James Norton: from playing a psychopath in Happy Valley to Hollywood
He talks to Anna van Praagh about fame anxiety, the problem with being posh and why we all need to stand up to Trump
By Anna van Praagh
21 September 2017
James Norton is staring down the barrel of the lens, narrowing his ice blue eyes, running a hand through his wavy blond hair and changing the position of his arms for the camera. The shoot is running late but Norton — who, by the way, is intimidatingly good-looking, embarrassingly good-looking, so good-looking that it’s awkward — is the picture of patience and charm.
Later, when we sit down together in a grotty pub in Kensington he’s so polite that we argue for a while over who is going to buy whom a glass of fizzy water (he wins). He’s scruffier in real life, wearing worn black vegan Veja trainers (‘I love them because everything’s sustainable and ethically minded’), Levi’s (‘which probably aren’t so vegan’), a ‘crappy old white T-shirt, which I live in’ and a jacket he bought this summer at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Festival, where he ‘raved like I was 19’. God knows he deserves a break after a whirlwind three years since he gave the performance of a liftetime as psychopath Tommy Lee Royce in Sally Wainwright’s BBC drama, Happy Valley. The finale was watched by 10 million people, and before long you couldn’t switch on the telly without seeing Norton on every channel, playing a crime-fighting 1950s cleric on ITV in Grantchester, and Prince Andrei in the BBC drama War and Peace.
Now his star is set to go stratospheric with a lead role in the remake of the cult 1990s classic Flatliners, co-produced by Michael Douglas, and a starring role in the new BBC series McMafia, which is being hailed as the new Night Manager.
They are big roles and will propel him to another level of celebrity. Is he worried about becoming that famous?
‘Yes, it’s terrifying because right now it’s a lovely place where if we walked down the street maybe in 20 minutes someone would stare. Or you get the people on the Tube who sit there with their phones pretending to text and then the flash goes off and you’re sitting there going, “You’re f***ing kidding me.” But most of the time you get people politely coming over going, “I’m sorry to stop you, but I just want to say I loved Happy Valley,” and you go, “Great”.
‘This Flatliners film or McMafia could propel me into the next stage,’ he continues, ‘and at what point do you go: “F***. I really almost wish I hadn’t moved into that place because now I can’t walk into a pub?”’
Fame feels ‘out of control’, ‘exposing’, ‘unnerving’, but of course it’s an inevitable byproduct (‘a weird side effect’) of success in the industry he is in. ‘You can’t really work with the best directors and the best actors and have the best scripts available to you if you don’t put yourself in front of the public, as they define whether you’re a success or not. So in a way it’s a kind of inevitability, which you sort of have to deal with.’
People come up to him ‘once every hour, half an hour’, and because he’s conscious of being recognised, ‘every interaction’s a little bit different. I am a worrier for sure,’ he says quietly. ‘I’ve had moments where I’ve been thinking about it, you know, at 4 o’clock in the morning when you’re feeling a bit anxious… sometimes I’m a bit nervous about it or sometimes you feel a bit weird and you’re not quite sure why, and you try and articulate it with someone and it’s really hard to articulate because most people just go, “F*** off.”’
Flatliners, in which he plays one of a group of medical students who stop each other’s hearts to experience the afterlife, was shot in Toronto last year and is his first experience of a big-budget studio movie. He’d done ‘nothing of this scale’ before. ‘I was completely the new boy,’ he laughs. ‘The amount of money they had for things! The stunts.’ On his first day on set, ‘I was like f***, this is way out of my depth, playing an American as well, which I’ve done a bit, but I was playing an American amongst Americans.’ Working with Michael Douglas — a ‘lovely, warm, conscientious man’ — was a career highlight, and generally on set he ‘had the time of [his] life’.
Afterwards, Norton went on location in France, Russia and Serbia to shoot McMafia, in which he plays Alex Godman, a British-raised hedge-fund-trader son of a Russian mafia boss who is drawn back into organised crime. It’s a clever multi-layered drama about how globalisation has connected the corporate and criminal worlds and how we’re all complicit. The screenplay was created by Hossein Amini, who also wrote the screenplay for Drive, and of all his projects it’s the one Norton is most excited about.
‘Personally I think it’s The Night Manager with a bit more depth,’ he says. ‘You’ve got all these gangsters from across the world and they’re all incredibly rich and layered individuals, whereas I thought The Night Manager was great, but it was a bit more glossy, maybe.’
He came back to London briefly to shoot Hampstead, in which he plays Diane Keaton’s son and about which he is typically self-effacing — ‘It was amazing but I didn’t really do much in it.’
Norton, 32, grew up in the pretty market town of Malton in North Yorkshire, the son of Hugh and Lavinia, both lecturers. He has one younger sister who is now a doctor, and has described his childhood as ‘idyllic’. He went to Ampleforth — known as the Catholic Eton — where ‘I had an odd time, because it’s quite a testosterone kind of environment. It sounds ridiculous, being quite candid, but I went through puberty quite late and it makes a huge difference if you’re at boarding school, and I loved theatre and music. I wasn’t macho.’ He now sees not fitting in as an advantage, ‘because I wasn’t so in with the cool kids, I managed to do a bit of work’. He went on to get a first in theology from Cambridge and then went to Rada.
