“Adolescence” may be one of the more uncomfortable sits of the year in television, and it’s so affecting because its lead star, Owen Cooper, said that playing the role of Jamie Miller truly took him out of his “comfort zone.”
“It’s an honor to be here. What started off as a hobby to landing the role in ‘Adolescence,’ acting has really taken me out of my comfort zone and inspired me to learn and soak up knowledge from other experienced actors,” Cooper said upon accepting the first award of the evening at the IndieWire Honors ceremony held in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Cooper won the Breakthrough Award from IndieWire Honors, and it couldn’t be more fitting, because his role in “Adolescence” was his very first on-screen role. He’s not even a nepo baby! Though fellow honoree Ben Stiller jokingly scolded Cooper for not thanking his father Bradley.
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Cooper thanked his entire cast, Netflix, his agent, his parents, and many more, and he joked that he even came prepared with a script, something he didn’t do after winning a prize from the recent Gotham Awards. As he said, the beginning of his career “couldn’t have gotten off to a better start.”
“I feel very privileged to be able to start my journey with a great team of cast and crew, and I wouldn’t be able to perform as I did without every single one of them,” Cooper said.
Cooper’s award comes just as “Adolescence” this week became the second-most-watched English language series in Netflix history, surpassing “Stranger Things 4.” The four-part series, dazzling for each of its episodes being shot to be real time and seen in a single, long take, made the teenage star an instant breakout, with “Adolescence” creator Stephen Graham saying recently Cooper reminded him of a young Jodie Comer destined for big things.
“Owen isn’t an actor, he’s a magician,” Graham and co-writer Jack Thorne told IndieWire of Cooper. “We knew we had a brilliant actor when we met him in auditions. We knew we had a wizard after the first week of rehearsals.”
Cooper says he idolized Tom Holland and the work he did in “The Impossible,” one of the on-screen roles that broke him to international audiences and helped him become the next Spider-Man. Cooper told IndieWire he’s watched the film 30 times.
“I think it was Tom Holland in ‘The Impossible,’ that I thought that he was really good and that I wanted to be like him and I wanted to be doing what he’s doing,” he said. “Tom Holland was the first actor I saw and was like, ‘Oh, he’s really good.’ When I was a kid, I watched actors as characters, I didn’t watch them as people.”
Up next for Cooper, he recently wrapped shooting Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” adaptation, in which he plays a young Heathcliff, which is the protagonist role as portrayed by Jacob Elordi as an adult.
The IndieWire Honors event took place at NeueHouse in Hollywood on Thursday, June 5 as hosted by comedian and “Hacks” breakout star Robby Hoffman. Other honorees for the evening included Ben Stiller, Colin Farrell, Ramy Youssef, Julianne Nicholson, Kathy Bates, and more.
