No one will love you like your mother, and that ideal is on full display in Christine Tremarco’s devastating performance in Netflix’s Adolescence. At only four episodes, the Jack Thorne-Stephen Graham creation has taken the world by storm, and it makes us question what we would do if our child was guilty of an unspeakable act. It’s all there on Tremanco’s face: disbelief, heartbreak, and confusion. Is there a thing as a perfectly raised child? All Manda Miller could do was love her son, Jamie, as much as she possibly could, and Tremanco puts her entire loving heart into her performance.
I imagine that it’s difficult for every mother to figure out how to give their teenage son room to grow on their own private terms while also trying to maneuver how to be there for them. You want your kid to know that they can come to you for anything, but you don’t want to suffocate them. Do you let them solely come to you? Is there an assumption that teenage boys will look to their fathers for support first as they navigate the tumultuous road to becoming young men? When Owen Cooper’s Jamie is taken to the station to be questioned in the murder of Katie Leonard, he asks for his father to be his guardian. “Why did he pick you?” Tremanco’s Manda asks him, her face soaked with drying tears, her voice trembling.
The fluidity in the chemistry between Tremanco and Graham (who plays her husband, Eddie) is extraordinary. In episode four, they are poised to celebrate Eddie’s fiftieth birthday, and this married couple get frisky at the kitchen sink before something derails their entire day. Tremando reveals just how long she and Graham have known each other, and that friendship transfers to their bond as a married couple tremendously. You’d think they have played against each other for years and years.
Tremanco’s performance is uninhibited, her voice raising its pitch and volume when she confronts the police at the station. She shrinks, though, when emotions run high in her own kitchen and her husband dashes any hope she holds onto about running away to Liverpool to escape prying eyes.
I think of Manda Miller quite a bit since my first viewing of Adolescence. They say that “mother knows best,” but Tremanco paints the portrait of a woman who has the world questioning her instincts, abilities and capacity for love.
Adolescence is streaming now on Netflix.
