If you have been keeping count of Owen Cooper’s award wins over the past year, you are going to need a bigger shelf as he has added another award to his name at the BAFTA 2026. The 16-year-old from Warrington won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actor at the Royal Festival Hall in London. His performance as Jamie Miller in Netflix’s Adolescence has now swept virtually every major awards ceremony on both sides of the Atlantic.
Accepting the award from presenter Lucy Punch, Cooper joked that the trophy was heavier than he expected, then noted that exactly a year ago he had been on a BAFTA stage presenting an award rather than receiving one.
Accepting the award he stated,
“In the words of John Lennon, you won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it. In my eyes you only need three things to succeed in life. One, an obsession. Two, a dream. And three, The Beatles.”
The BAFTA 2026 win completes Cooper’s clean sweep, almost 14 months to the day after Adolescence first dropped on Netflix. In that window, Cooper collected the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series, the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor, and the Critics’ Choice Award.
He also won at the Gotham Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the Royal Television Society Awards, among others. The BAFTA 2026 is the final piece as he now holds every major honour the industry has to offer for a single performance.
The Owen Cooper role that BAFTA 2026 celebrated
Adolescence was directed entirely by Philip Barantini in single continuous takes across four episodes, and premiered on Netflix on March 13, 2025. It became the platform’s second most-watched English-language series, crossing 141 million views in its first three months. The show is about the murder of a young girl, and a young boy being the prime suspect. It explores cultures of toxic masculinity and what the spread of incel culture does to young children.
Cooper’s episode, in which Jamie faces a clinical psychologist played by Erin Doherty across a single unbroken hour, drew particular attention. The technical and emotional demands of that episode alone would have been extraordinary for an experienced adult actor and Cooper was 15 when he filmed it. The show sweeped more awards as well at the BAFTA 2026.
A BAFTA win at 16 is the kind of thing that usually marks the peak of a career. These are honors well deserved, and opens an exciting canvas for what Cooper will do in his future in Hollywood.
Edited by Nibir Konwar