He quickly picked up good roles, playing Carey Mulligan’s boyfriend in An Education (‘I was so nervous… I was just like, you know, a wreck’) and appearing in Laura Wade’s critically acclaimed play, Posh. Theatre work, he says, gave him the best grounding, ‘particularly in this mad industry where there’s so much posturing and hot air and most of it’s a load of crap’.
The fact that most of Britain’s top actors — think Redmayne, Hiddleston, and Cumberbatch — all went to public school is a touchy subject. Norton recently sympathised with Redmayne, saying: ‘Two Oscar nominations in two years, it’s extraordinary. But half the press coverage is about the fact he went to Eton.’ But it is a subject he is ‘nervous’ of engaging with, ‘because the more it’s talked about, the more people associate you with it.
‘It’s when the conversation is slightly inflammatory,’ he continues, ‘and one-sided and there’s a level of blame attached to someone who’s been to a public school, because the thing is you can’t turn the clock back.’ He points out that there are other problems in the industry that get less attention. ‘I mean, lots of people are in dynasties, that’s a leg up,’ he continues. ‘That’s never questioned. The idea of people being sons of sons or daughters of daughters. That’s a massive advantage. There is nepotism and that’s less of a conversation.’
Politically, Norton is active and engaged, but is wary of using his celebrity as a platform. ‘I did tweet about the second referendum and I went down to the protests,’ he says, ‘I’m not apolitical or apathetic by any means… I went down to the march against Trump at Whitehall and I sent one photo on Twitter, and those two tweets got so much hate and vitriol from people. It was just a very incendiary reaction, very inflamed. I was really shocked but at the same time I do sometimes feel like at some point we’re all going to have to start shouting because it is getting so terrifying.’
He hopes he can make a difference through the roles he chooses. ‘There’s a lot of McMafia which is about transparency and corruption and that’s a conversation I would like to hopefully be a part of,’ he says, ‘particularly with what’s going on with Trump. Trump recently repealed a law which said that oil barons don’t have to make their financial dealings public so they are now basically behind a curtain, allowed to do what the f*** they want. That is criminal… And what he’s doing to the environment, what he’s doing to divide an already divided nation is… I think at some point, whether you’re an actor or not, we’re all going to have to start shouting, however much it’s going to piss people off. I haven’t got to that point and I’m nervous about it.
‘I follow the news and I have my own strong political standing,’ he continues. ‘I voted for Corbyn. Owen Jones got in touch with me on Twitter and asked me if I wanted to speak at one of the rallies because he’d seen one of my tweets. I actually couldn’t do it because I was working, but I did in my head have a speech and I was terrified about this prospect of standing up — I mean, I was absolutely terrified, and I didn’t and I’m not sure if I would now.
‘And then you get other people who go, “Look, you’re an actor, just do what you know, do what you’re good at. You’re not a politician, you’re not a journalist,” and they’re right, you know, to a point.’
An issue he does feel confident talking out about is diabetes. He was diagnosed with Type 1 when he was 22 and is keen to dispel preconceptions about the illness. ‘Yes, please! Let’s finally tell everyone we’re not these obese wasters who sit on our arses eating candyfloss,’ he laughs. ‘It’s a manageable condition. It doesn’t make me tired or unhealthy or ill, it’s just something I have to be aware of. I have a pen here,’ he says, showing me. ‘I inject myself probably about eight to 10 times a day. In fact I’m probably due a jab now, if you don’t mind.’
He certainly couldn’t look in better health, a fact not lost on directors who seem to want him to strip on screen at every opportunity. Does he mind being objectified? Doesn’t he find having to parade around showing off his muscles a bit, well, embarrassing? ‘If I had the choice I wouldn’t,’ he says breezily, ‘but what I won’t do is really complain about it, because there’s a time and a place… You just have to take it.’
To keep in shape he cycles, swims, plays tennis, hikes, swims in rivers whenever he can and is looking to get into Pilates after recent problems with his back. He has just bought a house in Peckham, where he hangs out at Frank’s and eats at Peckham Bazaar.
He’s been going out with the actress Jessie Buckley since they met on the set of War and Peace. ‘It’s tough because you don’t see each other,’ he says of their relationship. ‘She’s been away for a year. She’s done three jobs back to back. We see each other on average once every six weeks.’
As for future projects he keeps a list on his phone of directors and actors with whom he would love to work. ‘Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Clio Barnard, Alfred Molina, Stanley Tucci. I met the Coen brothers recently for a film — didn’t get it. You get pretty good at rejections. You do calcify a little bit. You become good at the hits. And now I do less of the meetings, but the meetings I do go for are often ones which are, for example, going and meeting both of the Coen brothers and shaking their hand and then not getting it — it’s is a bit like, “Oh f***.” But it’s just a privilege to meet them and tell them that I love their work.’
‘This industry... throws you around,’ he reflects. ‘People who coast and love a content life, it’s not for them. It’s a roller coaster and you have these incredible highs. You also have incredible lows and every job offer is complemented by five rejections.’
Would he move to the US? ‘I’m not averse to it. I would go with the work and if there was a really great opportunity. I think Hollywood is this beast and there is a commercial element to it, which I’m aware of — the fact that it’s so much more profitable and money-orientated… You could get really rich.’ He pauses. ‘That’s one way of thinking about it.’
He shrugs. ‘But then you do lose your life.’ James Norton is staring down the barrel of a lens.
