The final scene of the Netflix series “Adolescence” has left viewers feeling emotionally delicate and even raw — and it turns out there’s a good reason for that.
The series is particularly harrowing. A teen boy (played by Owen Cooper), has been accused of stabbing a female classmate to death. It quickly becomes clear the boy is guilty of the crime, and the series explores the impact of incel culture on the youth.
When it came time to film the show’s final scene, which shows the boy’s father weeping in his son’s childhood bedroom and apologizing to one of his stuffed animals, the show’s team knew they wanted the maximize the intense emotions present.
“We knew that we wanted to end it in that room. We wanted the journey to finish where it began,” director Stephen Graham, who also plays the boy’s dad, told Netflix.
To help bring Graham to the emotional edge on camera, director Philip Barantini employed an unexpected trick that keen viewers can look for on a rewatch.
The director, also known for TV series “Malpractice” and “Boiling Point,” had the show’s art department print out photos of Graham and his wife and children and put them in the bedroom set with a note that read, “We love you. We’re so proud of you.”
Though the camera couldn’t see the photos and note, Graham could, and that provided the emotional push he needed to feel the weight of what his father character is feeling in the emotional difficulty of knowing your son is a killer.
“If you watch the scene closely, he looks over to the right-hand side, and he spots the pictures and the notes. It broke him open,” Barantini explained in the same interview. “The other takes before that were very different. They were all still incredibly emotional. But that last take, which we used, was real, raw, and unexpected from him as well.”
“Adolescence” is streaming in full on Netflix now.
