Stephen Graham is bringing back popular movie Boiling Point as a four-part TV series. Photo / Getty Images
The Liverpudlian star is the last actor you’d expect to cry in an interview — he talks about Brad Pitt, accepting an OBE and why he’s turned his film Boiling Point into a television drama.
No one does gangsters and tough nuttery more convincingly than Stephen Graham, so it’s a shock when I make him cry. We’re talking about how powerfully food can evoke memories and he chokes up recalling how his mum, Marie, who died last year, took him to Chinese restaurants in Liverpool as a childhood treat. They would share wonton soup and chow mein.
“My mum was a decent cook,” Graham says. “She used to make this gravy that I’m devastated she never passed on to me.” His tears set me off crying; I explain that my mum has cancer and he scoops me into a cuddle. As we pull ourselves together, he shows me a fairy cake tattoo on his left arm, which is in tribute to his nana, Mary, and her baking: “I’d help make the cakes and the icing and lick the bowl.”
This homely grub is worlds away from the brutal restaurant business depicted in Boiling Point, the short film that became an acclaimed 2021 movie, set on a disastrous dinner service and filmed in one shot.
Graham plays Andy Jones, a rapidly unravelling head chef who glugs booze out of a water bottle and, in the film’s final moments, collapses from a cocaine-induced heart attack.
Now Boiling Point has bubbled back to life as a four-part BBC series, picking up the action six months after that calamitous night. “But I’m dead, that’s how we played it,” Graham quibbled when he was told that the BBC was hungry for a spin-off. Nevertheless, he bit and so — spoiler alert — Jones is alive, still wrestling his demons.
Many of the film’s original cast are back too, including Graham’s real-life wife, Hannah Walters, as the maternal pastry chef Emily. The first few episodes are nerve-shattering, with flare-ups, racism and self-harm amid lingering shots of sizzling meat, foaming butter and meringue tarts.
Graham, 50, who is also an executive producer on the series, gets fired up when talking about creating a drama with a social conscience. “I feel we have an opportunity first, and I’m not being disrespectful to dramas that I’m watching at the moment — I’m not being disrespectful at all in any way whatsoever,” he says, as I lose track of what he is definitely not disrespecting. “But I want to make something that would have inspired me as a young actor — and would have made me think as a young man growing up. And it has to be entertaining.”
We’re talking over coffee (oat milk for Graham) at the River Cafe in West London, but there is an elephant, well, a bear, in the room.
The Boiling Point spin-off is already drawing comparison with The Bear, the harrowing but hopeful hit Disney+ series that follows a young chef, Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), taking over his family’s diner in Chicago after his brother’s suicide.
“We’re extremely different from The Bear,” says Graham, who has watched two episodes of the rival show. “Our film was made before their series. You can look and see, that’s a fact. How many keys are there on a piano? How many tunes?”
Both shows deal with mental health and addiction. Graham has been teetotal for seven years. “It’s been a dramatic change in my life. It was just a decision that I made and I’m very, very grateful that I did.”
Which isn’t to say, of course, that he doesn’t enjoy going to top-end restaurants with his wife. Does he have a spending limit on dinner a deux?
“Look, no I don’t,” admits Graham, who was brought up on a council estate in Kirkby and met Walters at drama school. “I don’t really spend a lot of money on anything else, so we like to go out. It’s an experience, especially when you’re eating in those fine-dining restaurants where the chefs are magicians.”
The BBC series is a co-production with Matriarch Productions, Graham and Walters’s production company, and the couple felt strongly about giving unknown actors an opportunity. Some of the other decision-makers, though, wanted big names in the plum parts. “There was a lot of, ‘Oh well, we can put a good name in that role who’ll bring the demographic for such and such an audience,’” Graham says, “And we’re, like, ‘No, let us have a go with these people.’”
As the man of the moment for at least 15 years, Graham has earned the right to sit at the grown-ups table, as he puts it, and is known for championing young talent, including Jack O’Connell and Jodie Comer. “She’s a fantastic actor and has that wonderful quality of treating people exactly the same on set,” he says of Comer.
Once, while he was filming Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, it was Brad Pitt who went out of his way to praise the new lad for doing a great job. “He said to me, ‘Look, I think you’ve got a lot of characters in you. I can see you. You’ll go far,’” Graham recalls. The pair are still in touch.
Although beloved by Hollywood — he starred in Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire and The Irishman — Graham has always eschewed moving to Los Angeles (“I like flying in there and flying out”). He lives in a small Leicestershire town where he can pop to the shops like an ordinary Joe. What’s his relationship with fame?
“I still don’t see myself as famous. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? The biggest one for me is something like a text from Gary Oldman, or a phone call from Daniel Day-Lewis saying, ‘I saw you in Time and thought you were fan-’”, he says, stopping himself from repeating a compliment.
His extraordinary career was recognised with an OBE this year. Graham, who is mixed-race and had a Jamaican grandfather, weighed up whether to accept it; some of his heroes, including John Lennon and Jim Broadbent, had rejected honours.
“It’s a complex scenario, isn’t it?” he says, recalling advice he received from Steve McQueen, the black British film director, who was appointed CBE in 2011. “He said, ‘The only way to make change is from the inside.’” In the end Graham dedicated his OBE to his mum and her social work.
His mother’s death was the “most difficult experience up until now that I’ve had to go through”, but he has found acceptance. “I got to tell my mum how much I adore her, how grateful I was for the sacrifices she made for me, the fact that she always believed in me even at times where I couldn’t believe in myself. She pulled me out of a state when I was younger,” he says, alluding to a mental breakdown in his 20s.
Today Graham is in enviable shape. For the past eight months he has been on a strict health regimen to play an East End boxer. His meals are weighed out, but he has successfully negotiated with his personal trainer to be allowed five dark chocolate Maltesers in his late-night yoghurt.
“Physically, mentally and spiritually I’m in the best place I’ve ever been in my entire life. For me the key thing for that is gratitude.” A self-described “spiritual scally”, the actor has long been a dedicated meditator. He may wear a chakra bracelet, but surely he has a personal boiling point?
“I stopped watching my team Liverpool play live because it f***s with my spiritual equilibrium,” he answers. His labradoodles, Bonnie and Clyde, now get walked when the Reds are playing. “I’m not the Dalai Lama, I’m merely walking my path.”
Graham’s path has led him to star in some of the best telly of the past five years — a prison guard in Time; a care home patient in Help — but he has never won an acting Bafta despite various nominations. He says he isn’t bothered.
“It’s ultimately down to a group of people sitting around the table. So if five different people are sitting in chairs on that day, they might have a different viewpoint.” It irks Walters, though, “and it really pisses off Shane Meadows”, who wrote and directed This Is England, in which Graham starred.
He grins madly when I say his wife is superb in Boiling Point. The acting industry has proved a more bruising ride for Walters. “To watch the rejections that come and smack her around the face, but also understand those rejections because I’ve been through them myself ... being constantly told, “We think you’re magnificent, however we’re going to have to go with a name.’ It’s a Catch-22, isn’t it?”
Their 18-year-old daughter, Grace, works for Matriarch Productions too, reading scripts and learning the ropes. With accusations about nepo babies rampant, Graham insists that Grace will be making the tea just like any other newbie. “You’re not just going to fly in and sit in a board meeting. No, no, you’re gonna start down that way,” he says, pointing to an imaginary shallow end. “You have to start there in order to appreciate the things.” As Graham has learnt, gratitude is key.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
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