Stephen Graham: “This is more than a job… It’s a vocation”

“I turned 50 during filming, but it’s the fittest I’ve ever been,” says Stephen Graham. “And probably the best I’ve ever looked.” Sitting in The Halyard Liverpool, Vignette Collection, biceps flexing as he reaches for his oat flat white, it’s hard to disagree.

Graham is reflecting on the physical transformation he undertook to make new boxing drama A Thousand Blows. “It was a four-month process to reach peak condition,” he says. “We did it all properly. I had blood tests. My diet was laid out. I followed my workout plan to the letter. I’d smash the gym four times a week heavy weightlifting, with boxing training on the other three days. It was a lot but extremely enjoyable. The hard part was the food. I was constantly eating to bulk up. Loads of whey, carbs and protein. Three thousand calories per day. It’s difficult to cram that much down you.”

For his pugilistic style, Graham took two inspirations. “I tried to emulate Mike Tyson and Lenny McLean [the ‘Guv’nor’ of unlicensed boxing]. I wanted Tyson’s stature and sheer brutality, combined with Lenny’s snarling, explosive anger. Win by any means necessary. Elbows, head-butts, anything goes. It’s not a tickling competition, it’s a bare-knuckle fight.”

When Graham makes his ring walk in the opening episode, all tattoos and sculpted torso, every bit of that gruelling preparation is on display. What did his wife and co-star, Hannah Walters, make of her husband’s metamorphosis? “I’ve known this man since he was 19,” she laughs. “And, let me tell you, I’m very happy with the results.”

A Thousand Blows is a period thriller set in the perilous world of illegal boxing in Victorian London. A stylish, swaggering take on costume drama, it’s written by Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, and cut from similar vintage cloth. The six-part series is set amid the East End’s thriving bare-knuckle scene during the 1880s. Graham stars as local champion Henry ‘Sugar’ Goodson, who becomes locked in a deadly rivalry with Hezekiah Moscow (Small Axe’s Malachi Kirby), a new arrival from Jamaica. Both are historical figures. The result is knockout viewing.

“The beauty of this show is that it’s rooted in truth,” says Graham. “It’s fictionalised but based on real people and events.” It was Graham and Walters who brought Knight on board as screenwriter. “Steve has a wonderful way with working-class stories,” says Graham. “He looks at history from the bottom up, not the top down. A lot of his research is reading old newspapers and court documents. He believes that truth is often more magical than fiction. He tells stories you couldn’t make up.”

Graham’s own biography reads rather like a fairy-tale rise. Merseyside-born and mixed race, he discovered acting aged eight, playing Jim Hawkins in a school production of Treasure Island, before joining Liverpool’s Everyman Youth Theatre in his teens. His breakthrough was his blistering, Bafta-nominated performance as skinhead Combo in Shane Meadows’ This Is England. His impressively long list of film credits include Snatch, Gangs of New York, Boiling Point, The Irishman and Blitz, plus the Venom and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises.

On the small screen, he played Al Capone in the HBO gangster epic Boardwalk Empire and the antihero in Line of Duty series five, which broke records with astonishing ratings of 12.5 million. Overnight, says Graham, he got recognised a lot more.

Now 51, he’s one of the most prolific, versatile and respected British actors in the business. Yet he still pinches himself when he’s in the same frame as his screen idols. “To this day, it blows my tiny mind,” he says. “Working with De Niro and Pacino on The Irishman was incomprehensible. Watching those masters was my education. When I was 15 and decided to give acting a proper go, the first thing my dad did was walk down to the video shop and rent three films: The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver and The Godfather. He wasn’t messing about! We watched them over the weekend and he said, ‘That’s how you do it properly.’”

The fact that Graham now works with those greats, he says, “is a constant source of surprise and delight. I had posters of these people on my wall. They were over in America. I was in a block of flats in Kirkby. There was no chance of ever meeting them, let alone acting with them. When I met Gary Oldman, one of my all-time heroes, he said: ‘I thought your performance in This Is England was magnificent.’ He said it so casually, but it’s one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever been paid. For Daniel Day Lewis to phone out of the blue to say he’d seen [Shane Meadows’ drama] The Virtues and thought it was beautiful – surreal doesn’t cover it.”

