The rapper-turned-one-man business empire P Diddy strolls into the foyer of
a chic Soho hotel. Typically, he is surrounded by an eight-man battalion of
minders who clear the way for a swift dash to the elevator. Suddenly,
however, P Diddy stops and reaches out to an unassuming white man standing
next to a marble statue.
“I loved you in Snatch ,” he gushes, and the object of his
affection, the 33-year-old Liverpudlian actor Stephen Graham, smiles, shakes
his hand and exchanges pleasantries.
Graham, you see, has a face that’s not easy to forget. A charismatic
scene-stealer who leaves indelible impressions on audiences, casting
directors and mega-successful rappers alike, he was the nervous one in TV’s
Band of Brothers , the funny one in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch
, the tough one from Scorsese’s Gangs of New York , and the
aggressive one in Arctic Monkeys’ promo video for their song When
the Sun Goes Down . And now, thanks to a role in what is undoubtedly the
best British movie since Trainspotting , Stephen Graham, star of This
is England , is about to become, simply, the One.
“That was a little bit spacey, wunnit?” he says, postDiddy, sitting in the
hotel’s back bar. “I’m just this little lad from Liverpool! I don’t expect
that every day.”
Graham is here to discuss Shane Meadows’s Eighties-set coming-of-ager, a
startling movie that, frankly, needs little industry hyperbole to sell its
excellence. Graham stars as Combo, a skinhead who infects a Midlands gang
with the reactionary politics of the National Front. In doing so he takes a
fatherless teen, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), under his wing, espouses racial
cleansing and sets the stage for a purgative and violent climax.
Naturally, this being a Meadows movie, in which character and banter take
precedence over action and plotting (see Twenty Four Seven and Dead
Man’s Shoes ), a concerted effort is made to understand the
essence of Combo. “We wanted to make him unlike any skinhead you’d seen on
screen,” says Graham, referring to the likes of Russell Crowe in Romper
Stomper and Ed Norton in American History X . “We wanted to open
him up before your eyes.”
Graham brought added complexities when, on the eve of the shoot, he confessed
to Meadows that, contrary to the entire spirit of his own character, he
himself is, in fact, mixed-race. “Me grandma’s Jamaican,” he says. “So I
told Shane, and I said: ‘You’re probably going to want someone like Tim Roth
now, instead, aren’t you?’ But he instantly went: ‘No. Don’t you see, that
makes it even more interesting?’ ”
Graham’s skinhead, at turns terrifying and pathetic, is a fascinating portrait
of pressure-cooker hatred. His most powerful scene, a slow-burning face-off
with the black British actor Andrew Shim, is riven with the conflicting
emotions of someone who despises what he sees and yet somehow yearns for the
same. Here Graham’s face is tortured and tear-stained and speaks, he says,
of his own childhood years of being a racial outsider. “I was on an
antiracism march and this black lad turned to me and said: ‘What are you
doing here, you’re white!’ And I got really upset.”
He pauses and explains that his heritage is Jamaican, Swedish, Irish and
Scottish, and then adds, passionately: “Don’t you see, even the title
This is England , well [thumps own chest] THIS IS ENGLAND, because
this is me. I’m a thoroughbred mongrel, the best and the worst of
everything.”
Graham began his career in a school production of Treasure Island at
the age of 10. He acted in Liverpool’s famous Everyman Youth Theatre (past
alumni include Ian Hart, David Morrissey and Julie Walters), became fast
friends with the playwright Willy Russell ( Blood Brothers, Educating Rita
) and was expelled from the prestigious Rose Bruford College for Speech and
Drama in London.
“They said it was because I was a misogynistic, homophobic, racist drug
dealer,” he says with a casual shrug. “But really they were just trying to
squash me and turn me into one of them production-line actors.”
Ignoring the protests of Russell, who suggested taking Bruford to the
European Court of Justice, Graham instead went travelling for a year, and
continued living the actor’s life — eating bad food and accompanying friends
to humiliating auditions. It was on one such trip that the nascent director
Guy Ritchie spotted Graham, told him he liked his face and cast him in his
debut short film The Hard Case (1995).
Ritchie, of course, returned to Graham for the role of the luckless mobster
Tommy in Snatch , and the rest has been a slow and steady climb
through TV mini-series such as Band of Brothers and Empire ,
shows such as The Bill and Coronation Street and mainstream
A-listers such as Gangs of New York .
During the making of the latter movie, Graham says he became close friends
with Leonardo DiCaprio, and regularly socialises with the actor whenever
he’s in the UK. Then, when he’s in LA, he stays with DiCaprio. There was
even the suggestion of a juicy role for Graham in the most recent
DiCaprio-Scorsese collaboration The Departed , but it was, allegedly,
sequestered by a bigger-name star at the last minute. “I could say more
about that,” says Graham, grinning. “But I can’t. I’ll remain silent.”
In general, Hollywood giants don’t intimidate Graham, who also counts Brad
Pitt and Daniel Day-Lewis among his co-stars. “I admire them, and I’m
slightly in awe of them,” he says, “but most of the big-name actors I’ve met
are pretty humble. It’s the TV soap stars you’ve got to watch out for. The
ones that think they’re so much bigger than they are because they’re in
Hello! magazine.”
Conversely, Graham describes himself as a jobbing actor with a wife and two
kids, a house in Ibstock in Leicestershire, and a mortgage to pay. He says
that acting is about doing the work, and not being snobbish about the roles.
He has become, for instance, something of a poster boy for the Sheffield
indie rockers Arctic Monkeys, who cast him as a sleazoid pimp in When the
Sun Goes Down and have signed him up again for their next promo video.
He’s just finished work on the big-budget children’s fantasy film
Inkheart , but the project he’s mostly obsessing about is another
potential Meadows movie, this time opposite the Meadows regular and
heavyweight thesp Paddy Considine ( Cinderella Man ). “Shane wants to
get us together,” he says, grinning at the idea. “That would be something
really special.”
Meanwhile, of course, there’s This is England to nurture, plus
his rising status as a power-player to fans and billionaire rappers alike.
“I know it was pretty mental to meet him like that,” he says, reflecting
modestly on the P Diddy encounter. “But when you’ve shaken Kenny Dalglish’s
hand, which I have, where can you go?”
This is England is released on April 27
