Adolescence: 27 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets About How The Netflix Drama Was Made

In the last week, Adolescence has become the show that everyone is talking about – not just because of its hard-hitting subject matter and compelling performances from its entire cast, but also its unique storytelling device, which saw every episode being filmed in one long, continuous take.

As a result, there’s plenty for viewers to pick apart – with the cast and crew lifting the lid on exactly how the unique drama came together in various interviews and behind-the-scenes videos.

If you’ve been as gripped by Adolescence as the rest of the nation, here are 27 behind-the-scenes facts about how the cast and crew pulled off the mammoth task of creating the four-part miniseries…

While the case of Jamie Miller is a fictional one, Stephen Graham said the idea for Adolescence was inspired by two real-life tragedies

“I read an article in the paper about a young boy who stabbed a young girl to death,” he recalled to Jimmy Fallon.  “And then a couple of months later on the news, there was a piece about [another] young boy who stabbed a young girl to death. And these were at opposite ends of the country.

“And if I’m really honest with you, it hurt my heart. And I just think, ’what kind of a society are we living in at the minute where young boys are stabbing young girls?’.”

Stephen Graham also wove his own brief brushes with the so-called ‘manosphere’ into the show

Speaking to GQ, Stephen recalled that after being sent a training video by his son, he “must have been involved in the algorithm somehow”. 

He recalled: “All of a sudden, this fella is popping up, and expressing his views and opinions. Which he’s entitled to, that’s fine. But I was like, Woah, okay, I don’t quite think like that.

“And Grace [his daughter] goes, ’Daaad. That’s Andrew Tate’. And I was like, ‘Well I don’t know him’. And she’s like, ‘Well he’s…’. And I was like, ‘Oh, wow, really, OK’. And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m a semi-put-together 51-year-old man who knows a little bit of who I am and what I’m about. So, what if I was a 13-year-old boy who didn’t have the greatest relationship with my father, didn’t really have that solid connection with a role model, and was finding my feet out there?’.”

During the final episode of Adolescence, Stephen’s character recalls a similar experience to his wife as they discuss how their teenage son could have become swept up in such videos online without their knowledge.

While coming up with the idea for Adolescence, Stephen was keen to avoid certain tropes relating to troubled teens

In a piece for The Guardian, screenwriter Jack Thorne recalled: “Two and a half years ago, Stephen Graham phoned me up to ask if I was interested in writing a show about knife crime.

“He wanted to talk about young male violence towards women and he had two stipulations: he wanted to do it in a series of single shots, and he didn’t want to blame the parents.”

Stephen also told Tudum: “We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser. Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us!’.

“And what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.”

He later explained on The Tonight Show: “As a collective, we didn’t want it to be a ‘whodunnit?’. We wanted it to be more of a ‘why?’, a ‘why he did it’.”

Adolescence saw Stephen Graham reuniting with a number of his former collaborators

For starters, all four episodes are directed by Philip Barantini – who helmed Boiling Point, another one-take project starring Stephen in a lead role.

Screenwriter previously penned This Is England, in which Stephen played a pivotal role.

And when it comes to the casting, Stephen once again worked with people he’d already acted alongside, including Ashley Walters and Erin Doherty (both of whom appeared in the 2025 series A Thousand Blows), Christine Tremarco (Stephen’s friend from childhood, and his co-star in Little Boy Blue) and Jo Hartley (who played Cynthia in the This Is England series).

Stephen’s wife Hannah Walters is also an exec producer, and makes a brief appearance as a teacher in episode two.

Impressively, Adolescence was young actor Owen Cooper’s first major acting role

Coupled with the fact that the show is Stephen Graham’s first writing credit, and we reckon they’re both off to a flying start.

Owen Cooper was cast after an open call for audition tapes

The casting team then met with hundreds of hopefuls, before a handful were selected to attend a series of callbacks and workshops.

From there, Owen was chosen for a chemistry read with Stephen Graham, and was subsequently cast as Jamie.

Before being chosen, the teen admitted that he was only considering acting as a “hobby”, having grown up with aspirations of becoming a professional footballer.

Stephen also told GQ: “We did something that is never normally done in these situations, those four boys [who attended the workshop]… We offered those four kids four roles. Four integral parts.

“Because normally in our industry, they get to that far, and then it’s like, ‘Look, it didn’t work, goodbye’. But I want to do that, because none of our kids had ever worked in the profession before, so I wanted them to know that their talent had got them to this place, and we still believed in them. It’s just that we were going a different way with the main role.”

In fact, Owen hadn’t even considered that he might be in the running to play Jamie when he first auditioned

“I was there with my mum and at that point there was a chance that I could play the role of Ryan,” he said earlier this year, as reported by The Mirror. “So when we sat down that was what we were expecting to hear.

“So, when it was the role of Jamie I was like, ‘What?’.”

Owen continued: “I’d been asleep in the car before we arrived and I’d only just woken up. I was on a different planet and just thought, ‘This is mad!’.”

