Adolescence has enthralled viewers across the world, following the fallout when a 13-year-old boy is accused of murdering his female classmate.
Written by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the four-part series highlights the toxic subcultures online young boys are subjected to and how this is negatively shaping their relationships with girls and women.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Graham revealed the inspiration behind the most talked about Netflix series of the year, and why he hopes “this is just the beginning of the conversation”.
The 51-year-old actor recalled reading a story about a young boy who had stabbed a woman in a village not too far from where he lived. Not too long after this, he saw yet another story on the evening news of a teenage girl who had been stabbed by a young man.
“Not just a completely different case,” he notes. “It had happened on the other side of the country! Mind you, this was before the incident at Southport,”
“But it was already like four or five occurrences that were similar enough to go: OK, what is happening here? These aren’t men committing these crimes. They’re boys. That had been lurking somewhere in my subconscious for a while.”
Graham admits that he’s always been most drawn to “tough, humanistic stories about working-class people and real issues, real problems,” “That was really what I wanted to go for with Adolescence as both a writer and an actor,” Graham explains.
“I didn’t set out to make a ‘hit.’ I wanted to make one of those social dramas for right now. Because we have a real crisis going on with young men today, and we’ve got to start talking about it right now. It affects all of us. I just wanted to start a conversation about this, a real conversation. I didn’t know if people would be ready to talk about it. But I think they are. And hopefully, this is just the beginning of the conversation.”
Graham also confessed that while he thought the series may cause a stir in the UK, he has no grasp of the impact it would have all over the world. “I got a text from a mate of mine, telling me how big Adolescence is in India,” he said.
“And my first response was, ‘Hold on… did you say India? Did I hear you correctly?’ Apparently, it’s really striking a nerve there. But it just seems to have struck a nerve in a lot of places! The thing you have to understand, when we set out to do this,”8
“It was very colloquial. But it’s like we dropped a stone into this pond, and the ripple effect it’s produced has been unbelievable.” That ripple effect has flooded into schools in the UK, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and government officials announcing on Monday that Adolescence will be shown to students in a bid to curb social media harm.
"It's much broader than that. It's a cultural issue, and therefore we're going to have to look more broadly, work as a society on this, and discuss it, which is why I'm really pleased that Adolescence is now going to be shown in schools free because I do think young people should be watching it,” Starmer said.
