One-Shot Wonders: How Casting Director Shaheen Baig Assembled the Perfect Cast for “Adolescence”

Co-created by and co-starring Stephen Graham, Netflix’s four-part series Adolescence has been a widely viewed hit for the streaming site. Nothing about casting the show, about an otherwise ordinary boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), who has been influenced to such a malign degree by his online life that he becomes capable of murdering a classmate, Katie (Emilia Holliday), was standard operating procedure. Each episode is a single take, and finding an actor young enough to play the difficult role of thirteen year old Jamie and do so while shooting repeat one-shots was no small feat.

Knowing that discovering the show’s Jamie would be a long process, casting director Shaheen Baig (After Love, Peaky Blinders) looked for adult leads at the same time. She cast parts like DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), the cop who first brings Jamie in for questioning, and Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), while the search for Jamie across Yorkshire and northern England ran in the background. Prior to his arrest, Jamie lives with his family in a pleasant, unspecified Yorkshire town, and Baig kept her hunt regional, both so that actors wouldn’t have to do accents and the series’ many younger players could easily go home after work.

The work itself was structured atypically, with each episode requiring a rehearsal week, tech week, and shoot week, and it was non-negotiable for actors to be available for the whole period. Also unusual: having gotten down to a shortlist of four actors for the role of Jamie, after choosing Cooper, Baig and her team gave the other three finalists roles in the story, which is a rare occurrence. “I think that is a really positive note,” she said. “There was inclusivity across the board, and that was one of the joys of it.”

Adolescence has been lauded for its chillingly apropos script, but the series’ authenticity also comes from Baig’s meticulous casting choices. We had the chance to speak with Baig about putting together a stellar cast for one of the year’s most resonant new series.

What is your process like when a show’s creator is also the star?

It means you have this wonderful shorthand with the team. Stephen was really involved in the casting process. A lot of us had worked with each other before. It felt very much like we were in sync, and that’s rare. Sometimes you can spend an initial moment just getting to know everybody, and everyone has a slightly different idea of what the show is, but on this one, we were all aligned.

What was the search for Jamie like?

He is incredible. We searched all over Yorkshire and then in a couple of cities in the north of England. We did street casting, used social media, contacted youth groups, sports groups, drama groups, schools, anything you could think of, really. We were looking not just for Jamie but also for other young people in the story. We also looked at professional young actors. But it was a very wide, lengthy search.

What were some of the particular qualities you were looking for?

This was an unusual job, and the nature of the one-shot was not just for the young actors but for the adult cast. It was almost like a piece of theater. You rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and then you shoot. It’s continuous, and you redo [a certain] amount of times a day. We needed really robust actors across the board. For Jamie, we saw some brilliant young people for the role. We got down to four, and they were all fantastic in different ways. We knew we needed somebody who wasn’t afraid of repetition, and somebody who was able, every time we did it again, for it to feel fresh, to feel original. Owen just had that capacity. He wasn’t scared of the process. I don’t think he realized, until he got into rehearsals, how the one-shot would manifest, but he was very focused, he did the work, and he listened. He worked really closely with Phil [Barantini, the show’s director] and Stephen, and I think he displayed, in those final screen tests, the ability to lock in and want to do the very best he could. It was an extraordinary sort of focus for somebody so young.

How did you cast Erin Doherty as Briony, Jamie’s clinical psychologist?

Erin is a brilliant actress. We had worked together on a series for Disney called A Thousand Blows. She was one of the leads, along with Stephen, on that show. We talked about a lot of different people for that role [of Briony]. Erin’s done a lot of theater, so she has that work ethic and [knows] the technical aspects of it. And also, she’s a really brilliantly truthful actor. We knew she would be able to embrace that way of working. I don’t think it’s for everybody. It’s fairly terrifying to shoot like that, but exhilarating. Once we’d all decided it was Erin, it was a no-brainer. She was coming straight off another job, so fair play to her, because we shot Episode 3 first. For Erin and Owen, that was really tough. But once Owen was able to manage that, he could manage anything, I’d say.

How did you find Manda, Owen’s mother?

Christine [Tremarco] is a great actress. Stephen has known Christine since they were kids. When we were talking about actresses for that part, we only talked about a very small group of people. It’s such intimacy in Episode 4. It’s a really difficult episode. Christine is someone he has massive respect for and feels really comfortable with. I knew that Stephen and Christine would really take care of Amelie [Pease, who plays Owen’s older sister Lisa], because it was her first job, and that Christine and Stephen would have this really natural bond.

How did you put together the huge cast for the high school?

We gave parts to a lot of the young people we saw throughout the whole audition process. We kept bookmarking. When it got to making the decisions—and this was a really lovely, special thing about the job—collectively we said, we’d really like to give a whole bunch of people parts in the series. We also used a lot of local young people, because we needed big crowd scenes. The production embraced the community that was on their doorstep.

Out of that episode, Katy’s best friend, Jade, really stands out.

She’s incredible. It’s almost like you could make a film just about her story. [Fatima Bojang] does something so brilliant with that part, because she’s really memorable. When I finished the series, I kept thinking about her. That was the real beauty of her performance. It was a difficult part to play, and she gives you so much back story, she gives you layers, [even though] she doesn’t have lots of screen time.

What was the general approach to casting supporting roles?

Across the board, it was really a matter of workshopping, working with smaller and smaller groups, and working out what their instincts were. Phil really loves to work with natural instincts, so that’s what we did. Some roles were slightly tweaked for those young people to embrace what they were naturally bringing to those workshops. We did do script work, but we did a lot of improvisational work with them as well, throughout the audition process, to see where their imagination was, and to see how quick and fast they are, because when you’re working on something that’s essentially shooting live, anything can go wrong at any time. We needed to have really imaginative actors who weren’t afraid to improvise, because sometimes in those situations you have to.

Featured image: Adolescence. (L to R) Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, Erin Doherty as Briony Ariston, in Adolescence. Cr. Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix © 2024