“I went a little bit method”: the 2014 movie character Stephen Graham called “twatty”
Liverpool’s Stephen Graham is a fantastic example of cream rising to the top because he’s managed it three times now, in very distinct periods of his career, over a 25-year period.
Firstly, at the start of the 2000s, thanks to his going from working on The Bill to getting cast alongside Brad Pitt and Jason Statham in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, he caught the eye of Hollywood to the point that he started to mix it in the big leagues on movies like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York in 2002.
At that point, he might have been forgiven for thinking he would be a major movie mainstay, because both Snatch and Scorsese’s film were huge hits, and the legendary director of the latter didn’t forget him. But Graham’s career almost immediately calmed right back down again, and he returned to working mostly in British TV while making the occasional movie.
But seven years later, he had another hit with football biopic The Damned United and then Hollywood came calling again, Graham cast as the psychopathic gangster Baby Face Nelson in Johnny Depp’s Public Enemies before a very different role in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides two years later. Things went quiet again for some years, but Scorsese was about to direct the pilot of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, and Graham was on a plane to the US once again to play Al Capone.
Scorsese is, of course, no stranger to method actors, and once that show had wrapped, Graham, by his own admission, dipped his toes into that world on a movie he made in 2014, a psychological thriller called Hyena. Graham played Detective Inspector David Knight on the British neo-noir about bent coppers and investigation units, in shades of his future work on Line of Duty, and in doing so had to push himself to go outside his usual comfort zone.
Graham told Empire: “I said to the director on day one that I wanted Knight to be an absolute twat. No matter what job you’re in or where you are, you’ve always got one person who’s so underhand and spineless that they’ll do anything to get to the top. They don’t care who they stand on. There’s always one in your work.”
Graham set about going shopping in order to make his character more convincing, adding: “We got a lovely pair of brown Gucci suede loafers, which to me shout that word out, and this Comme Des Garçons aftershave I’d bought in Paris thinking I was dead smooth. So I was actually being a twat myself. I tried it, and my wife told me never to spray it again, but I thought it’d come in handy one day. Before every scene, I sprayed it all over me. I went a little bit method twatty on this role!”
Despite a low budget, Hyena picked up favourable reviews and won several industry prizes, but once more it signalled the start of a decade of Graham appearing in projects closer to home rather than big cinema releases, a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel notwithstanding, as well as the trusty Scorsese giving him a small role in The Irishman on Netflix.
That was before his life-changing success with 2025’s Adolescence, the one-shot drama that became the streaming giant’s most-watched ever production, and won Graham a Golden Globe, a Bafta and an Emmy. He made Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere the same year and has two major movies in the works, a sequel to Tom Hanks’ war drama Greyhound and the thriller Bunker with Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz.
