The makers of Netflix’s limited series “Adolescence” started with a strong, disturbing theme: a violent act committed by a 13-year-old amid the pressures of a social-media culture that can foment alienation, misogyny and violence. They had a provocative format: four hour-long episodes that would take place in real time and in single, uninterrupted takes. They had a strong cast that was led by Stephen Graham (“This Is England,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Boardwalk Empire”), who was also co-creator and co-writer and exec-produced the series alongside formidable allies like Plan B’s Brad Pitt, Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner.
What they didn’t have, though — and what they needed for “Adolescence” to work — was a young teenage boy who could play the mild-mannered Jamie Miller, who is arrested in the stabbing death of a female classmate. The part required an actor who could handle hour-long takes and persuade viewers that he was a naive kid falsely accused of a monstrous crime in one moment, a vicious killer driven by the male rage of incel culture in the next.
Oh, and they’d prefer that the person didn’t have much of an acting résumé. On a show that faces the ugliest transgressions of childhood and is populated by actors as resolutely grounded as Graham, Ashley Walters and Erin Doherty, it wouldn’t pay to have much pint-sized thespian polish.
“No disrespect, but we didn’t really want a child or a young lad who had lots of experience,” Graham said. “We wanted to find someone who was quite raw, with not a lot of professional work, if any. And I knew we would find somebody if we searched and searched.”
They found that person in Owen Cooper, a 13-year-old who lived outside Manchester. But the search was arduous, with casting director Shaheen Baig combing the North of England and putting casting flyers on social media and in clubs, malls and cinemas. “We targeted all those places where your auntie or your granny might be looking to sell a washing machine or a Hoover,” Baig said, adding that the team looked at 500 to 600 submissions.
Cooper had never acted professionally, and his only training had come from a weekend drama club when he sent in a self- taped two-scene audition. In one scene, he was asked to play an innocent student accused of something by the headmaster; in the other, the instruction was to play it as a guilty student who nonetheless proclaims his innocence. “Owen was at that sweet spot: He was still a child, but he was on the cusp of becoming a young man,” Baig said. “And his tape was really assured.”
Several callbacks culminated in a workshop in which the four finalists for the role of Jamie met with Graham, who would play Jamie’s father, Eddie Miller. Though none of them had professional experience, all four spent the day working and improvising with Graham and would be given roles in “Adolescence.”
“I don’t want to sound pretentious in any way, shape or form,” said Graham, who is so thoroughly down-to-earth that he couldn’t sound pretentious if he tried. “But something happened in that room. He left the room and we all looked at each other and went, ‘That’s it.’”
Graham shook his head. “He’s so gifted and so bright, and he has a beautiful sense of freedom and expression,” he said. “Owen is a generational talent.”
Owen
The generational talent was back in school in early April of this year, though he didn’t go straight there after “Adolescence”; instead, he played young Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” (Jacob Elordi handled the character as an adult.) But he wrapped on that film in late March, so on a Tuesday-afternoon Zoom call, Cooper, who is now 15, sported a British schoolboy’s white button-down shirt as he sat in his bedroom in a town between Manchester and Liverpool.
Across the top of the wall behind him were posters of Euro Cup football, entirely appropriate decorations for a teen boy who’d grown up midway between England’s two most successful clubs, Manchester United and Liverpool. Not unexpectedly, Cooper had originally wanted to be a footballer — and the personable 15-year-old still couldn’t quite articulate why he became fascinated watching clips of actors at work. “To be honest, I don’t really know where it came from,” he said. “It just clicked in me, where I told my mom and dad that I wanted to start doing drama lessons.”
He took those lessons at Drama Mob, a weekly club in Manchester where kids would team up and act out scenes in front of the group. At first he went with his cousin, but she quit after about a month to focus on dance, leaving him alone. “I was really nervous before I started doing drama lessons, but I just loved it,” he said. “And I dunno, it just went from there.”
The phrase “it just went from there” explains a second row of posters on his wall, smaller than the football ones but all in nice frames. They showed off the movies and TV shows he said he loves: “my favorite film of all time,” “Taxi Driver “(signed by Robert De Niro), “Django Unchained,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Breaking Bad.” “Not films I should be watching,” he admitted with a grin and a shrug. His heroes, he added, are people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Pacino and De Niro, “the person I look up to for accents. Anything that De Niro’s in, I watch to learn the accent.”
Like his idol’s, Cooper’s big break came with dark material. When he originally auditioned for “Adolescence,” he knew the show would center on a knife crime, but he had to work his way to understanding the full context: the way social media can breed toxic masculinity; incel culture’s manosphere of frustrated young men taking out their anger on the girls they think will always ignore them; the coded emojis that can bite and mock.
I think I worked about five hours a day on the script — which, to be honest, was a bit much. But it worked.
Owen Cooper
“I’m so glad I’ve never experienced that,” he said of the poisonous high school dynamic in the series. And yet he did understand something else that was crucial to “Adolescence,” and to the character he played. “I think every kid, boy or girl, has times when they want to fit in by being someone they’re not,” he said. “That’s what happened to Jamie, and I think everyone goes through that.”
Even Owen Cooper. “I wanted to do drama, and no boy in my school did that. So that was a thing I kept quite low for a while, until it was getting in front of football, in front of seeing my friends. Then I had to explain to them what I was doing, and they were supportive all the way, which I didn’t think they would be. I thought they would’ve took the mick a bit. In the back of my mind I was like, Should I do this? What if my friends say this or say that? But I just wanted to do what I enjoyed.”