A-list admirers aren’t limited to fellow thesps. “I’m playing Bruce Springsteen’s father in the biopic, Deliver Me from Nowhere. Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen and I’m his dad, Douglas,” he adds. “The Boss approved my casting himself. He told our director, ‘I love him, he’s fantastic.’ I was overwhelmed, thinking ‘What? Bruce Springsteen knows who I am?’ He’d not only seen This Is England but loved my take on Capone in Boardwalk Empire. How mad is that?”

With White starring in The Bear and Graham in Boiling Point, it’s a meeting of screen chefs. Did they find time for a herb-chopping contest? Graham laughs: “No, we didn’t have a chop-off. Maybe next time.”

When I interviewed fellow actor Lennie James recently, he couldn’t speak highly enough of Graham, both on camera and off it. “Stevie is the best of us,” he said. Spending time in his company, you can see why. When he gamely agrees to some photos out on the street, it’s clear how beloved he is. High Life has never had so many passers-by approach a subject mid-shoot. Graham greets everyone warmly. He peppers conversation with the words “blessed” and “grateful”. He’s lovingly tactile with Hannah, and fizzes with pride about their teenage children, Grace and Alfie: “Someone once told me, ‘Your kids could sit down with a prince or a pauper and treat them exactly the same.’ That made my heart burst.”

That generous spirit extends to his burgeoning production career. In 2020, he and Hannah founded Matriarch Productions. “Having our own production company sounds grand,” explains Graham. “It’s literally a computer underneath the stairs where Hannah sits and does it all.”

As executive producers, they ensured A Thousand Blows employed people from socially deprived backgrounds. “It’s hugely important to us,” he says. “We had a trainee scheme across all departments, ring-fenced in the budget. It enabled us to take on a lot of young people who wouldn’t normally have those opportunities. There’s still a huge class problem in the arts. I’m not shouting with a fist in the air or trying to start a class war. We just have an obligation to level the playing field. A variety of voices is vital. We need to find and nurture these people to help our industry grow.”

Graham believes in paying it forward. “We’ve worked hard to get to where we are. Now it’s important we put our hands back down and help pull up people like us. I’m not saying that individually we can change the world, but we can influence our own part of it. Working on Blitz, [director] Steve McQueen said to me ‘You can only change these institutions from the inside.’ Now, Hannah and I are getting to sit at the big table with the grownups and raise these issues.”

Another cause close to his heart is working with charity MANUP and being an advocate for male mental health. Graham has spoken of his struggles with depression and tried to take his own life in his early 20s. “I never planned to shout it from the rooftops but I’m glad I went public,” he says. “Only the other day, I got a text from a friend, saying, ‘How’s your mental health at the minute?’ It’s so important to maintain that constant line of communication because certain men go quiet. A bit of human contact can help them out of a hole. It’s about reaching out and making sure the people around you are OK. We’ve got a little WhatsApp group where we all check in on each other.”

Graham is in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. Hannah helps her dyslexic husband sift through scripts to choose the right parts. He might be best known for hard-man roles, always finding the humanity within them, but he’s equally at home in soul-baring or politicised pieces. “I’m drawn to work with social awareness and something to say,” he says. “For me, this is more than a job… It’s a vocation.”

He played Liverpool dockyard union leader Hayden Stagg in the final series of Peaky Blinders and reprises his role in the film sequel. “That was good fun,” he grins. “Cillian [Murphy, who stars as cap-clad kingpin Tommy Shelby] is such a humble man. We share the sensibility that everyone on set is an equal. He’s wonderful to watch. At times, I have to tell myself, ‘I’m acting with him here. Stop fangirling and get yourself together.’”

Having received an OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours (“I’ve been ordained!” he jokes), is Graham in danger of becoming a national treasure? “That’s not for me to say,” he laughs. “I’ve been called it a couple of times by nice people in the Co-op or Tesco. I accepted the OBE for my late mum. When she was terminally ill in hospital, I showed her the official letter and she went, ‘Wow!’ So I said, ‘OK, I’ll take it then.’ We were a single-parent family for a long time. My mum battled to overcome adversities, so it meant a hell of a lot. The journey from that little scally in a school play has been huge. To still be here today, having this conversation, aged 51? I must be doing something right.”

A Thousand Blows is coming to Disney+ on 21 February 2025 for UK and Ireland. Adolescence is coming to Netflix in 2025