Episode 3 of Adolescence is mired in violence from the very beginning. When clinical psychologist Briony Ariston (The Crown’s Erin Doherty) enters Standing Secure Training Centre, she has one question: Was her charge, accused murderer Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), an enigmatic teen, involved in a fight at the facility? Although that mystery is eventually solved in Episode 3, the installment quickly turns its focus from a single brawl to the inciting incident of the series: the fatal stabbing of Jamie’s schoolmate Katie (Emilia Holliday). While viewers know by this point in the story that Jamie committed the killing, it’s Briony’s job to determine whether the boy could be found legally innocent.

“I had to attack the episode as a child psychologist would. Her goal is, ultimately, to get an answer,” Doherty, a two-time SAG-winning actor, tells Tudum. “Briony needs to be able to go to the higher-ups and give them a genuine assessment of what she believes about Jamie.”

A “tennis match” of a conversation ensues while Briony tries to settle on a resolution. All the while, Adolescence’s one-shot filming style ping-pongs between Jamie and Briony, who seem to be adversaries, friends, and a proper doctor-patient pair throughout the hour-long episode.

The series is co-created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, who have worked together for 20 years. As Thorne tells Tudum, “When I was writing this, Stephen said to me, ‘Just write a David Mamet play.’ And I was like, ‘Stephen, you’re talking about one of the great dramatists of all time.’ ” Still, Thorne persevered. “We all sort of treated it like it was theater, like we were making something together and that it was just purely about performance,” he says.

So, take a seat as Doherty, Cooper, Thorne, and the rest of the Episode 3 team take you inside the unforgettable installment.

Owen Cooper, Phili Barantini on the set of Adolescence

Preparing for Adolescence

Once Graham conceived of the idea for Adolescence, he knew he needed to include an episode centered on a child psychologist and Jamie. “In a conventional drama, the episode would show the first time these two had ever met,” Graham says. However, unbeknownst to Jamie, Episode 3 is actually his final conversation with Briony. This twist gives their discussion greater urgency, as well as establishing history between the two. “I really wanted the episode to be about the understanding of this lad,” Graham says, which is only possible once both counselor and client are comfortable with each other.

“Episode 3 gives us this deconstruction of this young boy,” Graham says. “We get to see the fact that Briony’s been doing this job for years, but yet she’s never experienced [anyone] like Jamie.”

With Adolescence taking shape, executive producers Thorne, Graham, and director Philip Barantini needed to find their Jamie.  The team always knew Cooper was “just special,” Barantini tells Tudum, and he quickly became the front-runner. Although Adolescence is his first acting credit, Cooper dazzled Graham during their very first improvisation. “When he left the room, I turned around to Phil and Jack and said, ‘I think that’s him,’ ” he says.

Thorne was impressed by Cooper’s “real simplicity” as a performer. “He wasn’t acting. Owen was working out his own way through it,” Thorne says. “But it felt like that capability was in him right from the start. Owen just needed to work out how to harness that monster inside of Jamie. And then once he harnessed that monster, there was no stopping him.”

The team was confident that veteran actor Doherty would be the person to help Cooper inhabit the role. “Erin is so brilliant as an actor and so generous,” Thorne says. “You do not know what she’ll do next — not just as herself on screen, but what she’ll do for the other actor. She will respond. She will go any way you ask her to go. And she’ll do a different take each time. That generosity is so crucial to Episode 3.”

Behind the Scenes of Episode 3

Rehearsing Episode 3

Although Episode 3 is the penultimate chapter of Adolescence, it was the first one the team shot due to Graham’s busy acting schedule; the co-creator also stars in the series as Jamie’s dad Eddie (who does not appear in Episode 3). So Cooper and Doherty met each other, and the rest of the team, on the first day of rehearsals. “I was excited and a bit nervous,” Cooper tells Tudum. “But then I got on set and met loads of amazing people, Erin being one of them. It was the best first job I can think of.”

Episode 3 — along with the drama’s three other episodes — followed the same three-week schedule. Since each chapter of Adolescence was filmed in one shot, every person — from the cast and camera crew to the makeup department — needed to be ready to perform their job in perfect succession.

Rehearsals with director Barantini and the actors ran for the first week. “It would be me with the actors going through the script, really homing in on the emotional beats, and talking about the characters,” he explains. The director would separate his script into progressive sections, which the team would rehearse one at a time, tweaking as they went, until Barantini was happy with it. They’d then move onto the next section and repeat the process. Eventually, the group would go to the very beginning of the script and perform all the sections together, “building it until they get to the end.” Usually, by Wednesday of the rehearsal week, Barantini and the actors had finished the entire script. “Then we would just try and run it in its entirety as many times as we could in a day,” he says.

Doherty appreciated the unusual amount of time she was given to prepare to portray Briony. In fact, she wishes she could “work like this” always. “The more you’re in a character’s skin, they just become a part of your soul. “There’s a freedom that comes with the repetition we did,” she says. “By the time it came to shooting, we knew this episode inside out. Owen and I knew each other, we made that bond. And character-wise, there was no question about whether we knew how to embody these people.”

Cooper agrees, saying, “You start having the same thoughts that Jamie and Briony would.”

