It’s a chilly evening in a community centre in Gatley, a quiet suburb of Stockport. But underneath the glow of the hall’s overhead strip lights, a group of teenagers are also preparing for a moon landing. Or in the royal court of an imperious queen. Trekking in the Arctic. Screaming at a Taylor Swift concert.
All entirely imaginary scenarios, of course. Especially the one where I have to briefly stand in for Taylor Swift. But the performers are so full of energy and conviction that it’s hard not to be transported along with them. “As soon as we step through the doors, put our phones down, I feel like time just stops here, do you know what I mean?” one of the girls tells me. “It’s like a break from reality.”
This weeknight session is just one of the classes run by the Drama MOB, the Manchester drama school and talent agency founded by Esther Morgan and longtime Coronation Street actor Tina O’Brien. They’ve been in business since 2013, but over the past year, the whirlwind ascent of one of their star pupils has brought their work into the spotlight, too.
When Netflix’s Adolescence
The show marked Cooper’s first ever professional role; as the Adolescence cultural juggernaut gathered pace, breathless headlines seemed to suggest that Cooper had simply been plucked from nowhere for his television debut. But this wasn’t the full story. In the two years leading up to his casting, he’d attended lessons with Drama MOB – the same class that I’m visiting, in fact. Morgan describes him as a “very focused” pupil who “was up for a laugh as well”, while O’Brien notes that he “had his parents’ support behind him, which is obviously massive” for a young actor.
Back in January, the now 16-year-old became the youngest ever winner of the Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role on Television award at the Golden Globes, beating nominees with decades more experience. In his acceptance speech, Cooper spoke of how he “took a risk” on the classes, unsure if his interest in acting would ever amount to much. “I was the only boy there, it was embarrassing,” he said. “But I got through it.”
On Sunday night, he broke another industry record, becoming the youngest ever individual winner at acting union SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards after being crowned Best Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series. “We didn’t think we’d end up with a Golden Globe Award or an Emmy winner,” Morgan says. “We were laughing because he won the National Television Award first [in September] and it was the first time anybody’s ever won one of those [from the classes], and we were really pleased then.”
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Cooper as Jamie Miller, on the set of ‘Adolescence’. In the two years leading up to his casting, he’d attended lessons with Drama MOB (Netflix)
Morgan and O’Brien have been friends for more than three decades, since meeting at the age of 11. “We started high school together,” O’Brien explains. When her daughter Scarlett was about three or four, she started looking around for local drama groups, but “really struggled to find anywhere that was good enough quality”, as Morgan puts it. So they decided, she says, “let’s just set up our own”.
Given their joint experience, it made sense. O’Brien has played Sarah Louise Platt – daughter of Corrie icon Gail – since 1999; Morgan had previously taught drama to primary school pupils. They held their first class in January 2013 down the road in Didsbury, another leafy Manchester suburb, and “we had seven children come along”, Morgan says. These days, they run 29 classes across the region, and have just under 600 children attending each week.
Their casting agency, which Morgan oversees, launched in 2015, “because we were getting lots of requests from people wanting really good northern kids, because they were struggling to find them. Obviously, we have them coming to class”. They now have about 300 performers on the books, with ages ranging from newborns to grown-ups.
We didn’t think we’d end up with a Golden Globe Award or an Emmy winner
Esther Morgan
Over the years, they’ve built up their reputation with casting directors, who are “now coming to us directly for different jobs”. Pupils have “done feature films, we’ve got a number of regulars on the soaps”, Morgan says, and in 2018, one of their students played a young Elton John in the John Lewis Christmas advert.
For the teens in Gatley, the session eases in with everyone sharing a bit of news in a circle, from mock exam results to working up the courage to join a new club at school to excitement about the Champions League. Then it’s onto warm-up games and improv exercises, designed to get them thinking about how to use their physicality and be creative with the space on stage. Some of them have been coming along for years, and have their sights set on professional work; some are just here for the fun of it, or for the confidence boost it provides.
Accessibility has always been important to Morgan and O’Brien. Acting is an increasingly elitist profession, and the “class ceiling” can force talented young performers to give up early on. “In each of our classes, we’ve got a number of places that are free,” Morgan explains. “We’ve both said it was something really important to us – we don’t want there to be a barrier.”
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Drama MOB founders Tina O’Brien and Esther Morgan (Drama MOB)
O’Brien agrees. “As a child myself, I know that I was very fortunate to be able to go to drama classes, but we didn’t have any money,” she says. “I remember my mum and dad saying, ‘Well, you can choose between going to drama or gymnastics.’” She was “so fortunate” that she did choose the former – she’d go on to start working as an actor in her teens – “but for some children there’s not even the possibility of that”. Through their funded places, “we’re trying to really target those kids that really want to do it, but maybe they wouldn’t [otherwise] be able to”, Morgan adds.
And although they work with plenty of great casting directors in the North, the industry can still feel very London-centric – which can add another layer of expense for parents. “We would still like to see more things being cast here,” Morgan says. “Often, recalls are still happening in London, so you’ve got to factor in train fares for a child and an adult, maybe a hotel.”
Call it the Owen Cooper effect if you will, but since Adolescence aired, they’ve noticed a leap in the number of boys signing up for classes. As Cooper put it in his Golden Globes speech, there is still a lingering preconception that drama is somehow “embarrassing” or not something for boys.
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Cooper with his Golden Globe trophy (Getty)
But in Gatley, in the session for 12- and 13-year-olds, the gender split is almost 50/50; it skews more female in the adjacent session, for older teens, though the boys still make up a good third or so of the numbers. “It does leave you feeling positive afterwards, and like you can take on anything else, I guess,” one of them tells me.
The classes, Morgan says, are “somewhere they can express themselves and feel safe to do so with other boys. We’ve seen a bigger uptake since Owen – other boys going, ‘Oh actually, it’s alright to do drama.’” Sometimes, she adds, “sport might not be their thing, so they’re looking for something where they feel like they fit and they can meet other like-minded kids”. O’Brien is hopeful that they will see more of them keep acting for longer, rather than dropping out when they start high school. “You find when they’re younger, they’re not embarrassed or bothered. But they get to a certain age, and they’re like, ‘Ugh,’” she says.
She’s seen plenty of discussions online and in the media focusing on how boys are being brought up, asking, “Are we setting up young men to be all ‘I am a provider, I am strong, I don’t feel’?” But in the classes, the emphasis is on getting attuned to the emotions. “Here, it’s all about expressing – how does your character feel? How would you say that? And I think that’s really healthy. We’re both parents of boys, and I think for us personally, we would say that to be able to have those conversations and skills is incredible.”
Going forward, there are “other northern areas that we’d like to tap into” to launch more classes, Morgan says, but “rather than just opening up all over the place, we want to make sure that it’s [still] good quality”. The goal is to keep “pushing our northern talent”, finding the Owen Coopers of the future – and making sure they have fun too. “I remember, years ago, we used to take all the classes, and whatever mood you were in, by the end of the evening you were just so happy because they were so happy,” O’Brien says. “It’s such a lovely thing to be part of.”