STEPHEN GRAHAM
“It was never my goal to make it in America. For me, it’s just been trying to be as truthful as possible”
When Stephen Graham was a child growing up in Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, he’d command attention in his front room by acting out impressions of Idi Amin and Margaret Thatcher. Now in his mid-forties, and nearly 30 years into his onscreen acting career, Graham is renowned for playing bad guys.
There’s more to Graham, obviously, as evidenced earlier this year by his shattering performance in Shane Meadows’ Channel 4 miniseries The Virtues, in which he plays alcoholic Joseph, who returns to his hometown in Ireland and unearths horrific memories that he’s long suppressed. But he’s best known for playing anguished, disturbed and incendiary men: racist skinhead Andrew ‘Combo’ Gascoigne in This Is England and its three subsequent TV series; bank robber Lester Joseph Gillis – better known as Baby Face Nelson – in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies; and Chicago’s Prohibition-era kingpin Al Capone, aka Scarface, in HBO’s superlative crime series Boardwalk Empire.
The latter was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who had cast Graham eight years previously in Gangs Of New York. And now the actor is working with Scorsese once more, this time alongside the director’s closest family (Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Joe Pesci) in mob epic The Irishman. He plays Tony Provenzano, a member of New York’s Genovese crime family who was known for his associations with Teamsters union director Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and President Richard Nixon.
“I’ve grown up on Scorsese’s films, they were the films that I watched with my dad,” says Graham, so excited that his eyes out-bulge the tattooed biceps that strain against his sports t-shirt.
Graham is not at all what you expect, which is to say that he’s chatty and smiley and doesn’t once launch across the table to grab by the throat. Seated in the dining area of London’s Soho Hotel, he tucks into a Caesar salad and alternates between a glass of still water and a latte, those rounded eyes glittering as he reels off anecdote after anecdote. It might be 29 years since he made his screen debut as Football Kid in, but he’s still a big kid in the sweetshop of cinema, not able to quite believe where his career’s taken him since he was spotted playing Jim Hawkins in a school production of .