Thorne felt a sense of awe as he watched the process come together in the rehearsals for Episode 3. “I sat on the floor while they sat around the table. It was like being in a theater rehearsal,” he says. He encouraged the actors to make the words their own, and amend anything they needed to make it more honest. During this time, the writer was reminded of a conversation he previously had with Rhys Ifans, who led Thorne’s Broadway adaption of A Christmas Carol alongside Doherty. Ifans told Thorne, “Acting opposite Erin is playing jazz. Her performance is constantly evolving and reacting to everyone around her.”

“It was just that during rehearsal. So I knew that she had that in her all the time,” Thorne says. “But the extraordinary thing about that time was watching Owen take a huge breath in and become a remarkable actor.”

With the actors well rehearsed, tech rehearsals would then run for the second week of an episode’s block. “It’s so important that every single member of the entire team is watching the tech rehearsal, because they need to know where the camera’s going to move to,” Barantini says. That would leave week three for filming…

Matthew Lewis, Erin Doherty as Briony Ariston, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, on the set of Adolescence

BEN BLACKALL

Filming Episode 3

Like the previous weeks, Episode 3’s third and final stretch followed a strict schedule. During filming week, the team began shooting the entire episode at 10 a.m. and then again after lunch. In between takes, Barantini would give notes. “Erin is a very reactive actor. So I knew if I gave Owen the notes, she would just react to whatever he did,” the director says. “Then Owen would go on set, and create absolute magic.”

Despite the rigorous schedule, Doherty felt “free” throughout shooting. “Phil was an actor’s dream to work with. He’s so about an actor feeling comfortable and safe. He respects your instinct,” she says. “He wants to capture that rather than make you bend and fit into any kind of vision that he has.”

One of those exact instances can be found in Episode 3. During Briony and Jamie’s conversation, he starts to yawn. “Owen didn’t do that in any of the other takes. I didn’t tell him to do that. That was the very last take,” Barantini says. The young actor had been yelling in the scene all week, so the yawn was genuine — “It was hard to hide it,” Cooper says — and Barantini was surprised and delighted to see it. “We were all behind the monitors going, ‘Oh my God!’ ” the director says.

His first experience with professional acting may have been a demanding and unusual one, but Cooper is thankful he was introduced this way. “It’s better than always cutting and stopping and starting. Because once you’re in it, you’re in it for the whole episode,” he says. “It just makes it so free.”

Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, Erin Doherty as Briony Ariston, in Adolescence

The “chess match”

Episode 3 follows Briony and Jamie to bleak places, as the pair discuss masculinity, attraction, and the latter’s descent into dangerously misogynistic propaganda. Sometimes Jamie’s simmering resentments spill over onto Briony, including one terrifying moment in which he scares her during their session.

“There were moments where I really wanted Owen to let go and really go for it, in terms of being angry [with] Erin. And that’s just not Owen. He’s a sweetheart,” Barantini says. “For him to go that dark was a challenge.”

A lengthy conversation with the director helped Cooper rise to the moment. “I was like, ‘You know you’re protected by me and Erin. Everyone around you has got your back,’” Barantini says. “From that moment, he was a completely different actor. It was just mind-blowing.”

The result is the “chess match” between Briony and Jamie, as Doherty calls it, where viewers try to figure out who’s right, who’s wrong, and who actually has the moral high ground. “You can see they’ve built up this relationship and it is genuine. Briony isn’t a bad person. She’s not trying to get anything out of Jamie,” Doherty continues. “She cares for him. Briony is genuinely asking him these questions, praying there is some twist of fate where she could say that this kid is innocent when all the evidence points at one thing.”

While Briony attempts to juggle her professional goals and personal feelings, a part of Jamie is simply happy to have someone pay attention to him. “She’s the only person who will properly talk to him. His sessions with Briony are very useful to him,” Cooper says. “Episode 3 gave me a proper idea of who Jamie was. He just wants to be liked and recognized.”

Saying goodbye to Episode 3

The end of Episode 3 is also the end of Briony and Jamie’s relationship. This episode is their final session together. This news sends Jamie into a fit of rage since, as Cooper explains, “I don’t think he’s got anyone at the facility to speak to apart from Briony.”

As the episode crescendos, Jamie begs Briony to admit whether she likes him or not. He thrashes, fights a guard, and bangs on windows, all in the pursuit of a response to that question. “He’s obviously frustrated and upset,” Cooper says. “He doesn’t have his parents, friends, or teachers anymore. He only has one person that he can talk to and that person is now gone. It’s obviously hard for him.”

Jamie isn’t the only one affected by this goodbye. The final tableau of Episode 3 is Briony crying alone at the table right after Jamie’s exit.. “That room represented hope for both of them,” Doherty says. “For a moment, they got to share in this dream of everything being OK. But the minute that both of them leave, that doesn’t exist anymore. The reality comes crashing in.”

Doherty left Adolescence feeling gratitude toward Cooper. “All credit for me has to go to Owen because it’s such an intense tennis match. If you don’t trust your partner to smash that ball back into your side of the court, you’re screwed. You feel like you are doing a monologue,” she says. “This was so well-handled, I never felt like I was doing any of the heavy lifting. It was completely mutual.”

For an even deeper look at Adolescence, keep coming back to Tudum. And, see the drama unfold for yourself by (re)watching the series, now streaming on Netflix.

Watch the Adolescence trailer.