Celebrated writer and playwright Jack Throne writes 10 to 12 pages a day and says that “maybe two or three are worthwhile.” That’s some grounded feedback for any writer struggling to get through a screenplay or pilot script. Not everything you type up is going to work, but when it hits, it hits. Thorne has had his share of success. An Olivier and Tony Award for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Five BAFTA Awards for a slew of celebrated British television programs, including two editions of “This Is England.” But even with the success of “Cursed Child,” he’s never experienced anything like “Adolescence.”
As Thorne tells it, fellow producer and director Philip Barantini brought the one-shot pitch from the now legendary production company Plan B to Stephen Graham’s attention. The latter then reached out to his old friend and collaborator Thorne. When Netflix came on board 18 months ago, television history was made. Arguably one of the most critically acclaimed programs this decade, “Adolescence” has resonated with viewers around the world in ways even the streamer could never fathom.
During our extended conversation, Thorne reflects on the research that went into crafting the four, one-hour, one-shot episodes, including an unexpected dive into incel culture. There’s also some reflection on the current state of the television industry on both sides of the Atlantic (including how people are flocking to non-traditional narrative), getting “hammered” by “The Studio,” how the sequel to “E.T.” connects to a potential “Adolescence” second season, and much, much more.
Oh, and we tried to find something out about those “Beatles” movies he’s working on. We did try.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: You are so prolific. How do you do pull all this off?
Jack Thorne: It’s just not me. There’s loads of people that write as much as me. I’m on a lucky streak of stuff getting made before this. There was a long period when I only got “Best Interests” made for about three years, and then suddenly everything started happening all at once. So yes, no, it’s just pure luck of this moment, and then I will go back to ignominy.
I don’t believe that! [Laughs.] But, as someone who’s worked in the business for a while, mostly on the other side of the pond, what did the two Emmy nominations for this series mean to you?
Oh, they were huge. I mean, they’re ridiculous because I think Stephen’s a lot cooler than I am in every way, but I really like all this stuff, and I get way too much approbation from it. And so the feeling of people being interested in our work was huge, and the feeling of the Television Academy being interested in our work was just the cherry on top of a very nice cake.
I’ve spoken to some of your colleagues, and I feel like I’ve heard different versions of the story of how the show got made. No one’s being untruthful, but from what I understand…
A lot of lies involved in this.
There are so many lies. From what I understood, Plan B had come to Stephen, or was it to you?
No, it was to Phil.
It was to Phil.
Because of “Boiling Point.” So, they love the film “Boiling Point,” and they said to Phil, “Is there a way of making this into a TV show? You and Stephen together, you’re a diamond team. We’d love it.” And then Stephen and he talked, and they started to formulate a plan. Basically, that was the starting point of it all. And then luckily Stephen was nice enough to want to work with me, gave me a call, and it was to write it, but do it all. And then I said, “What about if we did it together?” And that was the starting point of us working as writers together. We’d done five things before, but I was always the writer. He was always the actor, or sometimes he was the producer, and I was the producer. But this was the first time when he said, “O.K., I’ll pick up a pen with you.”
Was there already an idea for the narrative?
Yeah, he wanted to talk about knife crime. He had an idea of how the one-shot could work, discussing knife crime. He had various things in his head that he then laid out to me, and then we started to cook with them and stir the pot and do different things. He had two rules, really. One was that he wanted it to be a one-shot, which I was like, “Yes, I love the one-shot, and I love what you guys did with ‘Boiling Point,” so please count me in.” And the second was that he didn’t want to blame the parents. And that was actually a lot harder to deal with than the one shot, because then you weren’t doing something where there wasn’t an easy answer, and he was totally right. And he was challenging in a way that Stephen always is challenging and has been challenging as an actor all the time. And then it was about going, “O.K., let’s start creating spheres of responsibility for Jamie. Let’s make this as complicated and as chaotic as his brain is, and let’s talk about the education system. Let’s talk about his parenting. Let’s talk about friendship groups, and let’s talk about what he’s consuming on his phone.” I’d sort of spent a long time banging my head against the computer, going “This still isn’t working for me.” And then someone I worked with, Mariella Johnson, who is brilliant and younger, said, “I think you need to look at incel culture.” And I’d heard about incel culture and heard about the Manosphere, but it wasn’t a book I’d ever properly opened. And then as soon as I started looking into it, I came across that statistic, 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men. And I thought, “When I was 13, if someone told me that. If someone had told me that a normal life is basically beyond you because women are never going to find you attractive, I would’ve gone, yeah, that makes sense.” And so suddenly there was somewhere to play into, and I’m not saying that Jamie is solely a product of the manosphere or solely a product of incel culture, but suddenly it was that final piece of the jigsaw that made sense of the whole for me.
Where did the plan for just four episodes come from? Was there ever a version where it was longer? Or shorter episodes?
You know what? I think that was Stephen right from the start. He said, “Four one hours.” Stephen and I we’ve done a lot of four one hours in the UK system. It’s quite a normal thing. So, it’s a vocabulary we understand. We wrote it originally for a different streamer, and then, because of the way that their process worked, there was a long time when we were sort of sitting on and nothing was really going on. There was a window for Phil and Stephen’s availability that I knew about that summer. And we were getting into October, I think, and I called Stephen up and I said, “I’m going to write eps two and three because I don’t like this. I don’t like waiting.” I believed in the project, and I thought it would happen. And Stephen was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And then we wrote those two. And then by the time that streamer rejected us, we were able to go to Netflix with three episodes, I think in January. And they were like, “Yep, let’s go.” And we were on that train.
