British Actors You Should Know: Stephen Graham

How do you know a British actor is becoming a national treasure in real time? In the case of Stephen Graham, it’s the fact that every type of audience – British TV watchers, exciting thriller fans, and film auteur fanatics – has unanimously recognized the actor’s singular, invaluable talents across the past decade. The Liverpudlian actor had a working-class upbringing and is, to this day, astute and sincere in his criticism of working-class communities and realities on-screen – something that his younger co-star Jodie Comer (also from Liverpool) has praised as Graham’s reputation as a generational talent cemented in recent years.

Like many British actors, Graham got his start on British telly, doing the rounds on long-running soaps and procedurals like Coronation Street and The Bill. (For years, these shows were almost rites of passage for young British actors.) As the gritty social drama strain of British independent and nationally-funded cinema emerged in the 2000s, Graham began to flourish – but his breakout role as the unstable Combo in Shane Meadows’ This is England came after working with Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York and appearing in the opening episodes of Bands of Brothers. 

As his career grew, Graham evolved alongside British television to suit small-screen entertainment's sophisticated and ambitious aims. In 2025, he’s starred in two streaming series helmed by former collaborators: A Thousand Blows from Steven Knight and Adolescence from Philip Barantini. Both shows come months after his three 2024 film projects – Blitz, Young Woman & the Sea, and Venom: The Last Dance. Talk about range! 

We've compiled a list of significant and underrated performances from Graham’s career to complement the actor's new streaming releases.

Shane Meadows had already made waves with his English midlands dramas Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Dead Man’s Shoes when he made This Is England, a coming-of-age drama, but much of the success of this 80s-set skinhead drama is indebted to Stephen Graham’s performance as Combo, an ex-con with far-right beliefs who ignites a working-class Nottingham community. Graham’s performance is incendiary, dangerous, and compelling, and the character appeared over This Is England’s three follow-up TV series.

This Is England is streaming on AMC+.

Stephen Graham’s portrayal of Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies is the first of three real American criminal performances on this list. Having already worked with Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York, Graham collaborated with another American master, Michael Mann, on his Johnny Depp and Christian Bale-starring biopic of Great Depression bank robber John Dillinger. Graham ably holds his own against the big Hollywood actors, blending into Mann’s visibly digital aesthetic with physical urgency – and even getting his very own gangster shootout.

Public Enemies is streaming on Netflix.

A lesser-known thriller on this list, Hyena is an independent corrupt cop drama directed by Gerard Johnson and starring Peter Ferdinando as Logan, the substance-abusing police officer in too deep with violent Albanian gangsters. Graham plays the detective inspector with a murky past with our protagonist, heading up an anti-trafficking taskforce investigating the criminals Logan wants to do business with. Within five minutes of the tough, lo-fi, gritty Hyena, we’re expecting an actor like Graham to rock up, which is a testament to his range of home-grown films and his versatility as an actor.

Hyena is streaming on Peacock.

A rich range of actors have played Al Capone, the ruthless Prohibition era gangster. Robert De Niro in The Untouchables, Tom Hardy (Graham’s Taboo co-star) in Capone, and Jon Berthnal in… Night at the Museum 2. But none of them got the extended arc that Stephen Graham got in the landmark Boardwalk Empire, an HBO series that premiered off the heels of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and just before Game of Thrones blockbuster-ified TV for good. Capone here is a young, up-and-coming tyrant, committed to family life and more collaborative than he’d later become.

All seasons of Boardwalk Empire are streaming on Max.

A shaven, tattooed, filth-caked Graham was central to the Tom Hardy and Steven Knight miniseries Taboo, about the vices and grime of early-19th century London, which was itself part of Knight’s Peaky Blinders related reclamation of the British period drama from stately halls and upper class decorum. As Atticus, Graham sticks close to the underworld with a gang that gets increasingly swept up in the family conspiracy surrounding Delaney (Hardy). 

If you want more of this brand of nasty period drama acting from Graham, we can recommend Knight’s A Christmas Carol, his Season 6 appearance in Peaky Blinders, his gang leader in Blitz, and the captain of a doomed whaling vessel in the grisly, homoerotic The North Water.

Taboo is streaming on Tubi.

Stephen Graham reunited with director Shane Meadows for The Virtues, a bleak, unforgiving miniseries about historic child abuse at Irish orphanages. But it was also a reunion for Graham and writer Jack Thorne (Adolescence), mining a common trauma with unsparing precision. It’s a sterling showcase for Graham’s brand of self-destructive pathos, but fair warning – this is probably the bleakest, most painful few hours that you can find in Graham’s filmography.

The Virtues is streaming on Kanopy.

The year 2019 was the tipping point of Graham’s national treasure reputation, and to honor that, nearly a third of this list covers this single year. One of the joys about the superlative internal affairs procedural Line of Duty is that each season lines up a different underrated British actor as a “bent copper” under investigation: after Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, and Thandiwe Newton, Stephen Graham transformed into the tested, fragile John Corbett for the best season yet. There is nothing quite like getting a B-list but respectable actor and spending 6 episodes going, “what if they were morally compromised?”

All six seasons of Line of Duty are streaming on BritBox.

Graham’s second film with the great Scorsese offered him an expanded, centrepiece role. Over three-and-a-bit hours, The Irishman tracks the relationship between Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia bagman suspected of killing him. The late era Scorsese mafia pic has a historic cast – Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel – added a lot of pressure to Graham’s role of “Tony Pro”, an upstart foil to Hoffa and co. He delivered and then some, challenging Pacino and De Niro with enthusiasm and conviction in their shared scenes.

The Irishman is streaming on Netflix.

Two Liverpudlian icons unite for an urgent, extremely contemporary drama Help, set in Northern care homes. Graham plays a man suffering early-onset Alzheimer’s, who a carer played by Jodie Comer looks after. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the care home, the mismanagement of PPE caused intense strife that was mirrored in hundreds of similar care facilities across Britain. Even though it was a quickly delivered polemic on an in-progress crisis, Graham and Comer ground the ripped-from-the-headlines drama with uncommon emotional depth and grace.

Help is streaming on Acorn TV.

The film Boiling Point (plus the short film that preceded it and the TV series that followed it, all with the same title) is the forerunner of Netflix’s Adolescence, as Graham collaborates with Philip Barantini using a “oner” long, unbroken take format. We’ve never felt the intensity that Graham brings to every plot beat and line of dialogue more than we do in this real-time restaurant thriller, as Graham plays a head chef dealing with a million personal crises unfolding over a single dinner shift – a perfect marriage of performance and form.

Boiling Point, the film, is streaming on Amazon's Prime Video. The TV series is streaming on Netflix.