And now, of course, he’s back in school as the star of a hit television program. “The only thing that’s different is that the teachers are nicer to me,” he said, then paused. “And the whole school knows who I am.”
Episode 3
The intricacies of filming “Adolescence” were formidable, but there was a precedent: Co-creators Graham and Jack Thorne and director Philip Barantini had worked together on the 2021 British film “Boiling Point,” a drama shot in a restaurant kitchen in a single 90-minute take. But the Netflix series didn’t stick to one location. The first episode started in a car, went into the Miller home for Jamie’s arrest, then traveled with the family to the police station. The second episode was even more relentlessly kinetic, following a police investigation that roamed through a sprawling school. “There were a lot of different obstacles in the way of telling a good drama, with all those bloody corridors,” Thorne said of the episode, which required camera hand-offs through open windows and ended with the camera being carried by a drone.
The third episode, though, took place almost entirely in one room between two people, Jamie and Briony Ariston, a court-appointed psychologist played by Erin Doherty. “For Episode 3, Stephen basically said to me, ‘OK, you need to write a David Mamet play,’” Thorne said with a laugh. “Trying to create a compelling story within a single space and trying to get inside Jamie’s brain was incredibly difficult.”
The production had a fixed schedule: two weeks of rehearsal to get the cast comfortable with the material and to choreograph all of the action and camera moves, followed by a week of shooting two takes each day. But Graham was doing a film in Central Europe when production began, so they started with Episode 3, in which Eddie Miller doesn’t appear. And that meant that Cooper, who had never been in front of a camera before, had to launch his acting career with a week of 52-minute takes in which Jamie swings between timidity, charm and rage, revealing far more about his character to the stunned psychologist (and to the audience) than he’d planned.
“All I cared about before Episode 3 was the lines,” Cooper said. “That was a massive thing. The first day I was under so much pressure. I just wanted to go in there and prove I was the right person for Jamie. I think I worked about five hours a day on the script — which, to be honest, was a bit much. But it worked.”
He went in, he said, with the preconceived notion that “all directors are horrible and dead bossy, and all big cast members have got massive egos and don’t speak to kids.” Barantini quickly changed Cooper’s mind about the “all directors are horrible” part, but the director had to figure out how to work with his young star.
“Phil found it tough,” Thorne said. “He was constantly changing his vocabulary and adjusting himself during that first week. It was beautiful to see him working out a new way to direct in order to reach Owen. And Phil said there were times when he’d be talking to Owen and thinking, This kid isn’t receiving anything I’m saying. And then on the next take, he’d see every single one of his notes being met by this boy.”
If Cooper’s scene partner Doherty was awed by a neophyte actor handling marathon speeches on his first days in front of a camera, it was only in retrospect. “All of those things in hindsight are really impressive,” said the actress best known for playing Princess Anne in the third and fourth seasons of “The Crown.” “But they never entered the room, because he was just an actor. You forgot about the fact that it was his first job and he was 13 years old. Honestly, it was one of the purest, most fulfilling acting experiences I’ve ever had.”
By the end of the week, they were exhausted and Cooper’s voice was shot. “I completely lost my voice from shouting,” he said. “They gave me lemon and honey, the most disgusting drink I’ve ever drunk in my whole life. But it healed my voice.”
In the final take, Cooper yawned; it wasn’t the character yawning as much as a weary actor unable to stop himself. “Am I boring you?” Doherty’s Briony said. “It just came out of my mouth,” the actress said. “I was like, there’s no way that Briony would sit here and not address what he just did.”
That final take was the one they used for the episode, but Cooper didn’t agree with the choice. “My voice,” he said. “I hate it.”
Aftermath
Almost everybody associated with “Adolescence” will say that they were taken aback by the reaction to the show when it premiered in March — not just the numbers that put the top 10 of Netflix’s all-time viewership list but also the conversations it started about incel culture and social media.
“We were hoping for some impact,” Thorne said. “We weren’t expecting this impact — that’s the honest truth. And we’re all sort of reeling from it and trying to work out how to use this moment effectively — when to speak, when to shut up.”
Added Graham, “We managed to catch the zeitgeist, so to speak. It’s created a different kind of buzz because it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, especially for four hours of television.”
The only one who’ll say he saw this coming is the kid making his on-camera debut. “I just knew it was gonna be massive because ‘Baby Reindeer’ was huge,” Cooper said, citing last year’s provocative British limited series on Netflix. “It’s not similar, but it’s got parts where it’s similar. I thought it wasn’t gonna be as big as ‘Baby Reindeer,’ but I think it’s overtaken ‘Baby Reindeer’ now.” (He’s right.)
And what does it mean for Cooper? “I think right now he could probably have any career he wants,” said Baig, the casting director. “I’m sure he’s gonna get offered everything and he’s got a wonderful family and a brilliant team around him. He just needs to choose carefully and choose roles that will help him grow as an actor, but I don’t doubt for a second that he’s gonna get plenty of choice.”
Winding down the interview back in his room, Cooper squirmed in his chair and talked about the unusual turn his young life has taken. “I was doing it as a hobby,” he said. “I obviously did want to get on a film set and meet new people, but it was just a hobby that I enjoyed. But then ‘Adolescence’ came and I heard the name Stephen Graham, and I had to take it more seriously than that.”
He smiled as Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro and Bryan Cranston and Jamie Foxx looked over his shoulder from their place of honor on the wall behind him. “And now I’m obsessed,” he said. “I want to be doing this for the rest of my life.“
A version of this story first ran in the Limited Series & TV Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
