‘I wouldn’t answer Stephen Graham’s calls’: Erin Doherty on dreams, danger and ghosting Adolescence’s creator

For a while, Erin Doherty ignored Stephen Graham’s calls. Not deliberately, she stresses with a laugh. “I’m just really bad at my phone. I’m such a technophobe, and he knew that,” she says. They had made the Disney+ show A Thousand Blows together, in which Doherty plays an East End crime boss in Victorian London, and Graham had talked about an idea he wanted to dramatise, about a teenage boy who is catastrophically radicalised by online misogyny. A couple of months after they’d wrapped A Thousand Blows, Graham and his wife and producing partner, Hannah Walters, kept trying to get in touch. “I was getting voice notes from him and Hannah being like, ‘Erin, pick up your phone!’” Doherty’s girlfriend told her to ring him back and Graham offered her the role in Adolescence. She said yes on the spot, without reading the script. ‘People don’t want to be spoon-fed and they don’t need to be …’ Erin Doherty.Photograph: Stefan Bertin ‘It had that electricity!’ … Doherty with Owen Cooper in Adolescence.Photograph: Ben Blackall/Netflix Doherty in A Thousand Blows.Photograph: Disney+ Since it was screened on Netflix in March, Adolescence has had nearly 150m views. It sparked a huge cultural conversation; it was shown in secondary schools and its creators were invited to Downing Street. Did they have any idea it would become such a phenomenon? “No, and I’m not sure you’re supposed to,” says Doherty when we speak. She is chatty and down-to-earth, even in the year her career went stellar. As well as starring in A Thousand Blows, her role in Adolescence - as Briony Ariston, a psychologist - won her an Emmy for best supporting actress. “But you do know when you’re a part of something that’s good and deserves to be seen, and we knew that about it. I think because it came from such a genuine place, a place of real purity and rawness, it [fed into] the making of it. From day one, it had that electricity.” Doherty’s episode - like all of them, it was shot in one take - is the most tense and revealing of the four-part drama. Her character is interviewing Jamie, the 13-year-old accused of murder, in a detention centre, in order to prepare a report before his trial. Initially, she worried about who they could possibly cast as Jamie. “It was the biggest ask I’d ever read for a young person,” she says. “But the minute we got into the rehearsal room, Owen [Cooper] knew his lines, and he wasn’t daunted or fazed by any of it.” Despite the subject matter, it was a happy shoot. The writer, Jack Thorne (with whom Doherty had worked on one of her first jobs, the musical Junkyard), was “so collaborative, and very much: ‘This needs to feel as real and raw as possible, so if there’s anything that doesn’t sit right, let’s change it.’ He’s such an actor’s writer, which is just so freeing.” They rehearsed for two weeks, then filmed two...

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