into my kids room and I gave them a cuddle, and we’ve started to talk. I ask more questions.’”

Walters says it’s broken a formulaic barrier for TV. “[Higher-ups] will say, ‘All right, so we need a set piece at the end of this episode to bring people back.’ It’s like, ‘No, you don’t.’ You’re really disrespecting the integrity of audiences that are willing to sit and watch things like Adolescence. Life is enough. We don’t have to blow up a car. It’s a tragic story told in a really simple way about the ripple effects on the family, on a community, and people watched it in droves.”

Graham wonders if the British public service broadcasters (PSBs) such as the BBC, ITV or Channel 4 would have been brave enough to make Adolescence. He speaks from lived experience as a man from Liverpool, who has noticed how some industry creatives discuss the portrayal of poor characters. “‘Oh, let’s look at these working class people through a different prism,’” he says, sliding into a flawless posh English accent.

He then takes a moment to air some of his grievances with the PSBs at a time when DEI programs are being shuttered seemingly everywhere. “I speak like this [in a Liverpool accent], so you’d see me in the dock. You’d very rarely see me being the barrister. Ashley looks like that, you’d see him selling the drugs … No disrespect, but you’d never see Stephen Graham stood there questioning [as a lawyer]. It’s the structure within our industry and I’m not blaming anyone, but let’s just have a look at it.

“I don’t want to blackball myself here,” says Graham, “[But] my own experience through working with [the likes of BBC and ITV] is it’s a difficult battle trying to create opportunities for actors who don’t have a face or a name. They fly the flag and say, ‘We’re [embracing diversity],’ but when you’re really in the room and trying to push those people forward … I don’t know. Maybe they would. I hope I’d be wrong. But that’s why Netflix was such a good marriage for us.”

Anne Mensah, Netflix’s vp of content, U.K., says that while the chance to work with Graham, Thorne and Barantini as well as producer Warp Films, Matriarch Productions and Plan B was not a hard decision, even she couldn’t have predicted the global impact their show has had. “It’s television at its best, in your home and talking directly to you,” Mensah says. “We just wanted to support a great show. It’s up to the viewers to decide if it’s important.”

The streamer will look to get Graham the love he deserves outside of his native Britain ahead of the Emmys and Golden Globes. At the other end of the spectrum, newcomer Cooper may see his awards hopes bolstered by, well, his adolescence. Who else can boast a debut as monumental as this? Adolescence has racked up over 114 million views and reached the top 10 in all 93 countries where the top 10 is available. And the buzz isn’t dying down. Could all this hype tempt Graham & Co. into discussing a season two?

He winks. “Stay curious.”