The in-demand actor’s latest role? Playing a stroppy chef on the busiest night of the year in the single-take drama Boiling Point
Walking into the restaurant to meet Stephen Graham doesn’t just feel like walking on to the set of his latest film. It is the set of his latest film. Boiling Point– in which the Merseyside actor plays on-the-edge head chef Andy Jones – was shot in Jones & Sons, a modish London restaurant with a modern British menu, 24 hours before the first lockdown was enforced in March 2020. (Or “When Big Fuzzy Bozza said: ‘That’s it now, everyone get in your doors,’” as Graham recalls.) The movie is a “oner”, a dizzying single-take drama that goes some way to conveying the hypertension of kitchen life on “Magic Friday”, the last Friday before Christmas and the busiest night of the year. Battling debts, addiction and an imploding personal life, Graham’s kitchen nightmare unfolds in real time as he serves up the food, deals with difficult customers, berates his staff, gets ticked off by a restaurant inspector, and so on.
Boiling Point is also a small slice of cinematic history. It is the first British one-take movie. (Of Sam Mendes’s war epic 1917, filmed to appear as one continuous take, Graham says: “Don’t get me wrong, as a feat it’s magnificent. But we’ve been lied to [by the media]! It’s not one shot. Why don’t they just say it’s a film of 17 really long takes, do you know what I mean?”)
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