Now that it’s out, it’s a massive hit, and there are Emmy nominations. Who was the streamer who passed?
It was Amazon, but that is out there. That is out there. Stephen talked about it. I’m much more discreet than Stephen. But yeah, it was Amazon. Yeah, actually, I think it might be me who mentioned it for the first time. So I’m saying that I’m the discreet one, and actually I might be the indiscreet one. But anyway, it was Amazon.
You’d written the first episode, but did you know where it would end?
Yeah, always knew where we ended, and I always thought episode four was the one where Stephen was going to fly. You know what I mean? I always had that in my head, as there’s no actor I think about more than Stephen Graham. He’s an actor who lives in my head all the time. I can find myself writing lines for him, even when I’m on a project that I know he can’t be on. I just find myself writing for Stephn. I knew that when it came to that last episode, it was kind of like, “Let’s see every color in his butterfly wings.” And I knew he would be glorious. And then Chrissy came along, who just played opposite him. And I’ve got to tell you, the nomination for Christine Trimarco was one of the most beautiful things about this process because there’s actors that grab the light and there’s actors that don’t necessarily grab the light, and she’s just magnificent. And so for her to be celebrated by the academy meant so much to me and Stephen.
The first episode sets up what the dramatic conflict is, what’s going on in these characters’ lives. How did you decide what episodes two, three, and four would be moving forward, if you knew what the end was?
Well, our thoughts were that we wanted to see inside the education system. We wanted to understand what Jamie was being taught in schools. We wanted the school system to take responsibility for Jamie. You can’t place guilt in one place with him. And so the education system did have to take some responsibility for what happened to Jamie, how Jamie was made. So, that was episode two. Let’s try and work out how to tell a story within the school. And then episode three was like, let’s see inside Jamie’s brain. Let’s spend time with him and let’s uncover his layers. And then episode four was, let’s understand his parents and his background, because whilst Stephen said, I don’t want to blame the parents. They also need to take some responsibility for him and are part of his makeup. And if we’re going to understand him, if we’re going to understand every layer of Jamie, then we need to understand that right from the start, it was like, “We’re going to know he’s guilty at the end of episode one.” So it became a why-done-it, not a who-done-it. And that question of why was our sustaining sort of note that took us through each episode.
How much research did you have to do to find out not just about incel culture, about what happens to a kid like Jamie in the legal system, and what surprised you the most in what you found out?
So, there was a lot of research and a lot of talking to young people too, and a lot of reading books, but also a lot of time spent online in different places where I was trying to just understand not the sort of top of the waterfall where the Andrew Tates of this world live, but the midpoint in the waterfall the way young people are talking to young people and making videos where they’re talking about a game or they’re talking about a film, or what they’re talking about. So it was spending time there and just watching those videos and trying to understand what’s going on for them, what’s going on for young boys right now. And there were things that we knew at the beginning. But there were lots of things we found out along the way about incel culture and the manosphere. Actually, we’d written a lot of episode one before we found that I was still flailing around, going, things are working, things are cooking, but there’s bits that are missing here, and I know the bits that are missing here. And then that bit came in, and then we rewrote episode one. The way I tend to write is by a process of trial and error rather than any sort of laying everything out from the start. I try to write 10 to 12 pages a day, of which maybe two or three are worthwhile of which one gets used. I’d say that’s about my hit rate. So, that was the process all the way through of just kind of going up a dead end, back to the beginning, rewind, start again, try and find it. And with this, the interesting thing is how much you had to delete in order to start again, because you were constantly trying to look through the camera eye.
Erin’s character is a psychiatrist for the legal system. Did you speak to anyone in her position, and what did they tell you?
Lots. The interesting thing was, what’s the line that you walk when you’re talking to a young person, particularly when you’re talking to a troubled young person, what is your responsibility in that room? And I can tell you that there isn’t really a consistent line. So many people go in so many different directions. And that was the thing that surprised me, how personal and particular this whole system is. And we actually had a psychologist on set with us the entire time to protect Owen, who was with us and wonderful. And talking to her on the set was also fascinating in terms of what she would do differently from what happens in that room. The thing in terms of this generation of boys that I found more interesting than I expected to is how different this generation is. There’s a statistic that I really hang on to from the NHS, which is about all young people, actually, in terms of what the internet is doing, which is that in the last 10 years, the rate of outdoor accidents for young people has fallen by 70% in that same decade. The rate of self-harm has increased by 93%. So, they’re not going out and they’re doing damage to themselves. The discoveries that upset me were things like talking to a young girl who told me, “I don’t speak in class and I haven’t spoken in class for about two or three years because there’s a group of boys that intimidate me whether I’m right or wrong, they intimidate me and I’m scared of them.” It was talking to Union reps who told me that there is the incidences of, and I don’t think there’s anything written down about this, so I can’t back this up with, but this is what I was told anecdotally, instances of abuse, that’s not just words, but is actually physical abuse towards female teachers is going up and up and up. There is a generation of boys, and it’s not all the boys, far from it, but there is a generation of boys who are being pulled into something that’s really, really troubling. And so that stuff was the stuff that made me sit up and worry. They’re not all going to turn into Jamie, right? We’re not suggesting that they’re all going to turn into Jamie. And I’m not suggesting that incel culture is something that leads to murdering. But I am saying that there is a problem with our boys right now, and I’m worried about it.
