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Erin Doherty on the impact of her big hit on Netflix: Adolescence ‘consumed’ her, she tells Adam Bloodworth
Erin Doherty had already captured the zeitgeist. Her performance as Princess Anne in The Crown had such subtle power that it made casting director Nina Gold realise working class people could play aristocrats. Then as crime lord Mary Carr in A Thousand Blows, she was lauded as one of the most versatile actors of her generation. Next came Adolescence, in which Doherty plays a child psychologist interviewing a teenager accused of murder, which blew everything else out of the water.
Doherty leads some of the most harrowing scenes in the mini series, which has garnered the biggest audience for any streaming TV show in the UK in a single week. It’s become hard to pop to the shops without people asking “have you seen Adolescence?” – and everyone sounds genuinely unnerved. Asking questions about masculinity and online culture, it follows a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who’s been accused of murder. Shot as live, each episode is filmed in a single take, with actors allowed to improvise, making its form almost as interesting as its content. Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, has already landed the role of young Heathcliff in a forthcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
Doherty says she was genuinely scared during filming. You can’t turn away from her interrogation, which controversially humanises a murder suspect, but also shows the mental health repercussions on the psychologist.
Erin Doherty: filming Adolescence exhausted me, but it was worth it
We start by acknowledging that, by anyone’s standards, it’s been quite the year. “It took a good month to get it out of my system,” says Doherty of Adolescence. “You can’t escape what it’s doing to you, it kind of gets in your bones. There’s no copy and paste formula like, ‘Okay, I’ll do this, and then I’ll be Erin again.’ I was just so consumed and exhausted, just at the level of emotional intensity of this thing.’” Doherty is propelled by the show’s themes about online radicalisation of young men. “I think we all have to hold ourselves accountable for trying to break the cycle in some way.”
Talking over Zoom, Doherty wears a luminescent blue jumper and an even brighter smile. Unlike her most famous roles which veer towards austere, she is cheery and incredibly gracious. The first thing she offers is motherly reassurance about the tech issues I’ve had logging onto our call. “It’s so stressful, but you don’t need that anymore – it’s all gone!” She chats effusively about everything from how she hated school to bingeing The Crown and obsessing over her characters. If a PE teacher were to mark her interview style, they’d commend her for “giving 110 per cent.”
Had it not been for Adolescence, her boxing drama A Thousand Blows, released this February on Disney Plus, would still be brewing in the public consciousness. Doherty’s female crime lord was gently terrifying, with some hilarious lines, and that’s without mentioning the game-changing representation: bad-ass Victorian female crime lords, based on women who actually existed, aren’t your classic prime-time fodder. She spent a year filming that, then went straight into Adolescence, both with Stephen Graham, who invited her into the latter after being impressed by her work on the former: “I didn’t even read the script,” she says. “Whatever he does is just full of pure heart and love and care. I just knew that it was gonna be so vital; he doesn’t take on projects lightly.”
Netflix: Adolescence breaks the record to get the biggest viewership of any mini-series on the platform
The show has become the first streaming show ever to top the UK’s weekly TV ratings. “With something that is so frightening, it’s so easy to avoid it and to just go, ‘What a horrible thing that some people can do, I can’t get my head around it.’ Whereas this show is going, I understand how frightening a prospect that is, but we have to hold ourselves accountable for shining a light and going, ‘How are these events happening?’” says Doherty.
“Especially with our younger generation, we deserve to humanise how they get there, because otherwise, again, they just become this kind of two dimensional evil ‘other’. And actually, I do believe that everyone is born a good person. I don’t think that people are inherently evil. So it’s always necessary, it’s always worthy of our time to pick at that and go, ‘Oh my God, how did you get there?’”
Chuck in eight West End eight shows a week on top of her promotional schedule for Adolescence (she’s currently starring in the play Unicorn) and despite how she clearly loves talking about the show, she admits she’s “sooooo readyyyyyy” for a holiday. I suspect her ability to appear affable even when she’s exhausted has helped her schmooze numerous big-wigs on her way up.
You wonder how our brightest Hollywood hope would fare on a sun lounger. Doherty admits she obsesses over people to a degree that isn’t healthy. “It’s my biggest thing that I battle with,” she says. “I think we’ve all got demons. For me, it manifests as overthinking. I’ll get to the end of the day and I’ll lie in bed and be like, ‘Oh God, I hope that person didn’t take that the wrong way.’” She has to be careful that this approach doesn’t wear her down, because she “grew up a people pleaser.” But her ability to over-analyse can yield positive results, working in favour of forthcoming projects. When she researches roles, “I’ll dig and dig and dig and really try to understand and pick up why people behave the way they behave. I could linger on a specific interaction for a week.”
