‘Rip your jaw off’: The lengths Stephen Graham went to for his killer new role

Stephen Graham gives good psycho. Some of his standout roles have been deep-dives to the dark side: from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to the skinhead racist thug Combo in Shane Meadows’ This Is England to his breakout TV role as Al Capone in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Graham can do dull-eyed, hair-trigger menace like few others.

In Apple TV’s new thriller Nocturne, based on the internationally bestselling crime novel The Sandman by Lars Kepler, Graham plays Jurek Walter, a serial killer so dastardly he can torment Liev Schreiber’s small-town police detective from an underground concrete cell. And for this particular monster Graham has added a new string to his bow – he’s absolutely stacked.

“What I wanted to do straight away was create a sense of physicality for him,” he says, speaking over Zoom from New York. “So I worked a lot with my trainer because I wanted the audience to believe that I was a man who, if I wanted to, could stick my hand in your mouth and rip your jaw off. Do you know what I mean?”

I don’t know exactly what he means – I’d never really thought about having my jaw ripped off, up to this point – but of course “Do you know what I mean” is a Graham rhetorical tic.

It’s one born of a working-class upbringing on Merseyside and one that, like his humour and self-mockery, he hasn’t lost through his ascent to the very highest peaks of TV and movie stardom. It marks him out as normal, and that’s what makes his psychos, his damaged, sometimes violent, sometimes broken men, so electrifying – they always retain a sensitivity somewhere.

“Right at the very beginning, I said to Tim Van Patten, our fantastic, wonderful director, who I’ve been fortunate to work with for a great number of years now – we first met on Boardwalk Empire – I said to Tim, look, I’ve got an idea, and you might think it’s crap, but you might think it’s all right. I went, ‘I think he should meditate’. And Tim was like, really?”

A stone-cold killer doing his namastes is a classic Graham piece of psychological adornment.

“If he meditates then he needs to practise patience because he’s in this box for a long time. So he needs to be patient and he needs to be vigilant,” says Graham. “The art of meditation can enable you to practise patience and also some kind of tolerance with self. So it’s like waiting and waiting and waiting for that opportunity to present itself in order for me to get out of this box. Because that’s my overall objective.”

In Nocturne, Jurek’s goal is to get out of his underground prison cell, while Schrieber’s Jonah Lynn desperately wants to keep him in there. The back story is that Jonah and Jurek have a history. “[Jurek] wants the truth to be told,” says Graham. “He wants people to suffer the trauma that he experienced as a child.”

So when the search for his last missing victim forces Jonah to send his surrogate daughter, FBI Agent Saga Bauer (Zazie Beetz), up against Jurek, Nocturne becomes a twisted psychological cat-and-mouse like The Silence of the Lambs. Jurek’s role, like Hannibal Lecter’s in those famous films, is at first to remain inscrutable.

“Me and Tim [Van Patten] spoke about that stillness. It gives you a sense of ‘What’s actually going on with this fella? What is this fella all about?’ All the noise and all the chaos is coming from outside, whereas deep down underground I’ve found this kind of, dare I say, Zen-like stillness. Do you know what I mean?”

Graham is matchless in modern screen work at finding that stillness, with a stare that speaks volumes, all threat and taunt and interior torment. But even with all the creepy glowering, his fans from Adolescence will have noticed that he has hit the gym.

“Back when we started A Thousand Blows [Steven Knight’s Victorian bare-knuckle boxing drama],” he says, “that’s where I got into that process of being able to change my physical appearance. I did a lot of work with Rob, my trainer, in Leicestershire, where I live. For this, I didn’t want to be this big, massive, bulking old guy; I just wanted to try and find a shape physically where it looked like I could kill you with my bare hands. So we worked more on press-ups and pull-ups and squats and dips and things – what could I do physically within the confines of that cell to give me that appearance?”

It led to a memorable early sequence in Nocturne in which Jurek appears to be literally climbing up the walls.

“I found a little crack and then I managed to do some pull-ups and stuff like that,” says Graham. “It’s using his environment to try and create his strength.”

It’s a physicality that contrasts with Graham’s appearance in his most celebrated recent role, as put-upon dad Eddie in Netflix’s all-conquering drama Adolescence.

“Myself and my team – my manager, Ben, and Jane, my agent, back home – we were really careful about what we wanted to do next because we did have a couple of nice opportunities but we really wanted to try and find something that was completely different from Eddie, and completely different from that kind of solid social realism that we all managed to do when it came to Adolescence.”

Jurek Walter is not only completely different from Graham’s character in Adolescence, he’s completely different from almost anyone alive, in that he’s a dangerous, unpredictable sociopath. Graham likes to at least try and understand the characters he is playing, but how did he get into the mind of someone whose mind is a morass?

“The answer is a very simple one. My wife Hannah [Walters, also his production partner and a fine actor in her own right] is obsessed with serial killers and true-crime documentaries.”

Walters reads all of Graham’s scripts first. She suggested Nocturne was a plum role and then they set about their research.

“She was like, ‘so you’re going to watch this, this, this and this and we’ll sit and we’ll watch them together’. We sat on the couch for about two weeks [each] night with some crisps and some Maltesers and a little bit of ice-cream. And she just picked these amazing documentaries about these fantastic, weird serial killers.”

Cosy times, he admits, before adding that “I think as human beings we’re obsessed with the fact that people would go to these lengths, or that people do these kind of things. It’s just a really intriguing part of the human condition that makes you do that. I think as a society we’re obsessed with serial killers. I don’t have the answer to the question why.”

One answer might be that when they’re played by Stephen Graham, they’re eerily, tantalisingly watchable. Just don’t stare too hard.

Nocturne is streaming on Apple TV.

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