Is the Netflix Movie ‘Steve’ Based on a True Story? What Inspired the New Cillian Murphy Drama

Steve on Netflix—which began streaming today—definitely seems like the kind of movie that would be based on a true story. This is in part because much of the movie is partially filmed in a documentary style, via a documentary crew that shows up to shoot a special on a reform school England.

Cillian Murphy stars in Steve as the eponymous role, and he also produced the film via his independent production company, Big Things Films, which he launched with Alan Moloney in February 2024. The first was last year’s Small Things like These, directed by Tim Mielants, who is back again to direct Murphy in Steve. Murphy stars as the head teacher at a posh reform school for boys with behavioral issues, facing funding cuts in the 1990s. We follow Steve on a particularly tough day at the school, in which he can no longer keep it together for the sake of the kids. In addition to Murphy, the Steve cast includes Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo, Simbi Ajikawo, and Emily Watson.

Despite the documentary film crew, which is used as a framing device to tell the story, Steve is not a documentary, and Steve is not based on a true story. Read on to learn more.

Is the Steve movie on Netflix based on a true story?

The 2025 Steve movie is not based on a true story. The people in the movie are not based on people in real life. The movie is a fictional story, adapted from a fictional novel. Author Max Porter penned the script for the movie, by adapting a new version of his 2023 novel Shy, about a troubled student at a British reform school for boys in the ’90s. The movie version shifts the focus from the student, Shy, to the head teacher at the school, Steve (Murphy) who struggles to keep it together for the sake of the kids.

In interview for the Steve production notes, Porter said it occurred to him to retell his novel from the point-of-view of the teacher, rather than the student, based on the reception he got from readers on his book tour to the character.

“On the book tour I met some incredible people,” Porter said, “who would stand up and say, ‘Thank you. I did this job for 40 years, and it’s hard, day in, day out. I was abused and screamed at but wouldn’t change a day.’ And so hearing that –– about social care of any kind, I thought, what if you dialed into one person’s duty of care to these young people?”

Porter had worked with Murphy before on a stage production of Porter’s debut novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. When Murphy asked his longtime friend for ideas for a feature film, Porter told Murphy about a chapter from Shy—a chapter about Steve—that had been cut from the final version. It turned out Porter had over 30,000 words on the character of Steve. Murphy and his producing partner Alan Moloney, thought it would be the perfect in for the film.

“I wanted to concentrate on the life of one teacher under intense pressure who cares for these boys,” Porter said in that same press notes interview. “As a novelist, I love to put people under enormous pressure and see how they bend and flex and break and recover. Steve was an easy character for me to focus on, because I love him.”

Porter wrote the movie version of Steve specifically for Murphy to play. And Murphy, raised by a family of teachers himself, was thrilled to step into the role.

“Both my mother and father are retired teachers,” Murphy said in an interview for the press notes. “My grandfather was a head teacher in a school, and all my aunts and uncles are teachers. So I felt I had it in my gene pool.”

That said, while the characters in both the book and the movie are made up, Porter did intentional set his story in the real world of England in the 1990s.

“There are loads of reasons why the book and film is set in the ’90s for me,” Porter said in the press notes interview. “Partly because it was the end of many years of Conservative government. That had severe implications for social care, and so schools like Stanton Wood were closing. Schools like this no longer exist, and you can completely re-engineer a society with ideological decisions that you make when you are in government––as we’ve seen in England for the last 14 years in this country (with a Conservative government).”