‘I felt like I was a made man’: Stephen Graham on working with his childhood heroes

Stephen Graham likes to quote that very famous saying in acting, “There are no small parts, only small actors” – though it has nothing to do with the fact that the 51-year-old stands a power-packed 5ft five-and-a-half inches. When in 2020 he set up his own production company, Matriarch Productions, after a storied career as one of our great character performers, he made it one of the company’s founding principles.

Graham established Matriarch with his wife, the actor Hannah Walters. Their first project was the 2021 film Boiling Point, which created history as the first British single-take movie. Graham won a Bafta nomination for his portrayal of head chef Andy Jones, whose life unravels in real time during one frenzied service in the kitchen. But he was determined that Boiling Point would be just as radical behind the camera, too. Typically on TV and film productions, each actor is assigned a cast number, which functions as an unspoken hierarchy of their importance on the set. Graham decided he didn’t want that.

“You get number one on a call sheet, and then you get number, like, 52,” he says. “I’ve been number 52. I’ve been number 12. I’ve been number seven – I’ve been all of those numbers. And I’ve been number one. And, to me, I wanted to just smash that structure and say, ‘We’re not doing that. Everyone is as important as everyone.’”

Graham has been popping up, stealing scenes and generally being a rock in TV and movies for almost 30 years now. He’s held his own opposite some of the biggest names in the game: Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. And he’s built recurring relationships with revered filmmakers such as Shane Meadows and Martin Scorsese. Kevin Bacon may have the six-degrees-of-separation theory, but I have the (admittedly untestable) conviction that every one of us will have seen Graham in something: perhaps as a rogue undercover police officer in Line of Duty or the avaricious dad in Matilda the Musical, or maybe as Al Capone in Sky Atlantic’s Boardwalk Empire or supreme as the British nationalist Combo in Meadows’s This is England series. None of those? OK, there’s also Scorsese’s The Irishman, two instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean, and – there he is! – in the finale of Peaky Blinders.

And Graham is at it again with short but sweet roles in two new projects. The first is Blitz, the latest film from Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Small Axe), which is a Dickensian fable about a mixed-race boy called George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) in London in 1940. He is evacuated to the countryside, but decides to risk his life to return to the city to be with his mother (Saoirse Ronan). German bombs are falling all around George, but the greatest peril he faces is from an encounter with a pair of grotesque grave-robbers, brother and sister Albert and Beryl, played by Graham and Kathy Burke. They enlist him to comb the rubble, looting jewellery and personal effects from the recently deceased.

Graham is quite often cast as a nasty piece of work, but this new character – who is based on uncomfortable yet true stories from the Blitz that McQueen was keen to include – feels like a new low. Does he not mind? “They’re the most interesting. They’re fun,” he replies, smiling. “There’s also lots to bring to them, in many ways.”

He’s being a bit arch here. Graham likes to invest all his characters with depth and complexity, no matter how long their screen time (which for Albert in Blitz is less than 10 minutes). He starts his preparation for every role by carefully selecting the correct shoes for the person he is portraying. He will then move on to their walk, which might take days or even weeks of padding around his living room to perfect. “I’m a great one for nicking walks,” says Graham. “I might be sitting at St Pancras station or something and see someone walk, and I’ll go, ‘Ooooh, I love that.’ And I’ll lock it away and then I’ll try and go through my little Rolodex when I’m creating a character, and go, ‘That walk, I’m having that.’”

For Albert in Blitz, he developed a whole backstory with McQueen that most viewers will never have a clue about: he and Beryl were children raised in a Victorian workhouse; he fought in the First World War, suffered from undiagnosed PTSD and was now again destitute, reduced to stealing from the dead. “That’s what I loved about Steve’s story,” says Graham. “When George escapes, jumps off the train, there’s an element of Pinocchio – though he’s trying to get back to his mother, whereas Pinocchio is trying to get back to Geppetto. And you meet all of these really wild and interestingly wonderful characters on the journey: some are really evil and some show you there is decency in humanity. To me, it was like a twisted fairytale.”

Graham knows a bit about fairytales: his life and career has that feel to it. An inveterate story spinner, there’s a breeziness in which he talks about his ascent through the acting ranks. Here’s how he describes being cast as Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire: “I hadn’t had no work for a while and I got a phone call from my agent saying, ‘Could Marty [Scorsese] speak to you?’ And then he phoned me up, and he was like, ‘Hey kid, how are you doing?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m good, ta.’”

Or his 20-year friendship with DiCaprio that was forged on the set of Gangs of New York in 2002: “I’d class him as a very dear friend still today.”

But the reality is that very little was preordained about Graham’s rise. He was born in Kirkby, six miles outside of Liverpool, and was raised for the first 10 years of his life solo by his mother, Marie, a social worker. His grandfather on his dad’s side was Jamaican and Graham has been told that he came over on the Windrush, “though I’m not 1,000,001% sure on that”. As a kid he was pretty constantly getting into scrapes: he was flattened by a taxi in Liverpool aged seven; three years later, he fell from a seven-storey car park and smashed his arm, collarbone and both of his legs.

There were no links to acting in Graham’s family, but it was on his radar because Andrew Schofield, best-known for playing Johnny Rotten in the 1986 film Sid and Nancy, lived across the road from his gran’s house, where Graham went most days for his dinner. Schofield saw a 10-year-old Graham play Jim Hawkins in his school production of Treasure Island and suggested to Marie that he join the youth programme at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where playwrights such as Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell would often showcase new work. Graham followed his advice, and it led to a spot in the National Youth Music Theatre.

