The Robert De Niro movies that inspired Stephen Graham to take acting seriously
Since the early 2000s, Stephen Graham has been proving himself to be one of the greatest actors of his generation. He has appeared in many terrific television shows and films—the kind that viewers can hardly shake from their minds. The most recent is Adolescence, a powerful drama that he also co-wrote. It explores a 13-year-old boy’s interrogation after he is accused of murdering a classmate.
The show has earned critical praise, further cementing Graham’s brilliance as an actor who is deeply committed to portraying life’s more brutal and complex sides—stories that can be hard to watch but are entirely necessary. He first rose to public prominence as Combo in This Is England, a violent racist who manipulates vulnerable, impressionable teenagers to spread his fascist agenda. The film aimed to expose how dangerous ideologies brainwash young people, and Graham delivers a chillingly convincing performance as someone consumed by anger and hatred.
Graham has a knack for playing complex, often criminal characters, like Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire or the hopeful yet stupid Tommy in Snatch. While he has dedicated much of his career to British projects, the star has appeared in his fair share of Hollywood movies too, such as Martin Scorsese’s gangster movie The Irishman, appearing alongside Robert De Niro.
This must have felt like an exciting moment for Graham because it was De Niro’s roles in several key movies that solidified the young actor’s desire to take his love for cinema seriously. Appearing alongside the star on The One Show, Graham revealed: “When I was 14 I said to my dad, ‘I want to do this acting thing properly.’” Luckily, his father was on board with his idea and decided to get Graham some films to study. “I got my coat, and we lived in a flat and we walked to Quarry Green video shop. Remember the days of video shops? They were like libraries. And we went in, and he went, ‘Right, come on’, and we were walking up and down the aisles, and he picked three films.”
Two of these films featured De Niro in a leading role – Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. The actor’s performances in both of these films are simply terrific, and you can see why Graham was so affected by these movies. In Taxi Driver, for example, De Niro’s Travis Bickle, a war veteran who attempts to stave off his PTSD and insomnia by driving around the streets of New York – only to lose his grip on reality – is a complex figure: volatile, mentally unstable, desperate, heroic, deranged. It’s this kind of multitudinous character that Graham seems greatly attracted to playing, but who knows if he’d be the same if he hadn’t seen these revolutionary performances as a teenager?
The other movie was The Godfather, which was a landmark moment for Hollywood, balancing the line between accessible epic cinema and nuanced storytelling. While De Niro wasn’t in The Godfather, he played the younger version of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II to critical acclaim.
These movies opened Graham’s mind to the power of acting, encouraging him to train hard to become a talented performer. He continued, “And then we went home, and we watched those three films, and we watched them all over the weekend, so [De Niro] was the beginning of my whole love of favourite films, really.”
