It’s tempting for the technical story behind “Adolescence” to overshadow the themes at the center of the Netflix original. After all, this is a series composed of four hourlong one-shot episodes. But even though it was director Philip Barantini’s expertise with the oner that sparked the conversation that would lead to “Adolescence,” this directorial triumph was only utilized to highlight the tense story at the center of this limited series.
“Whenever I was reading the script, I had to be able to visualize that we were able to do this one take and it wasn’t going to be a gimmick,” Barantini told TheWrap.
“We wanted to create something that grabbed you straight away,” series star, co-creator and executive producer Stephen Graham told TheWrap. “We wanted to make it so you can’t afford to miss anything within the context of what we’re shooting.”
After Plan B Entertainment saw Barantini’s “Boiling Point,” the production company approached the director and star Stephen Graham about potentially making a series that was solely composed of continuous shots. It wasn’t until Barantini and Graham were riding in a car together that the “This Is England” star landed on what would become their next project.
“In the U.K., there’s a real problem with knife crime, certainly in the younger generation. There have been a series of of young boys who were killing young girls with knives, and it was really upsetting,” Barantini said. “That was the seed that we wanted to explore, and send a bit of a message and maybe spark a bit of a conversation.”
“Adolescence” centers around the 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper), a baby-faced teenager who’s arrested for the murder of one of his classmates. Over the series’ four episodes, “Adolescence” never hides the truth of what happened from its audience. From Episode 1, it’s clear that Jamie is guilty. Instead, the series lives in the gray areas of this devastating saga, refusing to give a clear motive for why Jamie did what he did, who can be blamed for this unpredictable child and how his family truly feels about his crime. In that way, the series disturbingly mirrors reality, a place where theories and speculation abound but true understanding of another person is maddeningly elusive.
When it came time to bring a writer on board, Graham quickly turned to Jack Thorne, his “This Is England” collaborator as well as the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Thorne always kept Graham’s cardinal rule for the series top of mind: don’t blame the parents.
“‘I don’t want to make this easy and blame the parents. I want to create a complicated portrait,’” Thorne recalled. Knowing he wouldn’t have a simple explanation for Jamie’s actions, he was encouraged by a female colleague to look into incel culture. That’s where he found the shadowy darkness that helped craft Jamie’s motives.
“This isn’t as easy to put in a box and go, ‘Oh, this is just crazy people thinking crazy thoughts,’” Thorne told TheWrap. “In lots of ways, I could understand what would attract Jamie to these ideas. That idea of there is a reason why you aren’t liked. There is a reason why you find it very difficult to talk to women. There’s a reason why you feel isolated from your parents. There’s a reason why you’re struggling academically. If you can put all these things in an argument that makes sense, that’s really, really dangerous.
“That’s the thing that I found most terrifying,” Thorne added. “It feels like this is a crisis moment where we need to start talking about it. We need to start finding solutions to it.”
The understanding that this wouldn’t be a traditional crime series was baked into the very writing of “Adolescence.” Early on, Thorne, Graham and Barantini decided not to show tropes of the genre like Jamie’s legal team developing their strategy or his dad Eddie (Graham) grieving. “It forced me to sit forward as a writer, and the hope is that it forces an audience to sit forward because they’re consuming a story in an unusual way,” Thorne explained.
Because of this unexpected intensity, Barantini’s stunning camerawork becomes additive, ratcheting up the already sky-high tension minute by minute. The audience is often forced to stand in the shoes of Jamie’s parents, two dumbstruck onlookers who have to remind themselves to breathe amidst the unfolding horror.
Achieving this effect required a great deal of preparation. For six months, Barantini worked closely with cinematographer Matthew Lewis to map out the camera movements and visual language of every episode. Each hour was then divided into its own three-week block, which were composed of cast rehearsals during the first week, tech rehearsals with the cast and crew the second week and actually shooting the episode on the third week. During that final week, each episode was shot two times a day for five days. By the end, the team had 10 cuts of each episode to choose from “and argue about,” Barantini joked.
“We were always in the environment of where we’re shooting. It’s not like cold table reads; we were in the space immediately, so we made the space our own,” Graham said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to marry both of these mediums together. You have that spontaneity and energy of a theater performance and something that is live and tangible, and in the same respect you have the discipline of film and television.”
“The script was the only thing that was really bothered about, because I didn’t think I was going to learn it,” Cooper told TheWrap of Episode 3. “But I learned the script, and then the acting came involved. With the help of Phil and everyone, [they] encouraged me to do the best performance I could.”
The demands of “Adolescence” would be daunting for any actor. Yet the young Cooper’s portrayal of Jamie is a standout throughout this breathtaking series. One minute, the actor infuses his character with a degree of wide-eyed innocence that makes the drab prison around him feel inhumane. The next, he’s exploding with anger in a way that feels disarming to watch.
Over 500 young actors auditioned for the role of Jamie, Graham said, but they purposefully wanted someone who didn’t come from a drama school background. They narrowed their search down to five potential actors and invited them to a workshop.
“As soon as Owen left the room, I turned around to Phil, our director, and to Joe Johnson, our executive producer, and said, ‘That’s it.’ And they were like, ‘We thought the same,’” Graham recalled.
“In the takes, I didn’t look at Stephen as Stephen. I looked him as my actual father. That bond just clicked as soon as we started,” Cooper said.
“Adolescence” is now streaming on Netflix.
