4 hours ago
4
Standing on stage at the Golden Globes in front of Hollywood’s elite, Owen Cooper said that the experience simply “did not feel real”.
The 16-year-old from Warrington picked up best supporting male actor for his performance in Netflix’s “incel” drama, Adolescence, which was one of the big winners at the ceremony and dominated the cultural conversation around male toxicity for much of 2025.
Adolescence’s Golden Globes success (it took four awards) follows its triumph at the Emmys, where it managed six gongs, including another for Cooper. As unusual as it all felt for the young actor, those who know him say his passion was there from the start.
Esther Morgan, who co-founded the Drama Mob with Coronation Street actor Tina O’Brien, taught Cooper and says it was obvious he was a talent from the outset.
“You could tell he definitely wanted it,” she says. “He wasn’t messing around when it came to listening, taking direction and learning his lines.”
Morgan admits that the school could not prepare him for this level of success but has pushed back at the narrative that Cooper “came from nowhere”.
He had had two years with the Drama Mob before the Adolescence casting process, which involved several rounds and initially had more of Morgan’s students in the running. But Cooper left an impression on casting director Shaheen Baig. “His name just kept coming back,” says Morgan.
Co-writer Jack Thorne said that the first time he worked with Cooper was in rehearsals for episode three, the show’s intense interview between the teenager and a psychologist, played by Erin Doherty.
“He came in word perfect and ready to work, but it was a lot of pressure,” says Thorne. “Slowly but surely – with help from [director] Philip Barantini and Erin – he sort of subsumed himself. By Friday he was Jamie.”
Cooper’s former teacher is a passionate advocate for northern actors, who are competing on an increasingly uneven playing field. An exodus from Hollywood has made London a more attractive hub for studios, which is further centralising an industry where more than half of all productions happen in the capital.
Morgan says northern actors, including the next Cooper, are being cut out.
“More shows need to be made and produced up here,” she says. “We need more casting directors working here because for some of our young people they don’t have the funds to travel up and down to London for castings.”
That isn’t the only challenge facing the next Cooper.
On stage at the Golden Globes, Cooper said he was the only boy in his class at drama school and it was “embarrassing”. Morgan says there is a “huge drop-off” in boys attending her classes once they go to high school and pursuits such as football and rugby take over. Acting can be seen as a soft, or – to use gen Z terminology – “cringe”.
That is backed up statistically too, with 17,000 boys taking GCSE drama in the UK in 2025, compared with 35,700 girls, with a similar ratio at A-level. But Morgan says Cooper’s success is already affecting that dynamic.
“Since Owen going on to be so successful, we have had more boys coming to drama,” says Morgan. “I think he’s helped with that [by] having that role model of saying, ‘yeah, I went to drama classes, I gave it a go’. I think that really has helped some of those boys to just kind of go out the comfort zone.”
Much has been made of Adolescence being on Netflix and the huge audience it has reached. In the week it launched its initial episode pulled in 6.45 million viewers, while the second recorded 5.9 million – breaking UK records in the process.
But at its core the show is a gritty, distinctly northern drama. Most of the principal cast, like Cooper and Stephen Graham, are from the north-west. It was shot on location in Pontefract and Sheffield.
Thorne is cautiously optimistic it could usher in a new wave of working-class British dramas that traditionally have not travelled well internationally. “I know from trying to sell stuff I’ve made abroad before that accents and British ‘issues’ were not seen as having an audience abroad,” he says.
“But who knows? TV remains quite a conservative industry and they may go back to thinking a man speaking in RP on a horse is a better bet.”
