Netflix reveals extreme lengths taken to film the Adolescence door ram scene in one take

After finishing Adolescence, everyone is wondering how Netflix filmed specific scenes over and over again, including the police raid at the start.

Every episode is one take and each one had to be filmed at least 10 times to get it right, so did they really ram that front door down every time?!

The answer is yes! Netflix has revealed that the police officers rammed through 12 whole front doors in total, and it gets even crazier.

Every time a door was rammed down by the actors, an actual real-life PVC door specialist on set had to fit a brand-new one.

Q: Did they actually ram down the door during the opening police raid in Episode 1?

They sure did, and they rammed through 12 doors in total! Then, they had a PVC door specialist on set to fit a new door each time. What a job that is.

— Netflix UK & Ireland (@NetflixUK) March 19, 2025

That sounds like a lot of hard work, but Adolescence’s writer Jack Thorne said there’s a very important reason each episode was filmed in one take.

He told Digital Spy it “forces you to be partial” as a viewer, explaining: “What you can’t do is tell the whole story, you can only tell bits of the story.”

“You can only look one way for an hour, and then you have to stop looking,” he continued. “And that thing of the unblinking eye forces you into complexity, and hopefully forces the audience into complexity.”

Adolescence’s producer Philip Barantini said it also makes the show “feel real,” like the audience is “living and breathing these characters”.

The door ramming wasn’t the only scene they had to go to extreme lengths to film over and over again either.

They had a really clever way of filming the van paint scene, and it’s so interesting how they got the camera through the glass window.

Credit: Netflix

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The whole four-part crime drama is a logistical masterpiece, and cinematographer Matthew Lewis said it took a LOT of planning.

“You can’t do a shot list, so we didn’t have one. We mapped the area we were using and looked at how the camera would move within it, and we rehearsed it like a dance, between me and the cast,” he told Forbes.

“We’d plot the route and move all the puzzle pieces until it made sense. The biggest challenge was how to go from a real house to a fake police station. So, we had to find a studio near suburban homes.”

All that hard work definitely paid off.

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Featured image by: Netflix