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‘I felt like I was a made man’: Stephen Graham on working with his childhood heroes

One of Britain’s most prolific actors, Stephen Graham is the face of countless hard-to-forget TV and film characters, a regular Scorsese collaborator and good mates with Leo DiCaprio. He talks about living it up in Leicestershire – and why he’s in the shape of his life

Kevin Bacon may have the six-degrees-of-separation theory, but I have the (admittedly untestable) conviction that every one of us will have seen Graham in something: perhaps as a rogue undercover police officer in Line of Duty or the avaricious dad in Matilda the Musical, or maybe as Al Capone in Sky Atlantic’s Boardwalk Empire or supreme as the British nationalist Combo in Meadows’s This is England series. For Albert in Blitz, he developed a whole backstory with McQueen that most viewers will never have a clue about: he and Beryl were children raised in a Victorian workhouse; he fought in the First World War, suffered from undiagnosed PTSD and was now again destitute, reduced to stealing from the dead. Schofield saw a 10-year-old Graham play Jim Hawkins in his school production of Treasure Island and suggested to Marie that he join the youth programme at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where playwrights such as Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell would often showcase new work.

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