Stephen Graham on A Thousand Blows' brutal fight scenes: "I did crack a stuntman's rib"

“This is not a job, it’s a vocation,” he says, establishing seriousness of intent early in our conversation. “I feel blessed and very honoured to be able to do what I do.”

You might say we’re blessed and honoured to be able to watch him. If troubled men are the curse of our age, then Graham is the poet laureate of portraying them. Characters such as the distraught Joseph in the 2019 drama The Virtues or the damaged and desperate DS John Corbett in Line of Duty prowl through our popular culture. They are intense and unsettling, yet we cannot look away.

Graham, born in Kirkby, Merseyside, in 1973, has spoken previously about his own early struggles with depression and even an attempt to hang himself. Many of his performances, apparently hewn from somewhere deep within his own life, have resonated with the lives of others.

“There have been certain moments, especially with The Virtues, where men have come up to me, and it could be in a Co-op or whatever, and said that piece made them realise that they had issues.” And how did that feel? “If something that I’ve been a part of creatively can help put someone on a different path and change their lives, it doesn’t really get better than that.”

As Goodson, in parts fragile, threatening and extremely violent, Graham has delivered another mesmerising turn. To achieve that, he embarked on a radical remodelling of his physique, gaining two stone. Working with a team of coaches, including a dietitian, he would train five days a week and eat five meals a day.

“Lots of protein: chicken, rice and broccoli. Every Friday I was allowed a treat, a Nando’s or a burger, but with no bun. And I could have some ice cream.” He realised how well it had worked during filming of the first scene where he makes his way to the ring. One of the crew insisted that Graham look at the playback monitors. “It was the shot of my back when the camera’s following me. I went, ‘F*****g hell, is that me?’ ” he recalls.

As well as the muscle, he had to get the right stance, the way Londoners of a certain disposition express their characters physically. “I watched a lot of Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone,” he says. “I really studied Bob in The Long Good Friday, and Ray in Nil by Mouth. I learned from my heroes, not trying to copy them but being inspired by how they conducted themselves in those roles.”

The fight scenes are brutal. Goodson goes about his business with scant regard for any rules. “He throws an elbow in; he’ll give you a head butt. And, because I’m small, we mixed that with a Mike Tyson-esque bobbing and weaving style — body shots and going through with the shoulder.” That really is Graham handing out the fearful batterings in the ring; the only stunt men are playing other parts.

Graham, who had “core skills” after boxing as a teenager, had to learn the moves of each fight as if they were choreographed. “It’s all sequentially put together, like Strictly Come Dancing. I did crack a stuntman’s rib. I felt terrible, but he was giving it, ‘Just hit me proper.’ I was saying, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I’m an actor. We’re pretending.’ Then he went, ‘Are you kidding me, boy?’ He stepped in and I caught him. I’ve never heard a squeal like it. He literally went, ‘Ughhhh! I think you’ve cracked my f*****g rib.’”

Like many frightening men before him, the chink in Goodson’s armour is love — in this case for Mary Carr, the leader of the all-female crime syndicate the Forty Elephants, played by Erin Doherty. Graham is 51, Doherty 32; an age gap he was well aware of.

"Erin and I spoke a lot about the complexities of that relationship, because Mary is a lot younger than Sugar. You have to make sure it’s not like that, try to make it a complex love. Sugar also has this self-deprecating feeling that he doesn’t really deserve love. For him she’s like a beautiful bird that he feels he’s captured, but he doesn’t want to."

He stops and asks, “Does that sound pretentious?”, as if they might laugh at him back in Kirkby. I don’t think they would. Anyway, Stephen Graham has earned the right to be very serious about what he does.

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A Thousand Blows comes to Disney Plus from 21st February. You can sign up to Disney Plus from £4.99 a month now.

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