Stephen Graham, the dyslexic actor and master of accents who was going to be a firefighter

Stephen Graham, 51, began training as an actor at 14, but put his dream on hold when he was expelled from Rose Bruford College for being a misogynist, homophobic, racist, and a drug dealer.

“Racist? My grandmother’s Jamaican, so I can’t be racist,” he told VICE in a 2017 interview. “There were only 5 Black lads at the college, and I considered myself one of them. Misogynist? I love women. I was raised by my mother on her own for ten years, so not sure where that came from. Homophobic? My uncle is gay and I love him to bits, and I’ve got lots of gay friends. So again, that’s not true. Drug dealer? I’ve never sold drugs. I’ve taken them, but I’ve never sold them.”

Graham argued that he was expelled because the principal at the time had a “grudge” against him: “He didn’t like me.”

After being expelled, he decided to join the fire brigade and passed all the required tests. But on the same day he had a meeting with the fire department, his agent called with an opportunity to audition for Coronation Street. He abandoned the fire brigade and hasn’t looked back since, steadily building a career on both the big and small screen.

Graham isn’t very tall, and he doesn’t need to be to command attention on camera. He’s 5′6″, but it’s his penetrating gaze and seriousness that have made him the ideal choice to play tough characters — thugs, gang members, gangsters, pirates, and other figures tied to violence or crime.

He played Tommy in Snatch, Shang in Gangs of New York, the troubled Combo in This is England, and the feared Anthony Provenzano in The Irishman. “I’m a father of two and a very nice guy. Once you get to know me, I’m charming. My mom adores me. I don’t know... I’ll never play Mr. Darcy [from Pride and Prejudice], you know what I mean? I guess you just go with the roles that you’re comfortable with,” he said about being typecast as a villain.

However, Graham has proven to be much more versatile. Millions of viewers have witnessed his nuanced portrayal of Eddie Miller, a devastated father whose son is suspected of stabbing a classmate, in the series Adolescence. Written by Graham and Jack Thorne, the show has become a Netflix hit, garnering 24.3 million views in its first week. The idea for the series came to Graham after a series of real-life teenage murders.

“We instantly blame the parents — but what if it’s not the parents? It could happen to anyone,” Graham reflected in an interview with The Times.

“We are all maybe slightly accountable in some way,” he added in an interview with Radio X. “Today the internet is as much of a teacher and a parent to our children as we can be.”

The actor, nominated for a BAFTA in 2022 for his role as the tormented chef in Boiling Point, is the eldest of four siblings and is deeply proud of his childhood as a “mixed-race working-class kid from a block of flats” in the small town of Kirby, which currently has just over 12,700 inhabitants.

“Things can be hard but there’s also a lot of laughter,” he told The Times. “My childhood was full of it and being able to represent where I’m from is integral to me. Too often I’ll watch stuff and think they’re treating the working class like an art project. It’s very condescending. ‘Ooh, look at the poor!’

His mother was a social worker, and his father was a head pediatric nurse. Though they raised their children in Liverpool, their roots trace back to Irish and Scottish origins. His paternal grandmother, as he pointed out when defending himself against accusations of racism, was Jamaican, and his grandfather was Swedish.

This mix of nationalities has also made Graham a master of accents. As a child, he would mimic voices to make his grandmother laugh. “I used to do, like, Idi Amin and Margaret Thatcher, and just come up with this mad little conversation of Margaret Thatcher coming to the shop to buy a bottle of Steri milk or Idi Amin getting on the bus,” he recalled in a 2019 interview with Esquire.

This ability to replicate accents has helped him stand out throughout his acting career, such as in Snatch, where he adopts a Cockney accent, typical of London’s East End, instead of his natural Scouse accent. “They’re gonna say I’m not Italian-looking enough, my accent” he recalled thinking while auditioning for the role of Anthony Provenzano in The Irishman. Once again, he won them over.

Even so, Graham hasn’t had it easy. ”In my early twenties, I suffered from really bad depression and tried to take my own life once,“ he told The Sun in 2019.

Graham also has dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes it difficult for him to read and memorize scripts. “My missus actually reads the script and says whether or not I’m doing it. She’s made some good choices,” he admitted years ago.

His wife is actress and producer Hannah Walters, 51, whom he met in 1993 while they were studying together at the acting school from which he was later expelled. They married in 2008, have two children together, and live quietly in a modest home in the English town of Ibstock — population 7,582 — close to her parents.

“I’m part of the furniture here,” Graham told the local newspaper in Leicestershire, the county to which Ibstock belongs. “I love the sense of camaraderie in Ibstock, the community spirit. It’s a proper English village. I like it that I can go into Smith’s, the local butchers — they’ve been here for years, you know — and people are all chatting and they say hello, how are ya and they treat me like they do everyone else."

The couple is also close professionally, having co-founded the production company Matriarch Productions in 2020 with the goal of “providing a much-needed platform for underrepresented voices and stories in the U.K.,” as stated on their website.

The production company is behind projects such as the 2023 miniseries Boiling Point, which continues the story of the chef from the original film; A Thousand Blows, a recent release by Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, in which Graham plays a dangerous veteran boxer; and the aforementioned Adolescence.

“I’m not saying what I do saves people in a third world country. I wouldn’t have the audacity. All I’m saying is that we should tell stories that give us a full kaleidoscope over the people that live in this country,” Graham explained in his interview with The Times.

The story of Adolescence has stirred viewers because its young protagonist (played by Owen Cooper, 15) wasn’t raised in a broken home with abusive or alcoholic parents, but in a perfectly happy and normal family, much like that of Graham and Walters themselves. As the actor explained in his conversation with The Times, he and his wife have worked hard at raising their children. “We have ups and downs, of course. Luckily, though, the relationship we both have with our children is beautiful — but it takes work,” he said.

On the professional front, Graham still has plenty of work ahead. He has several projects in the works for this year, including the Peaky Blinders film, set for release in late 2025 or early 2026. He will also be one of the leads in Good Boy, in which he plays a man who kidnaps a 19-year-old criminal to force him and his wife to become a “good boy.”

Both films are expected to feature plenty of violence and crime, genres in which Graham feels at home. He has accepted this typecasting, which he explained in The Times interview: “I’m just not perceived as this charming man who comes in on a horse.”

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