28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Adolescence's Stephen Graham reveals he paid for production team's rent while they filmed the series
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Stephen Graham has revealed that his and his wife Hannah Walter's company, Matriarch Productions, paid for the Adolescence team's rent while they filmed the hit Netflix series in Yorkshire.
The four-part drama traces the disturbing journey of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, whose exposure to misogynistic online communities may have contributed to him killing a female classmate.
Adolescence became an instant success and the centre of a national conversation on incel culture, misogyny and the online 'manosphere'. As discussed in Parliament, there were even calls for the programme to become mandatory viewing in schools.
Graham and Walters wanted to create opportunities for people from similar backgrounds to theirs while making the show. Working class representation in the film and TV industry has plummeted to the lowest level in a decade, to only eight per cent of the workforce.
Speaking to GQ, Graham said: 'I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back…[We] paid to put people up, because they wouldn't have been able to afford it. By going, 'Look, we know how much you want it, we'll cover the rent' – that gives that person the opportunity to save money, and then on the next job, they can pay the rent.'
The This Is England star, 51, who describes himself as a 'mixed-race working-class kid from a block of flats', was born in Kirkby, six miles outside of Liverpool, and was raised by his mother, Marie, a social worker.
According to research conducted by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre at the University of Sheffield in 2024, the vast majority of people working in the film and TV industry are from middle or upper-class backgrounds.
Owen Cooper and Stephen Graham in 'Adolescence'
( Netflix )
Back in 2016, The Danish Girl actor Eddie Redmayne admitted to occasionally paying the rent for struggling actors due to the inaccessibility of accommodation.
He explained: 'The greatest privilege that I had was that my parents lived in London. So when I was out of university and out of work for a year, working in a pub, I didn't pay rent and I get letters from people trying to go to drama school and needing to pay their rent. And so that's something I occasionally do. It's impossibly expensive to live in London.'
