Watch their mannerisms.” He thinks of this as ongoing performer training. Then you just allow these things to come out.” Graham plays a charismatic serial killer in the new Apple TV series Nocturne, and while he obviously doesn’t have the character’s murderous tendencies, the two do share a fascination with silently studying those around them. He became a familiar face in his role as Al Capone on Boardwalk Empire.
Then with his scene-stealing performances in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and as Bruce Springsteen’s volatile father in Deliver Me from Nowhere. Winning Emmys, BAFTAs, and a Golden Globe for his work in front of and behind the camera on the harrowing crime drama Adolescence made it much harder to study people without being noticed. It’s a sunny afternoon in the English Midlands, which is where Graham and his wife, Hannah Walters, keep their home.
He’s speaking to Esquire via Zoom, his face covered with a scruffy beard and his hair lightly mussed. He’s wearing a bright-blue Teamsters Memorial Picnic T-shirt and a black-rimmed pair of glasses. The actor could pass as either a pub bouncer or a college professor.
We’re being very English,” he says. But she’s not feeling camera ready at the moment, stirring a steaming saucepan full of minced meat as loose locks of blond hair frame her face. She wasn’t officially involved in the making of Nocturne, but Walters was crucial in helping her husband wrap his head around the character of Jurek Walter, a serial killer whose crimes inexplicably continue even though he is locked up in a criminal asylum.
He’s a soft-spoken manipulator, a master of analyzing behavior, and he’s able to wheedle into the minds of virtually anyone he encounters. Liev Schreiber plays a lawman on the outside who’s trying to figure out how Walter continues to puppeteer disappearances, and Zazie Beetz is an FBI agent who goes undercover in the detention facility to get close to him, at great personal risk. That’s an ironic statement,” she says.
There’s a lot of serial killers that aren’t intelligent, but they get found out very quickly.” “Highly intelligent. Looking at the script, I saw the manipulation that Jurek is capable of and how he is a chameleon and he’ll adapt to each situation. So he reads the situation first and plays what he thinks it is that you want.” That was about getting into Walter’s head.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
