Stephen Graham
Stephen Graham
Stephen Grahamis an English film and television actor who is best known for his roles as Tommy in the film Snatch, Andrew "Combo" Gascoigne in This Is Englandas well as its television sequels, This Is England '86, This Is England '88and This Is England '90, Danny Ferguson in Occupation, Billy Bremner in The Damned United, notorious bank robber Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies, Scrum in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and a crooked police detective in the acclaimed...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth3 August 1973
I adore my job. I think I'm one of the luckiest people out there. I've worked hard, but I get to mess about every day - that's how I see it.
College is the only place where you can rebel by doing exactly what people in authority tell you to do.
I'm drawn to dramas that make people think. I want to make an impact.
I'm a mixed race lad from Liverpool. I get to play a lot of hard characters, and some people perceive that's what I'm like, but it's great for me 'cos they're always the most interesting characters.
People in New York are surprised when I open my mouth.
You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.
Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.
The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.
I wouldn't rule out L.A. life, but I love England. I have a lovely house and nice garden, I walk my kids to school - family is most important to me.
There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen.