Sam Brigger
speaker
1,127 appearances
24 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 6 Jun
Sam Brigger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And, like, you're basically trying to figure out, like, how did we get here? How did things go so wrong? And what could you have possibly done differently? So let's hear that scene.
That's from Adolescence, the final episode of the show. This episode is devastating. And the show is going to stay with me, I think, forever, a very long time. And it's really hard to watch. It's really well made. It's really compelling. But you go through a lot of very intense emotions in this episode. Like you have a complete breakdown at one point.
Like, as an actor, how hard is that to go through? I guess, like, is there an aftermath that you have to reckon with after doing that kind of performance?
That's so comforting of her.
Yeah.
If you're just joining us, we're speaking with actor Stephen Graham, who stars in two new shows, Adolescence on Netflix and A Thousand Blows on Hulu. He'll be back after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air.
Stephen, I wanted to talk briefly with you about A Thousand Blows. You're playing actually a real-life person named Henry Sugar Goodson, who was a bare-knuckle boxer in Victorian London. And I just wanted to play a scene from the show. You have been undefeated, but there is this newcomer from Jamaica named Hezekiah Mosko. And...
When you're fighting him, it looks like you're going to lose but someone in your corner trips him and you're declared the winner even though it was unfair. But you're really shaken by this – the fact that you thought you were going to lose so you want to fight him again. So in this scene, Hezekiah who's played by Malachi Kirby comes into your bar.
You're training in the back and he talks to your brother who says like, look, if you fall in the third round, I'll pay you. And Hezekiah doesn't like that so he calls to you out in the back.
That's Stephen Graham in the show A Thousand Blows. Stephen, you know, this character you're playing, Sugar Goodson, is an incredibly closed-off person. He's prone to rages. Like, he's... Something will click in him and he'll beat people to death, even if they're people he loves. And, you know, this could have been a pretty one-dimensional character. Like, play them as just a monster.
But you bring out... And some humanity in him. And I just, can you just talk about like finding the complexity of the character?
You were probably on a very restrictive diet, probably like a lot of proteins and stuff like that and eating the same things day after day. It sounds like you've kept your physique up, so congratulations on that. But when you were done filming, do you remember like the first thing you ate that was like a milkshake or something like that?
You also said that shoes are really important to your characters. Yeah.
Well, if you're just joining us, we're speaking with actor Stephen Graham, who stars in two shows right now, one on Netflix, Adolescence, and the other on Hulu, A Thousand Blows. We'll be back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Steven, I wanted to go back a little bit to one of your early successes, which is the movie This Is England from 2006.
And you play a racist and violent prone skinhead named Combo. And there's a pretty famous speech in the movie that's heavily infused with white nationalist ideology. We're not going to play it because I think there's an F word in every sentence. So there'd just be lots of bleeps.
But I imagine in an acting career, there's a lot of times where you have to espouse beliefs as a character that you don't hold yourself. But I was wondering if this one... may have been particularly hard, obviously in part because it's just racist, but also because you have a multiracial background and one of your grandfathers is from Jamaica.
Did that make playing this character particularly difficult for you?
You grew up just outside of Liverpool in Kirby. And did you have to deal with issues of racism as a child coming from a mixed family?
You said your stepfather helped you sort of with your cultural and racial identity. He also helped you when you told your family you wanted to be an actor. Do you have this great story of him taking you to the video store and renting like all these great movies? Yeah. Yeah, he did.
Thank you. Thank you.
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