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The Heart-Pounding Story Behind Stephen Graham's Casting In 'The Irishman'

Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix
Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix

From Esquire

It was a Friday in New York, and Stephen Graham was perched nervously in Martin Scorsese's house. He was alone. Upstairs, two men were deciding his fate.

Two days prior, he'd received a phone call. A summons, to get on a plane and come here to talk about something big. These are not phone calls you ignore, so earlier that day he'd left the set of Shane Meadows's The Virtues, flown across the Atlantic, and headed to Scorsese's.

De Niro had greeted him, in a flat cap, with a paper under his arm. The house's owner, too. The trio sat and talked for two hours about The Irishman, a film which would unite Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino for the first time in a Martin Scorsese film. Then De Niro had to head off. He and Scorsese said they'd be in touch. Graham couldn't bear it.

"Tell me! I can't get on a plane not knowing," he said. They asked for a couple of minutes to discuss things. Which left Graham perched downstairs, in turmoil. What if they said no, after all that? What else could he have done?

Eventually, Graham was called back upstairs. He looked to De Niro. "I'll let Marty tell ya," he was told. Scorsese invited him to sit down. This didn't do anything for Graham's nerves.

"They're gonna say I'm not Italian-looking enough, my accent," he recalls thinking. "They don't understand what I'm saying anyway, so how can I pull it off?"

"Right, do you wanna do this kid?" said Scorsese. De Niro gave Graham a big hug.

"I felt like I've just been made, do you know what I mean?" he says, three years later, at Netflix's London HQ. "Like I'd been accepted into the family."

It was, he says, "kind of a little bit of a whirlwind". Graham tells the story with relish, painting himself as the starstruck Scouse kid who can't quite believe his luck. But you don't get to be one of Britain's most reliably excellent and in-demand actors by chance.

Take the first time that he and Scorsese met, at a meeting before the Kirkby-born actor took on the role of Shang in Gangs of New York. Graham brought along an enormous pack of information he'd been sent about the America in which the film was set, marked with details he thought were important. He told Scorsese that he wanted a big scar on his face, to show he was a thief who'd had a run-in with the New York fishmongers, who'd rip a hook through your cheek if they found out you'd stolen from them. And he wanted a dog, a scrappy terrier that could catch rats, as his nod to Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist. He got his scar.

"If I was a plasterer, I'd want to make sure I did a brilliant job plastering, do you know what I mean?" he says "You prepare properly."

On the last day of filming Gangs of New York, Scorsese promised him, "We'll do this again." Every time he bumped into Scorsese afterwards at premieres, Graham says he'd look at him "like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before he finds the golden ticket". Scorsese kept promising that it was coming: "Not this one, but it's coming." Eventually, Graham won the role of Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, the pilot of which was directed by Scorsese. Then came The Irishman.

Graham plays upstart union leader Tony Provenzano, a rival to teamster's union boss – and mob affiliate – Jimmy Hoffa. "He was very gregarious, he was very cocksure of himself, he had a dark sense of humour," Graham says. "He was extremely flamboyant in the way he dressed." Pictures of Provenzano's home from an archive newspaper interview added another layer. "It was very much, look at me – look what I've got."

Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix
Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix

Like The Irishman as a whole, his take on 'Tony Pro' weaves reality and myth together. His introductory scene, for example, follows actual newsreel footage of a speech he gave to union members. That footage gave Graham a way in.

"What's great about that speech is there's a slight nervousness to him. He used these really elaborate, extravagant words." Graham latched onto a "slight, tiny hint of a lisp – just tiny, tiny, tiny". That ear for an accent goes way back to when he'd make his nana laugh with "silly little impersonations".

"I used to do, like, Idi Amin and Margaret Thatcher, and just come up with this mad little conversation of Margaret Thatcher coming to the shop to buy a bottle of Steri milk or Idi Amin getting on the bus."

There's a straight line from there to how he likes working today. "I'm from the Shane Meadows school of acting," he says. "When I did This Is England, that's where I kind of matured as an actor, and kind of learned so much." The liberty to play with the script and ad lib is what excites him as an actor.

"It's just that kind of playfulness, do you know what I mean?" he says "And that overcoming the fear in order to then create. [Scorsese] and Shane Meadows, are very, very similar. They create a playground – they allow you to be free, within that moment, and to honour that moment and to be as truthful and honest as possible within the character, and also the purpose of the story."

Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix
Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix

Making the most of that freedom to experiment and explore needs diligence – a Graham signature – as well as acting chops. But he also relies on something more unexpected: he and his wife Hannah, who's also an actor, are both very into Reiki, the new age medicine that promises healing through the transfer of energy.

"I suppose it's helped me with my work, hugely – [I'm] more intuitive in many respects. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but yeah, it's made a massive difference in my life and my wellbeing."

A big moment came when Hannah booked him a Reiki massage "somewhere in Wales" a few years ago. "I'd not long lost my cousin, our Eddie, and I just burst out crying," he says. "All this emotion just overflowed, do you know what I mean? It just came out, and it was a beautiful release."

Since then he and Hannah have done an intense Reiki course on the shores of Loch Venachar, in Scotland. He tries to make time to meditate too. Does he manage to do it every day? "Well, I try to," he says, slightly guiltily. "It makes a massive difference. Not everything's so stressful then, is it?"

That's not to say he wasn't spooked about getting on set with Pacino, De Niro and Pesci, especially since the first scene he shot with Pacino was particularly pivotal. In it, Pacino's Hoffa eats an ice cream in a prison canteen, while Graham's increasingly irate Tony Pro demands to know why Hoffa has a cut of the union pension fund, and he doesn't.

"My bottle had gone – I was really, really nervous," Graham says. He called Hannah for support, and after a pep talk, recalled something he'd worked out while they'd run lines together at home. On the fifth take, he jumped up and slapped Hoffa's ice cream across the room.

Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix
Photo credit: Niko Tavernise - Netflix

"I didn't tell Al, I didn't tell Marty – I told the cameraman and the props department, just to make sure we had enough."

Pacino was impressed. "Did you see that Marty?" Graham recalls him saying. "That kid frightened me!"

His other big scene sparkles because of yet more improv. It began as another two-hander with Pacino, with each man trying to extract promises from the other, but neither willing to give any ground away. They won't even agree on how late Tony Pro was: Tony says 10 minutes; Hoffa insists it was 15. After a few takes, a thought struck him. "At one point Stephen popped in my head and went, 'I'm in a scene with Robert De Niro and he says nothing. Shit!'"

So he decided he'd try something. "I just went bosh: just looked round and went, 'What do you think Frank?'" he remembers. De Niro joined the improv. "And he says the best line in the scene, he goes: '12 and a half'."

He recounts these stories with endearing, saucer-eyed glee. "It was just an absolute joy," he says. And the kid who made his nana laugh doesn't feel very far away.

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