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Stephen Graham: the ‘working-class, mixed-race kid’ who cares deeply about the work
“There are certain things he does that actors can’t always learn,” says Socha. “It’s his aura and presence. He’s helped me understand the responsibility we carry as actors.”
Family is central to Graham’s life. In a profile for the New Statesman, his wife, Hannah Walters, said he is as likely to be found on a Saturday morning whizzing around his local skate park with his son as he is hobnobbing with Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio. His children are central to every decision he makes – even when steerage on a big James Bond film offered the opportunity for a genuine step up.
“Just living at home is more important,” says Walters. “If the only conversation you’ve got is about a film set or a project, then what’s the point?”
When he played Al Capone, he got so deep into the character that he was flagged by the FBI. “It’s always going to affect you,” he said. “Al Capone was a man who killed people and probably suffered from ill mental health. It does creep in.” He has started in the nothing, and now hovers around the richest and most powerful – a man capable of playing real people, like Capone, Nelson or Barnes, while grounding himself in the poverty and anger that forms, as much as anything, the core of a northern upgrbringing.
“It’s the way it is on every estate,” he said. “There’s negativity everywhere. ‘It’s killing us all,’ the kids say to Barnes [in Shane Meadows’ one-off TV drama, The Virtues]. It’s not pleasant, is it?” He laughed, but the laugh is haunted. A northern actor, chiselled out of the north and drifting back to join the there but for the grace of god gang.
Read the full article from The Guardian here: Read More
