Owen Cooper: How a Schoolboy Conquered the Golden Globes and Changed Acting for a Generation | Adolescence

Standing on stage at the Golden Globe Awards in front of Hollywood’s elite, Owen Cooper said the experience simply “wasn’t real.”

The 16-year-old from Warrington took home the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance in Netflix’s incel drama series, Adolescent, which was one of the big winners at the ceremony and has dominated the cultural conversation about male toxicity for much of 2025.

Adolescent’s success at the Golden Globes (it took home four awards) follows its win at the Emmys, where it managed six gongs, including one for Cooper. Although it was unusual for the young actor, those who know him say his passion was there from the beginning.

Esther Morgan, who co-founded Drama Mob with Coronation Street actress Tina O’Brien, tutored Cooper, and says it was clear he was a talent from the start.

“You can tell he definitely wants it,” she says. “He wasn’t messing around when it came to listening, taking directions and learning his lines.”

Morgan admits the school couldn’t prepare him for that level of success, but pushes back on the narrative that Cooper “came from nowhere.”

He spent two years with Drama Mob before the teen selection process, which involved several rounds and initially had more Morgan students in the running. But Cooper made an impression on director Shaheen Baig. “His name kept coming up,” Morgan says.

Co-writer Jack Thorne said the first time he worked with Cooper was in rehearsals for the third episode, the show’s intense interview between the teenager and a psychologist, played by Erin Doherty.

“He came in perfect and ready to go, but he was under a lot of pressure,” Thorne says. “Slowly but surely – with help from [director] Philip Barantini and Irene – he kind of caught himself. By Friday it was Jimmy.

Cooper’s former teacher is an ardent advocate for northern actors, who compete on an increasingly uneven playing field. The migration from Hollywood has made London a more attractive center for studios, further centralizing the industry with more than half of production being produced in the capital.

Morgan says northern actors are being left out, including the upcoming Cooper.

“More shows should be presented and produced here,” she says. “We need more casting directors working here because for some of our young people they don’t have the money to travel back and forth to London to do casting.”

That’s not the only challenge facing the next Cooper.

On stage at the Golden Globe Awards, Cooper said he was the only boy in his drama school class and it was “awkward.” Morgan says there is a “significant drop” in the number of boys attending her classes once they get to secondary school and she takes over activities such as football and rugby. Acting can be considered soft, or — to use Generation Z terminology — “awkward.”

This is also supported statistically, with 17,000 boys enrolled in GCSE drama in the UK in 2025, compared to 35,700 girls, with a similar proportion at A-level. But Morgan says Cooper’s success does influence that dynamic.

“Since Owen has been so successful, we’ve had more boys coming into drama,” says Morgan. “I think it helped with that [by] To have that role model that says, “Yes, I went to drama classes, I tried it.” I think this has really helped some of these boys get out of their comfort zone.

Much has been made of “Teenage”‘s presence on Netflix and the huge audience it has reached. In the week of its first release, the episode attracted 6.45 million viewers, while the second episode recorded 5.9 million – breaking UK records in the process.

But at its heart, the series is a distinctly gritty Northern drama. Most of the main actors, like Cooper and Stephen Graham, are from the Northwest. It was filmed on location in Pontefract and Sheffield.

Thorne is cautiously optimistic that it could herald a new wave of working-class British dramas that have not traditionally traveled well internationally. “I know from trying to sell things I made abroad before that British accents and ‘issues’ were not seen as having an audience abroad,” he says.

“But who knows? TV is still a largely conservative industry, and they may come back to thinking that a guy speaking RP on a horse is a better bet.”