Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Sun 19 July 2026 14:30, UK
If you’ve been feeling strangely drawn to wanting to buy quite floppy cheeseburgers by a nagging Scouse voice in the back of your head lately, then it’s probably due to the fact that Stephen Graham just signed a very lucrative deal to be the voice of McDonald’s in the UK.
While nobody has dared to release exactly how much Graham is pocketing in order to entice the nation to stuff themselves with more clown food, you can bet that after the success of Adolescence and the Golden Globe win that came with it, he was able to add a zero to the cheque written out by Ronald.
But due to Graham’s everyman nature, the fact that he seems like a genuinely decent chap despite having knocked around with some of the most famous stars on the planet, you can’t really begrudge him getting that bag, especially given he’s more than put in a shift on the way to his current success.
And his path to glory has certainly been anything but linear, with several false starts since he started acting in 1990, picking up the occasional role in British TV series for a decade until Guy Ritchie cast him in Snatch in 2000. Once he’d done that movie, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Brad Pitt and Jason Statham, you would have assumed stardom would follow, and for a while that seemed to be the case as he made HBO’s Band of Brothers and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York in quick succession.
But things went quiet again, and for almost five years Graham struggled to pay the bills, when in 2006, British director Shane Meadows cast him in the lead in the gritty race drama This Is England. He was superb as the vicious skinhead Andrew ‘Combo’ Gascoigne and was nominated for industry awards, but despite the film trebling its meagre budget at the box office and winning a Bafta, things dropped off again for the actor.
Aside from a brief flirtation with Hollywood again with a supporting role in Johnny Depp’s Public Enemies in 2009, Graham was making the occasional music video and taking low-budget films on, and as he told The Glass Magazine, it was all getting too much.
He explained: “I just thought to myself, if I can’t get work after all of that, then what’s the point?”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
On the brink of giving up acting completely and only talked out of it by friends and family, again Meadows came calling for Graham, to get him to reprise his role as Combo in a TV update called This is England ‘86, and then a phone call arrived that changed things completely. It was from Martin Scorsese, who hadn’t forgotten him and wanted Graham to play Al Capone in the new HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
As Graham recalls: “This is how your life can change in these moments. This is where, if you have that belief to stick to it to the best of your ability, the balance of fate changes.”
Boardwalk Empire was a critical and commercial hit, and Graham played Capone until 2014, getting nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award. Scorsese again brought him back for a role in his Netflix epic The Irishman in 2019, and since then, almost everything he’s touched has turned to gold, with the brilliant one-take Chef story Boiling Point, parts in Peaky Blinders and the Springsteen biopic Deliver me From Nowhere, plus the multi-Emmy winning Adolescence – which was executive produced by none other than his old Snatch mate, Brad Pitt.
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