I don’t need to know what you think about my work. If you want to come up to me and talk about it, great, but I don’t need to be a part of that conversation online
Growing up in Crawley, West Sussex, as a young girl Doherty and her older sister would take acting classes at the weekends. She was the shy one, but nevertheless remembers the experience changing her. “Something flipped through art,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to be Erin anymore.’ That was my first lasting impression of what acting and being someone else could do, mentally. I can put that anxiety down for a couple of hours and just let go. There’s not been anything else that I’ve found so freeing. It’s just in me. I don’t know how I would function without this ability to just let go.”
She took a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting in 2011, not long after leaving high school. Studying acting at the Bristol Old Vic, she graduated in 2015 and was first inspired to tread the boards after watching Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London at the National Theatre, a vivid, chaotic interpretative dance number about, amongst other things, climate change.
Call The Midwife and the BBC miniseries of Les Misérables were early roles, but the part that properly propelled her came in 2019 when she was cast as a young Princess Anne in The Crown. Casting director Nina Gold had thought “playing a whole different social class is one of the most difficult things to do convincingly”, but has admitted, “Erin really blew that theory.” She was captivating as the poised young princess, revealing a vividness to the most reluctantly camera-ready of the late Queen’s children. She still binges The Crown, and is obsessed with Imelda Staunton. “I got to meet her the other day. We were working on an audio book, and she is everything you want her to be. I absolutely binged the last series and thought it was phenomenal.”
Looking back to where it all began, Doherty reminisces about studying musical theatre at her comprehensive school in Crawley. She still has family there, and pops back regularly, but as a whole she cannot wax lyrical about the institution. “I hated school with a passion,” she says. “But the drama department was so pivotal to me.” She’d love to go back and jump in on some lessons. “I have such admiration for teachers but I could never see myself having the skill and ability.”
Erin Doherty on working with Stephen Graham
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If not through teaching, she has always been keen to promote the idea of levelling up. Doherty seems genuinely overwhelmed when I read the Nina Gold quote to her. “For her to say something like that, I don’t really know how to deal with that. I’m just grateful she took a chance, and I hope that it encourages other casting directors to keep doing that, because I think without them taking that leap of faith, so many actors wouldn’t get their foot in the door. I think that an actor’s job is to transform.” She’s passionate about “bringing working class actors into the world of screen acting,” and has been inspired by Stephen Graham. “He’s so brilliant at climbing the ladder, looking down and helping people up. That’s so inspiring to me. If I could do what he did for me and is continuing to do for others, I’d be so overjoyed.”
Away from work, Doherty is private, but decompresses by enjoying the small things. “Walks, family, engaging in normal conversation.” You sense she finds the concept of celebrity so bizarre that describing her downtime is a weird notion in itself. Despite whatever’s been written about her (none of which she reads), success has forced her “to really, really lean into my people. I have a very small circle.” She is happily in a relationship, but contrary to newspaper headlines, her girlfriend “isn’t in the industry”.
You can see why Adolescence appealed. She admits she is “awful” at her phone, always leaving her family on read, and says too many of us are addicted to technology. “I don’t think I’m doing it right either,” she says of her scarce digital approach. “I feel like there’s got to be a better balance. I’ve just kind of gone the opposite end of the scale.” Of Gen Z, who are growing up internet natives, she has “such empathy.” “It just completely freaks me out. I don’t know how I’d manage.”
She shies away from public perceptions about her, and is firm about why: “I just want people to watch the show. I don’t necessarily need to know what you think about it. If you want to come up to me and we’ll talk about it, great, but I don’t need to be a part of that conversation online. That’s not for me.” Instead, her family and set of lifelong friends are her barometer. “They’ll be like, ‘Things are really positive for you. Just know that you’re doing alright.’ I don’t need to look any further. If my people are telling me that it’s all good, then that’s enough.”
Queer representation
As for what’s next, she’s vague, but implies nothing’s firmly on the table yet. She will reveal, though, that more queer storytelling is a priority. “I feel like that’s going to be the route that I go down. Because, as I say, I’m so deeply passionate about telling queer stories and providing that representation. I hope that’s something I’ll get to pursue down the line. Breaking the kind of mould of it being a trope or like a cliche, being the queer friend, or the exploration of the relationships. They do exist, but it’s really rare to find the nuance and the levels of detail of what it means to be queer.” She’s inspired by “the way Steven collaborated with Jack Thorne on Adolescence. I’d love to maybe collaborate with a writer because I don’t know if I’ve got the bravery to be like, ‘And now I’m going to write this thing.’ I hold my hand up, I am definitely an actor.”
She circles back to that much needed holiday, then, on the topic of future roles, offers me a final one of her beautiful thought spirals. “I just like people,” she says. “Trying to figure out why we behave the way we behave, whether that means putting on a corset and walking down the cobbles of East End London or putting on an Adidas tracksuit and exploring what that means in 2025.”
Adolescence is available to stream on Netflix now
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