Stephen Graham

He grew up on a council estate in Kirkby, Lancashire, and landed Snatch (2000) by keeping a friend company at an audition. Guy Ritchie came out, spotted him in the waiting room, said 'I like your face,' and offered him the part. The actual breakthrough was This Is England (2006), where he played Combo, a radicalized skinhead fresh out of prison. The performance stuck. He reprised Combo across three TV follow-ups. By 2010 he was Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire. When Martin Scorsese wanted Tony Provenzano in The Irishman, he came back to Graham.

Adolescence (2025) was the show that finally got him an Emmy. He co-created it, co-wrote it, and starred as the father of a 13-year-old charged with stabbing a classmate, a role requiring sustained emotional devastation across four episodes. The show won eight Emmys total, including outstanding limited series. Graham took home best actor and best writing. In his acceptance speech, he described himself as 'just a mixed-race kid from a block of flats in a place called Kirkby,' as if he still couldn't quite believe the room he was in. The industry had stopped being surprised by him years earlier.

His wife, actress Hannah Walters, has become his most frequent collaborator. They appeared together in Boiling Point (2021), a film shot in a single real-time take with no cuts, and again in Adolescence, which they also co-created and co-wrote. A local actor encouraged him toward drama at eight after seeing him in a school play. His biological father was of Jamaican and Swedish descent, which gives some texture to his Emmy speech about being a mixed-race kid from Kirkby. He's been with Walters since drama school. That's a long time to keep working with the same person without running out of things to say.