The Netflix miniseries follows a 13-year-old accused of murdering a girl from his school. Co-creator and star Stephen Graham says he read about similar crimes and wanted to know: "Why is this happening?" Graham spoke with Sam Briger about the crime that inspired the show, fatherhood, and the unusual way the show was shot — in one single take. Graham also stars as a bare-knuckle boxer in the period drama series A Thousand Blows. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get special behind-the-scenes content, producer recommendations, and gems from the archive. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Who is Stephen Graham and what are his latest projects?
You go through a lot of different things physically, mentally, and even spiritually in the greater scheme of things, you know what I mean? But my main question was why, why is this happening?
And I guess that one of the things is that you're exploring why, but it's not a didactic show. You sort of let the feelings and the issues sort of stew there, but you're not resolving them.
No, not at all. And, you know, ultimately, I think I think that's one of the main themes of the show is that they can't be resolved and we don't have the answers. There's a wonderful saying, which is it takes a village to raise a child. And within that kind of complexity of what that says to me. within what we are doing, it's kind of like, maybe we're all accountable.
And that comes down to, you know, the parenting, maybe how we, how we parent our children, the school system, how the education system guides and tries to educate our children, the government, you know, how they can bring in legislation, um, the community and the environment of where we live, um,
And then on top of that now, which was something that me and you never had to suffer from and our parents never had to think about, but there is now this big thing called the internet.
When a child closes the door, back in the day when it was me and you, we didn't have access to the rest of the world and we couldn't be influenced dramatically by other people and their theories and their thought processes. So that was what we really wanted to look at, you know what I mean? Maybe we're all accountable in some way for what is happening today in our society.
So your character, Eddie, is a successful businessman. He has a plumbing business. He's lifted himself up in the world. He's trying to be a good husband and a good father. And you say that you based him to some degree on your uncle's and your friend's fathers. What was it about them that you took?
For me, Eddie, the character that I played, I wanted to make him more like that kind of archetypal man in a way. The kind of men that I was brought up with, like my uncles and like I've said, you know, my friends, fathers and stuff like that, who are beautiful, wonderful men.
hard-working men who go to work say maybe six o'clock seven o'clock in the morning and don't manage to get back home till gone six seven eight at night you know what i mean um so the kind of area that they live in is it's a really nice housing estate you know what i mean it's it's it's it's a well-to-do area in many ways it's not it's not it's far from upper class and it's you know it's it's a working class household
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