Stephen Graham’s Wife Would Like Him to Stop Following Strangers (Literally)

5 min readStephen Graham can’t help himself. The Emmy-winning actor doesn’t mean any harm. He just gets fixated on someone, and then...“I watch people,” he says. “I used to watch people in train stations. Watch walks. And watch how they behave. Watch their mannerisms.” He thinks of this as ongoing performer training. “I’ll store it for later in a Rolodex in me mind,” Graham says in his lilting Liverpool accent, tapping his temple. “You absorb as much as you can. Then you just allow these things to come out.”Graham plays a charismatic serial killer in the new Apple TV series Nocturne, and while he obviously doesn’t have the character’s murderous tendencies, the two do share a fascination with silently studying those around them. “It was a lot easier when my face wasn’t as recognizable as it is now,” the 53-year-old actor adds.He became a familiar face in his role as Al Capone on Boardwalk Empire. Then with his scene-stealing performances in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and as Bruce Springsteen’s volatile father in Deliver Me from Nowhere. Winning Emmys, BAFTAs, and a Golden Globe for his work in front of and behind the camera on the harrowing crime drama Adolescence made it much harder to study people without being noticed. “I still do it now,” he says, before his wife cuts in.“You get caught a lot now,” she corrects him.Graham shrugs. “Now I get caught a lot,” he agrees.Apple TV“We were in London about two weeks ago, and some fella just started walking. We both looked at him and she grabbed me by the arm and went, ‘Don’t,’ ” Graham says. “Because I’ll follow his walk, I’ll do his walk. I went, ‘But it’s a great walk!’ ”It’s a sunny afternoon in the English Midlands, which is where Graham and his wife, Hannah Walters, keep their home. He’s speaking to Esquire via Zoom, his face covered with a scruffy beard and his hair lightly mussed. He’s wearing a bright-blue Teamsters Memorial Picnic T-shirt and a black-rimmed pair of glasses. The actor could pass as either a pub bouncer or a college professor.“I’m at home, in the kitchen. We’re being very English,” he says. “My wife is making a cottage pie.” He spins the laptop around to face her. “Say hello, darling.”Walters is also an actor, best known for the film and TV series Boiling Point, and she was a producer with her husband on Adolescence, costarring as the schoolteacher Mrs. Bailey. But she’s not feeling camera ready at the moment, stirring a steaming saucepan full of minced meat as loose locks of blond hair frame her face. “How very dare you…?” she says to Graham in her most haughty dowager voice before waving cheerfully.She wasn’t officially involved in the making of Nocturne, but Walters was crucial in helping her husband wrap his head around the character of Jurek Walter, a serial killer whose crimes inexplicably continue even though he is locked up in a criminal asylum. He’s a soft-spoken manipulator, a master of analyzing behavior, and he’s able to wheedle into the minds of virtually anyone he encounters. Liev Schreiber plays a lawman on the outside who’s trying to figure out how Walter continues to puppeteer disappearances, and Zazie Beetz is an FBI agent who goes undercover in the detention facility to get close to him, at great personal risk. “And she was like, ‘Well, okay…’ ” The instruction began. “My research was watching crime documentaries with my wife.”What did she say makes a good killer? “What makes a good killer?” he repeats to the cottage-pie baker.She laughs off camera. “I don’t think anybody’s a good killer, are they? That’s an ironic statement,” she says. “But what makes a successful serial killer? I think intelligence. There’s a lot of serial killers that aren’t intelligent, but they get found out very quickly.”“Highly intelligent. Pragmatic,” he says.“And organization skills,” Hannah adds.“We watched a lot of different people and just nicked little bits from each one,” Graham says. “Then your job as an actor is to try and create somebody who is believable, who is three-dimensional. Looking at the script, I saw the manipulation that Jurek is capable of and how he is a chameleon and he’ll adapt to each situation. So he reads the situation first and plays what he thinks it is that you want.”Dennis P. Mong Jr“My wife is obsessed with true-crime documentaries,” Graham tells Esquire. “She has been for years. So I basically just said, ‘Look, what makes a good killer?’ ”That was about getting into Walter’s head. The second part of his prep was getting the right body. “I was getting myself in shape physically, where I looked like I could kill someone with my bare hands,” Graham says, holding his mitts out in front of him. “That was also one of my aims. Then you just build the character together with the director and with the writers.”Showrunner John Hlavin (The Shield) says a lot of the work was already done by the time Graham arrived on the Pittsburgh set. “I mean, I’m not going to tell Stephen Graham how to do it. You know what I mean?” Hlavin says. “You’re dealing with a top line of professional athlete.” His contribution was making sure that Jurek Walter remained distinct from other infamous screen sociopaths, like Hannibal Lecter, who overpowers people with his erudition and mind games. Jurek Walter wins them over with vulnerability and sympathy.Hlavin was struck by how quickly Graham could flip into character. “You’ve met him. He really likes to play. He’s very funny. He’s empathetic and personable. He sometimes would come to set singing, and it would echo around,” Hlavin says. “Then he snaps in. I would rehearse with him, we could be going over lines or making adjustments, and he would drop into character and I would be terrified. He’d go from friendly Stephen, chatting about the Steelers game he was invited to, to Jurek Walter.”Dennis P. Mong Jr“We could be going over lines or making adjustments, and he would drop into character and I would be terrified,” showrunner John Hlavin says about Graham’s performance.Graham gets physically animated when he talks about playing the role, like a little kid opening up a gift box that has something very dangerous inside. While his characters all have different mannerisms and voices, they often share a common trait: intimidation.Maybe it’s his stocky, bruiser build that gets him cast in these roles, or maybe the cheerful Liverpudlian is just especially good at suppressing his own upbeat nature. He admits to getting a little overeager, especially when it comes to studying people in the wild.That’s why it’s ironic that his wife, who was so helpful in guiding him to find the character of Jurek Walter, is so determined to hold him back from getting too close to passersby who intrigue him. “We were in London about two weeks ago, and some fella just started walking,” Graham says, rolling his shoulders back and forth. Imagine a person who moves like a too-tall stack of dishes.“We both looked at him and she grabbed me by the arm and went, ‘Don’t,’ ” Graham says. “Because I’ll follow his walk, I’ll do his walk. I went, ‘But it’s a great walk!’ And she went, ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.’ I was like, ‘Arrgh … okay.’ ”Not only is it awkward when the person spots him, but now that he’s renowned around the world, there are public-relations concerns to think about. His wife speaks up from across the kitchen: “Stephen Graham Followed Me into the London Underground—Headline!”“We’re influenced by so many different things,” Graham says. “Do you know what I mean?”So if you find yourself on the street someday, being watched by someone who looks like the Emmy winner, don’t be alarmed. But you might see your distinctive walk end up onscreen someday.