When you think of some of Britain’s best acting talent, there’s plenty of names that come to mind, perhaps Ian McKellen or Judi Dench, maybe Daniel Kaluuya and Emma Thompson, or, of course, Stephen Graham.
And he might not just be one of the greatest of Brits, as Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight branded the Liverpudlian ‘one of the best actors on the planet’.
This comes as the pair team up again for the new Disney+ series, A Thousand Blows, with Graham making a ‘physically scary’ transformation to turn him into a beast for it.
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Created by Knight and produced by the actor’s company with his wife Hannah Walters, Matriarch Productions, the show is inspired by true life stories in London's East End in the 1880s.
It follows Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and best mate Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) as they arrive from Jamaica to find themselves in the criminal underbelly of the thriving bare-knuckle boxing scene. Here they come across Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), Queen of the all-female gang the Forty Elephants, and self-declared emperor of the East End boxing world, Sugar Goodson (Graham).
Releasing later this month, the star’s appearance as the boxer has already been wowing fans as he put in the ‘hard graft’ to change his body. The 51-year-old tells LADbible he ‘wanted to completely change his shape’ over the six months from the project being greenlit.
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“First of all, I slimmed down, and then I bulked up. It was five meals a day, and lots of eggs, lots of chicken, lots of rice, broccoli, vegetables, vitamins, all that kind of stuff. It was tough,” he explains.
Graham ‘loved’ the process, working hard with a trainer and boxing coach to ‘try and make a brawler’. Well, bulked up he did, as trailers show him looking intimidatingly brawly as the Victorian boxer with tattoos across his chest.
“I'm only little, so I wanted to have a little bulldog kind of thing,” he adds. “So it was a cross between Mike Tyson and this Bare Knuckle fighter called Lenny McLean that we wanted to use.”
And the result was something that left his cast mates and crew stunned, with an ‘impressed’ Kirby admitting he felt ‘a little bit vulnerable’ knowing he’d have to fight Graham. While Doherty said it was ‘gorgeous’ as it’s a ‘physical representation’ of the impressive work Graham normally applies ‘internally’.
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For creator Knight, it was ‘unbelievable’ to see but also a little bit ‘annoying’.
“You have to look at yourself like, ‘therefore, I could do that possibly, if I committed myself’,” he jokes. “And it makes you feel like ‘Why am I not doing that?’”
The writer says Graham produced a transformation that made him ‘scary’ but that also helped the storyline.
“The scariness physically is what is tempered by the emotion that he shows,” Knight explains. “He’s such a great actor that it means I was able to delay his appearance on screen for quite a long time, knowing that when we finally reach that destination, it won't be a let-down, it won't be disappointing.”
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It’s Graham’s abilities as an actor that’s a key reason why Knight continues to work with him.
“He’s one of the best actors on the planet, to start with,” he says. “He's great person, great person to work with. When he's on a project, everybody else becomes better because they know they have to bring their best performance.”
With Graham having appeared in Knight’s Peaky Blinders series and set to appear in the film, the writer therefore names A Thousand Blows ‘a dream project’.
A Thousand Blows launches on 21 February on Disney+.
Topics: Stephen Graham, Peaky Blinders, Disney, Boxing
Jess Battison