Ashley Walters had a bit of an on-set nightmare while filming the Netflix drama Adolescence, which required everyone to go back to square one.
Much has already been made about Adolescence’s unique filming style, which saw each hour-long episode of the hard-hitting drama being recorded in one continuous shot.
To accommodate this, both the cast and crew were put through weeks of rehearsals, with each episode being filmed straight-through, twice a day, over the period of a week.
On Monday morning, Stephen Graham and his wife Hannah Walters – both of whom worked as executive producers on Adolescence, while Stephen was also its co-writer and one of its stars – paid a visit to Radio X, where they were asked about how it all worked.
“Why would you do that?” host Chris Moyles asked of the straight-through technique. “Because what if you’re 53 minutes in and someone goes, ‘John… Bob… Oh, God damn it…’?”
Stephen responded: “Well, that’s the risk that you take, isn’t it?”
Chris then asked: “What if you’re, like, halfway through and someone goes, ‘Stephen… I mean…’.”
“That happened!” Stephen teased, with Hannah confirming: “It happened in Ashley’s episode. Ashley screwed up.”
“Oh you’ve grassed him up,” Stephen then remarked, to which she insisted: “He won’t mind me saying!”
Since Adolescence’s release, Netflix has shared plenty of behind-the-scenes tidbits about how it was made – including what happened when the cast and crew made mistakes.
Last week, Ashley admitted that he’d already been through one major headache before production had even begun, when he turned up to set with a sports injury after an impromptu basketball game with his daughter.
“I took it for granted,” Ashley revealed. “I’m not gonna lie. Because I wanted to do the one-shot process so much.
“And I turned up to set with a bad back, by the way. My back had gone.”
He even went as far as saying “it nearly didn’t happen” for him, were it not for a last-minute appointment with a chiropractor who was able to sort him out.
The Chris Moyles Show Radio X airs every weekday from 6.30am on Radio X and Global Player. All four episodes of Adolescence are available to stream now on Netflix.