Cover Owen Cooper, the youngest male Emmy winner, received his Emmy Award in Los Angeles on September 14, 2025 (Photo: Getty Images)
Owen Cooper, the youngest male Emmy winner, received his Emmy Award in Los Angeles on September 14, 2025 (Photo: Getty Images)
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English teenage actor Owen Cooper, 16, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. Previously, he made history as the youngest male Emmy winner with his first-ever on-screen role in ‘Adolescence’.
At the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday (September 14), Owen Cooper, a 15-year-old actor from Warrington, England, became the youngest male winner of the Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor with his first-ever on-screen role in Netflix’s Adolescence (2025). The filming took place when he was just 14.
Acting alongside English actor and film producer Stephen Graham, who co-created the four-part drama series and also won an Emmy for his role in it, Cooper delivered a haunting performance as 13-year-old Jamie Miller who stabbed his classmate to death in an unspecified northern English town. It tackles topics such as misogyny, social media and their impact on schoolchildren.
The four-part series became the most-streamed title in both the UK and the US within the first week of its release.
Cooper not only delivered a haunting, convincing performance; he also contributed to the script, making him a prodigious talent the industry should look out for.
Here are five things you should know about this actor.
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1. A natural in acting
Above Owen Cooper won Best Supporting Actor at the Emmy Awards 2025 (Photo: Instagram/@owencoooper)
Owen Cooper won Best Supporting Actor at the Emmy Awards 2025 (Photo: Instagram/@owencoooper)
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Cooper was interested in both football and acting. He joined an agency called The Drama Mob in Manchester, where he attended weekly acting classes and did a self-tape reading for Adolescence, which sent him through to the first proper audition. Graham was so impressed by his audition that he turned to the series’ director Philip Barantini and co-writer Jack Thorne and said, “I think that’s him.”
2. Staying in character
Above Owen Cooper at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards held at the Peacock Theater on September 14, 2025 in Los Angeles. (Photo: Getty Images)
Owen Cooper at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards held at the Peacock Theater on September 14, 2025 in Los Angeles. (Photo: Getty Images)
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During the last take of the episode, Erin Doherty, who plays Briony, the child psychologist who visits Miller in a detention centre, seized an unplanned moment on set to ask Cooper, who was yawning, “Am I boring you, Jamie?” The teen actor did not break out of character but smiled cheekily at his co-star as if sneering at the psychologist.
Barantini later said to The Standard: “[Adolescence] was his first ever job. I’ve worked with so many actors who can’t do what he can do. It’s just natural, he’s a natural-born talent.”
3. He contributed to the script
Above From left: Owen Cooper and Stephen Graham at the Emmy Awards 2025 (Photo: Getty Images)
From left: Owen Cooper and Stephen Graham at the Emmy Awards 2025 (Photo: Getty Images)
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Cooper’s potential in the industry is not only seen through his acting. He made a creative contribution to the script by providing the scriptwriters with notes on realistic teenage slang in Britain to make the role more natural and authentic. In an interview with Daily Mail, Graham, who co-wrote the script and plays the father of Owen’s character, praised the teen actor as the “greatest achievement” of the series.
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4. A daring and humble talent
Above Owen Cooper delivering his acceptance speech at the Emmy Awards 2025 (Photo: Getty Images)
Owen Cooper delivering his acceptance speech at the Emmy Awards 2025 (Photo: Getty Images)
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In his acceptance speech on Sunday, Cooper described his experience of standing on stage at the Emmy Awards as “surreal”. “When I started these drama classes a couple of years back, I didn’t expect to even be in the US, never mind here,” he said. “I think tonight proves if you listen and you focus and you step out of your comfort zone, you can achieve anything in life. Who cares if you get embarrassed? Anything can be possible. I was nothing about three years ago, I’m here now.”
He thanked his co-stars, the production team and his family, and added, “It may have my name on this award, but it really belongs to the people behind the camera.”
5. What’s next?
Above A poster of Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Photo: Instagram/@owencoooper)
A poster of Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Photo: Instagram/@owencoooper)
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The prodigy confirmed his next acting opportunity even before Adolescence finished filming. He was cast as the young Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (slated for 2026), which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. He will also star in the romantic comedy-drama series Film Club, co-written by The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood, which is expected for release by the end of 2025.
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