The location of Adolescence was chosen for a very intentional reason

Philip Barantini told Tudum: “We knew it was going to be set somewhere in the North of England, and we also knew it would be from somewhere around wherever our Jamie was from — in this case near Warrington — because it would have been unfair to make him do an accent.”

The police station set was then purpose-built, so it would only be a short drive from the Millers’ family home

This was also where the assessment in episode three was filmed, while the school used in episode two was, indeed, a real functioning school.

As you’re probably well aware by now, every episode of Adolescence really was filmed in one long, continuous shot – with no visual trickery used

“That means we press record on the camera and we don’t press stop until the very end of the hour,” Barantini recently told Netflix. “But it’s much more complicated than it sounds.”

Cinematographer Matthew Lewis also told Variety: “There’s no stitching of takes together. It was one entire shot, whether I wanted it to be or not.”

Indeed, each episode required weeks of rehearsals before the cameras started rolling

For each instalment of Adolescence, the cast would do a week’s worth of rehearsals to get themselves used to the locations.

According to Netflix, this would begin with a five-minute chunk of the episode, with more being added each time to build out the hour-long run-throughs.

When the first week was done, there would then be another week of rehearsals adding in the crew, so everyone would know where they needed to be once filming did begin a week later.

The idea was then that the team would film two takes per day over a five-day period for each episode, suggesting there would be 10 takes in total.

However, that wasn’t quite how things worked out

As you can imagine, things did go wrong, meaning that most episodes needed more than 10 takes to get everything nailed down.

Some, more minor, mistakes could be glossed over, while others required the team to start the process all over again.

While the first episode used the second take, filmed on its first day of recording, two, three and four used takes takes 13, 11 and 16, respectively, all of which were recorded on their last day of shooting.

Episode three was actually the first in the series to be shot

This meant that Owen Cooper’s first time ever acting on a film set was in his incredible almost-two-hander with Erin Doherty.

Most of the blunders that led to do-overs were technical, rather than mistakes being made by the cast…

In an interview with Variety, cinematographer Matthew Lewis revealed that at one point during the taping of episode one, an iPad controlling the lights at the makeshift police station “just crashed”, leaving the entire set plunged into darkness.

“There’s a take where I walked into the wall,” he then recalled of another “humbling” moment. “I turned a corner out of the medical room, and as I was turning the corner, the inside of the door frame hit the gimbal. It twitched left, and came back to the centre. It was half a second, but there was nothing that could be done.”

The most frustrating of these incidents came while shooting the third instalment, with the cast and crew making it almost to the end of the hour-long episode before the camera stopped focussing sending them back to square one.

“It was midway through the week, and I thought that was the one. So when we lost that, I thought ‘We were so close’,” Matthew admitted.

…with one notable exception

The team has largely been tight-lipped about any flubbed lines from the cast, although producer Hannah Walters admitted that Ashley Walters did make an unfortunate slip of the tongue with just minutes left on one taping of episode two.

“In episode two, I chase a kid at the end, and I used his name when calling my son, instead of my son’s character’s name right at the end,” he later admitted.

“And Philip Barantini, the director, he came up to me after, because I was in bits, bro. You know when, like, you’ve dropped the ball? It’s like you’re dropping a ball for everyone, do you know what I mean?

“It’s like a football team, bro. You’re playing together. And I was in bits, bro. Nearly in tears. Because it was such a good take, and he tried to make me feel better by like, ‘No, but maybe, you know, the character is so discombobulated…’ I was like, ‘Phil, let’s just go again. Let’s go again’.”

At one point, Ashley Walters actually thought he was going to have to pull out of the show altogether when he turned up to set on his first day with a sports injury

“I took it for granted,” he claimed. “I’m not gonna lie. Because I wanted to do the one-shot process so much. And I turned up to set with a bad back, by the way. My back had gone.”

“I’d just been playing basketball with my daughter before I got on the train and my back was completely gone,” he revealed, explaining that his injury had exacertabed his existing sciatica. “So, I kind of got out the car, and I think Jo [Johnson, producer] and Hannah [Walters, executive producer] were standing there like, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ Excuse my language. It was really bad.”

He admitted to The Mirror that his part in the show “nearly didn’t happen” as a result, though the team was, thankfully, able to find Ashley a “good chiropractor” before filming began.

Let’s get into how some of the more specific shots were filmed – like those incredible closing moments in episode two

Initially, the idea would be that the camera left the school and travelled across town on its own, though there were concerns this would feel too much like a first-person video game.

This is where the idea to attach the camera to a drone was born.

Adolescence’s cinematographer recently described episode two as an ‘absolute nightmare’ to film for a very different reason

That would probably be the 320 teenagers featured as extras (all of whom were students at the real school used as the set), and the 50 extra adults “playing teachers, shoppers and parents”.

“From a crowd perspective, it was very ambitious, but the kids were game for making ,” Matthew told Variety.

And if you’re wondering how the show managed to avoid having crew members come on camera – they didn’t!

