Online Reporter
LOS ANGELES. – Many truly great works of art over the years have been shot in one take – from World War One epic 1917 to the Spice Girls’ music video for Wannabe.
But a lot of the most famous examples – including that 90s girlband masterpiece – weren’t actually shot continuously in real life. They instead simply used some clever editing to made it look like they had been.
One of the many notable things about Netflix’s Adolescence, which won several top prizes at the Emmy Awards, was that all four of its hour-long episodes really did involve filming everything in one go, without interruption.
It’s a shooting technique which was widely praised for making the viewing experience more gripping and immersive when the series was released to huge acclaim in March.
Audiences were instantly drawn in to the show’s bracing depiction of a teenage boy who is accused of stabbing a female classmate. But the series was far more than another procedural crime drama.
Its exploration of the impact of smartphones and social media on teenagers captured the zeitgeist, tapping into the fears of parents around the world.
The drama’s breakout star was Owen Cooper, a Warrington-born actor who was only 14 when the series was filmed.
Cooper played the central character, Jamie Miller, a schoolboy who is abruptly woken up by the police storming his house in the show’s first episode.
They find him in his bedroom and place him under arrest. “You’re making a big mistake,” insists the boy’s dad, played by Stephen Graham, who also co-created the series with writer Jack Thorne.But as the episode unfolds, it’s clear there is no mistake. Damning CCTV evidence ultimately proves Jamie’s guilt, and Adolescence begins to examine its key questions: what led to this murder, and what motive could a teenager possibly have had.
It was a storyline based on real events. “I read an article about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl to death, and it made me feel cold,” Graham told Radio X’s Chris Moyles.
A similar but separate teen stabbing hit the headlines just a couple of months later. “And these two incidents were at the opposite ends of the country,” Graham noted.
“And I just thought, why is this happening? And not just because I’m a father, but I think any human being with a moral compass can look at that situation and think, what’s going on with society today that we’re in this era where these young boys are stabbing young girls to death?”
Graham knew the success of the show would hinge on the young actor chosen to play Jamie, and casting director Shaheen Baig struck gold with Cooper – who had first become interested in acting around the age of 10.
In a joint interview with Baig, Cooper explained: “I don’t know where it came from, but I asked my mum and dad if I could start going to drama classes, and I think they were a bit shocked by it because I’ve always wanted to become a footballer.
“I still play football now, and then asking them if I wanted to start drama lessons, it was a bit out of the blue, really.”
Baig recalled: “It was really about trying to find somebody with the emotional register to be able to play Jamie.
“Owen sent us an improv tape, and I remember first watching that, and thinking, “OK. He looks great on camera, but also his improv was really smart.” It felt very natural.”
Many of the headlines surrounding Cooper claimed he had never acted before. But that wasn’t actually true.
“It has frustrated us a bit,” said drama teacher Esther Morgan, who helped run the weekly acting classes Cooper had attended for two years in Didsbury, Manchester.
The Adolescence team, she told BBC News in April, had approached the Drama MOB school while casting the series, asking to see tapes of their “strongest northern boys”.
“They kept coming back for Owen,” she recalled. “He just had something.” – BBC