Meanwhile, Graham’s stepfather Mike – a man he calls Pops – had arrived on the scene. Pops was also mixed-race, though his heritage was African, and he educated Graham on activists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. “Pops came into my life and he taught me about identity and my history,” Graham recalls. “He was my huge role model, and my huge male figure in my life.” Pops was also a big movie buff. When a teenage Graham told him he wanted to be an actor, they marched down to the video store and rented The Godfather parts one and two, Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver. They binged the films over a weekend. “He was like, ‘All right, watch these, this is how you do it properly,” says Graham.

There were plenty of quiet moments, even years, when Graham started out as an actor, but his break came in his late twenties when he was cast by Scorsese (who also directed Taxi Driver, of course) in Gangs of New York. Graham may have been meeting one of his heroes, but he wasn’t cowed: he told Scorsese he wanted his character, Shang, to have a dog, and that went in; he mentioned the gruesome detail that fishmongers would rip the cheeks of kids that stole from them with fish hooks – and Scorsese added that, too.

The film involved a five-month shoot in Rome. Early on, Graham met his co-star Daniel Day-Lewis in the gym. Graham had done some boxing as a child and they did some pad work together, chatting away, getting on nicely. “Then on the day of filming, I’m sitting in the chair in makeup, and Daniel comes walking through in full regalia,” says Graham. “I’ll never forget it. He looks in the mirror, puts his hand on my shoulder, and he goes, ‘From now on, I call you Shang and you call me Bill.’ And I just went, ‘OK, Bill,’ and that was it. We were locked in.

“For me, every day is a school day,” Graham goes on. “When you see Scorsese do what he does, you are getting to watch a master paint, basically. It’s the best school you could ever get.”

If Graham had a bucket-list of dream collaborators, he would have ticked off most of the names on it by now. But the big one came when he had to audition in New York for Scorsese again and De Niro before being offered a role in their 2019 mob epic The Irishman. “In all those films I’d watched with my dad, and all of those classic gangster films, there’s a moment when someone gets ‘made’ and they become a member of the family,” says Graham. “And when I got a hug off the two of them, I felt like I’d become a made man. It was surreal.”

Graham shakes his head. “You have to understand this kid from Liverpool who grew up in a block of flats, and now all of a sudden, he’s there with these two people who have been icons. You never think you’re going to meet Al Pacino. You never think you’re going to meet Robert De Niro. Your head – it doesn’t enter your head.”

Graham was living with Hannah in a flat in south London when he landed Gangs of New York. Because of the length of the shoot, it made sense to give up their place and decide where to base themselves when Graham returned: London? Los Angeles? Or, as it turns out, rural Leicestershire, which is where Graham is speaking to me from on a video call today. He insists they live a pretty unremarkable life: the couple have grownup children, Grace and Alfie, who both still live at home, and the four of them will go out to the cinema or for something to eat in Leicester.

“If people meet me in the Co-op or in Tesco when I’m shopping with Hannah, you can tell they’re thinking, ‘What are you doing here?’” says Graham. “And I don’t mean to be literal, but it’s like, ‘I’m pushing a trolley… We haven’t come here to have a dance, have we? It’s a shop.’ I do a lot of normal things. I go to the tip. I’ve got to go to the tip again in a minute. The fellas at the tip are like, ‘Alwight mate, back again?’”

This, again, is only half the story. Of course there must be busier people than Graham – presidents, Amazon drivers, single parents – but not many. Matriarch Productions, the company he set up with Hannah during the pandemic, is in full swing now. Its next project is A Thousand Blows, a rip-roaring, 12-part drama that will screen on Disney+ next year. The idea came from a photograph of a man called Hezekiah Moscow, a celebrated bare-knuckle fighter from the West Indies who landed in 1880s London. Hannah thought the story might interest the screenwriter Steven Knight, whom Graham had worked with on Peaky Blinders.

“I went, ‘You’ve got no chance, don’t be stupid!’” says Graham. “Then I swear to God, literally about four days later, she went, ‘Oi! Come here. Read that.’ And it was from Steven saying, ‘I love this. I want to do it. When can we start?’ I couldn’t believe she’d managed to do it.”

Graham has an eye-catching turn in A Thousand Blows as Sugar Goodson, the principal adversary of Moscow (played by Small Axe’s Malachi Kirby). You may have seen a trailer in which Graham walks into the ring looking absurdly hench for a man in his 50s. “It is out of order being 50 and being able to get into that shape,” he admits. “But it was a regime. It was habitual. I had to eat so much food and all the right foods. And then the working out: it’s not something that I did in three weeks. It took me about five months to get into that shape.”

Our time is up: Graham has to take some oversized cardboard to the tip, and then he’s shooting a week of nights on the forthcoming Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man. At the weekend, he’s flying to New York. A while back, Graham received a call out of nowhere from American director Scott Cooper, who he had tried to work with before, but the dates hadn’t aligned. Cooper was making a biopic of Bruce Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere, with The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White playing the Boss. He wanted to know if Graham would play Springsteen’s father.

“And Scott said, ‘Look, it’s not a huge role, but it’s a really integral role, a wonderful role. And when I wrote it, I thought of you,’” says Graham. “This is the bit where I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ Where your mind just goes, ‘Whaaaa…’ He said, ‘When I said to Bruce, I know who I want to play your father,’ he was like, ‘Who?’ Because it’s an important role. And then Scott said, ‘Stephen Graham. He’s an actor from England. He’s played…’ And Bruce went, ‘Oh, I know him. I loved his Al Capone. And This is England.’”

Graham laughs – even for one of his stories, his whole improbable career, this feels a bit far-fetched. “And then my head goes, ‘Bruce Springsteen has seen me in This is England and as Al Capone… Really?’ I still can’t quite fathom it sometimes.”

Blitz is in cinemas now before streaming on Apple TV+ on 22 November

Styling by Mark Anthony Bradley; grooming by Josh Knight; shot on location at The Roost, Dalston, London