To avoid spoiling the illusion, members of the crew would often disguise themselves as extras so that if they did appear on camera at select moments, they’d be less conspicuous.

“Every teacher was an AD, when the camera wasn’t pointing at them, they were ushering people through,” the cinematographer told Variety.

You might have missed a poignant musical moment that made episode two even more haunting

Episode two concludes with a children’s choir covering Sting’s Fragile, with the performers all coming from the real school that Adolescence used as its set for episode two.

Right before the credits roll, there’s a solo from a young girl, which viewers might not realise is the voice of Katie, the teenager at the centre of the whole story.

“The voice in the score is Katie’s voice,” Barantini told Tudum. “Katie is a part of the whole series. Her presence is always there.”

Episode four presented its own challenges as much of the story revolved around the Miller family’s van

To overcome these obstacles, there were actually two vans used in the episode – one for stationary, and another for driving shots.

Oh, and Stephen Graham really did have to keep flinging paint at it in every single take

To make it easier for everyone involved, the team created a special type of paint that they’d be able to jet wash off in between takes.

There was one use of VFX in the show, which fell in the second episode

Towards the end of episode two, the camera passes through a pane of glass, which might have left some viewers questioning whether this moment briefly broke Adolescence’s one-shot rule.

In fact, the opposite was true. The camera was able to pass through the window because there was no glass there. The pane of glass was actually removed, and re-added digitally for the finished episode.

“One of the camera operators was in the classroom, then when Ryan jumped out of the window, the other operator – who was crouching on the other side – took the camera and continued the chase,” Netflix revealed in an X post.

While the cast mostly stuck to the script – there were a few improvised moments that came about naturally during production

Speaking about filming the third episode, Owen told The One Show: “I was tired so a yawn came to me. Then, Erin did an amazing line. She said, ‘Am I boring you?’. So, that took me back and it made me smile, because it wasn’t in the script.

“I wasn’t expecting that at all, so it took me back a little bit, but it was amazing.”

Barantini also recalled: “ I never asked him to do, where he’s talking to Erin [Doherty] and the camera’s on him and he just starts yawning.

“Everyone behind the camera was going, ‘oh my god, he’s never done that before!’ Erin being Erin just said to him, ‘I’m sorry, am I boring you?’. And he had this cheeky smile on his face.”

Meanwhile, in Adolescence’s final moments in the following episode, Stephen’s character tearfully tucks a teddy bear into his son’s bed, telling it: “I should have done better.”

The original script actually called for Eddie to “get inside Jamie’s bed and pull the covers over his body, like he was an avatar for his imprisoned son”, but the Bafta nominee came up with the revised idea during rehearsals.

And that final scene had an added behind-the-scenes detail to make Stephen Graham’s tears feel even more natural

For his final day of filming episode four, Stephen was joined on set by not just his wife, but their two grown-up children.

What Stephen didn’t know was that the show’s director had requested that the art department print off pictures of the actor and his family to adorn Jamie’s bedroom, alongside a note that read: “We love you. We’re so proud of you.”

“If you watch the scene closely, he looks over to the right-hand side, and he spots the pictures and the notes. It broke him open,” Barantini shared with Tudum.

“The other takes before that were very different. They were all still incredibly emotional. But that last take, which we used, was real, raw, and unexpected from him as well.”

Stephen later told Radio Times: “On that final take, my wife and my two kids were there as well. And so, when I go into the bedroom, what they’d done was they put some pictures on the wardrobe, and it said, ‘So proud of you, we love you, dad’. And it was pictures of my two kids, Grace and Alfie, who I adore.

“So that kind of sparked that last, final scene in that moment as well while I was thinking of [Owen], who I’ve had the most amazing experience with.”

Because of the heavy subject matter, the Adolescence team was keen to make sure Owen Cooper was as protected as possible

Barantini told Variety: “Every day [while filming episode three], we’d do the tape, which would take an hour, and everyone at the monitors would be crying their eyes out.

“We had a psychologist there to make sure that Owen was okay. But she couldn’t find him. She’d be like, where’s Owen? And he’d be off playing swing ball. I’d ask, ‘mate, are you ok?’. And he’d be like, ‘yeah, hang on, I’m winning here!’.”

Finally… no, there’s probably not going to be an answer to one of the show’s biggest unanswered questions any time soon

Because of Adolescence’s distinct filming style, the story can sometimes be a bit fragmented, one such example being that we never do find out what happened to the murder weapon, the search for which forms a major part of episode two.

“I could have tried to fit it into dialogue in episode three, but that would have felt inauthentic and wrong,” Thorne told Deadline.

Pressed by Deadline, Jack refused to answer where the murder weapon ended up, out of fear of “spoiling” the show in its intended form, but insisted: “Stephen and I worked [where the knife is] out. But the point is that we didn’t have to answer it, and by not answering it, we create a question, and that question hangs on.”

Adolescence is available to stream now on Netflix.