In Stephen Graham’s World, Nice Guys Finish First

In 2012, the actor Stephen Graham and his wife were having a quiet dinner at a chain chicken joint in London when a young man approached the table. The man, James Nelson-Joyce, told Graham that he had just left drama school and wanted to be an actor, too. Many would have sent the 20-something away with some polite encouragement, but Graham asked for Nelson-Joyce’s email, and kept in touch, offering him regular advice and eventually recommending the younger actor to his agent.

More than a decade later, Graham and Nelson-Joyce are playing brothers in “A Thousand Blows,” a rip-roaring new Hulu drama set in the grimy East End of London in the 1880s.

Graham’s character, a bare-knuckle boxer known as the East End Gladiator, is of a type with the intimidating bruisers that he built his career playing, including a skinhead English nationalist in Shane Meadows’s “This Is England” and Al Capone in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”.

But over cups of tea on a recent gray afternoon in London, Graham, now 51, choked up while recounting his history with Nelson-Joyce. It means a lot, he said, laughing at the tears in his eyes, to be able to pass “the baton on” to younger actors. It also reflects Graham’s ethos that “you’re never above anyone, and you’re never below anyone.”

This egalitarian approach also applies when Graham works with some of Hollywood’s biggest names. In an email, Leonardo DiCaprio recalled that on the set of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” more than 20 years ago, Graham’s “fearless unpredictability kept everyone on their toes. But more than that, he brought truth to every scene.”

It also means people often want to work with Graham again and again. When Steven Knight signed on to write “A Thousand Blows,” Graham was already attached to the project. Knight had previously cast the actor in the final season of his hit gangster drama “Peaky Blinders,” and the opportunity to work with him again was one reason that Knight agreed to a do “A Thousand Blows” for a lower-than-usual fee, he said.

Graham “creates an environment where everyone feels that they have to do their best, not because they’re being told they have to, but because everybody else is,” Knight said. Having him as the lead actor on the yearlong shoot, filming the show’s first two seasons back-to-back, was like “if the most popular kid in school is actually doing well academically,” Knight said. “Then everyone else will.”

In “A Thousand Blows,” which comes to Hulu on Friday, Graham’s boxer character is Sugar Goodson, a longstanding champion now slowing down in the ring, but still running the neighborhood with his brother Treacle (Nelson-Joyce) and paying the police to turn a blind eye to petty crime. Bulking up to play the fighter took six months of training, Graham said, and was “by far the biggest transformation” he’d ever undergone for a role.

“I’m a little fella, I’m 5-foot-5 and a half,” he said, but for this role, “I wanted that bulldog stature.” Knight waits until the end of the first hourlong episode to introduce Sugar, which the showrunner said he could only do because he trusted Graham to “deliver the punch” needed for that entrance. We first see the character from behind, his enormous back rippling with muscles and his shoulders up by his ears, primed to fight.

Sugar’s status as the best boxer in the East End finds a challenger in Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby, “Small Axe”), who arrives in London from Jamaica hoping to become a lion tamer, and gets in the ring when that career choice doesn’t work out. Hezekiah soon falls in with the leader of an all-female gang, Mary (Erin Doherty, “The Crown”), someone Sugar has known since she was a child living in the workhouse.

All three characters are based on the lives of real people, all “survivors,” of difficult circumstances, Graham said. And while he sees the show as “entertainment,” Graham said he is most interested in telling stories that “can make us look at things from a different angle, or maybe represent the voice of the underrepresented.”

Graham grew up in Kirby, a small town in northwestern England, in a working-class high-rise apartment block. As a child he would do impressions of people he had seen on TV, including Margaret Thatcher, to make his grandmother laugh, and after performing in a school play at the age of 10, decided he wanted to act. He plastered his bedroom walls with pictures of actors like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Daniel Day-Lewis — all of whom Graham would later appear alongside onscreen, in “The Irishman” or “Gangs of New York.”

Going to a drama school in London was Graham’s first time away from “a very loving family home,” he said. In class, the exercises led him to revisit experiences from his teenage years that he hadn’t quite processed, like when his grandmother died, or his brother was stillborn. “To tap back into that, and to be a 20-year-old lad, meant the lid came off,” Graham said, and he had “a little bit of a breakdown.”

In the years since, he has “learned to navigate it better,” he said, adding, “Now, I can dip into those emotions and use them.” Meditating most mornings, he said, helps this process.

“He’s so soulful and gentle in his nature,” said Jodie Comer, who has acted opposite Graham a couple of times, and he brings a “beautiful ability to be honest with himself” to the work. Comer has known Graham since she was 16, when they met working on a BBC police drama. Graham also set up a meeting for Comer with his agent, a moment Comer called “such a catalyst in my life.” She still works with the agent today.

Since 2020, Graham has been supporting young talent, especially people from less privileged backgrounds, through Matriarch Productions, a company he runs with his wife, the actor Hannah Walters. (“Nothing happens without Hannah,” Graham said). Matriarch was involved in producing “A Thousand Blows,” from developing the concept all the way to postproduction. Throughout, Graham and Walters prioritized hiring diverse cast and crew members.

The company’s next project is “Adolescence,” a limited series about a 13-year-old boy who is arrested over the murder of a classmate. The show, in which Graham plays the boy’s father, comes to Netflix next month. After playing Mary in “A Thousand Blows,” Doherty also signed on to “Adolescence,” without even reading the script.

It was an easy decision, Doherty said, because acting alongside Graham was “the most collaborative experience I’ve ever had.” When she came away from the “Thousand Blows” shoot, she said, she wondered: “Why aren’t all jobs like this?”