James Norton
Human Power Comes From Human Fragility
Carlo Mazzoni in conversation with James Norton
CARLO MAZZONI Both of us are type one
diabetics. We are using similar technologies – while you use Dexcom, I use Libre. These technologies changed our lives. We are both essentially injecting insulin.
JAMES NORTON I'm going to move on to
a pump in the next few months after the play finishes, I'm going to start using an Omni pump which links to the Dexcom. It's all changing so fast – isn’t it? I like that it’s changing at a rapid pace. My blood sugar levels are good with injections, I feel fine but I could be doing better. It's just those annoying nights, when I wake up in the middle of the night, and my blood sugar level is high, and the technology is there, and that’s just life.
CARLO MAZZONI With the pump, shall we go for more standardized days? I'm a bit concerned that with the pump I will have even more limitations in my daily life.
JAMES NORTON As an actor, I have to cover the sensor up every night, I have my micro-phone packed on the arm as well. I spend some of the play completely naked – usually you'd have a microphone pack around your belt but since I’m naked it goes on the arm.
Microphone on one arm, the sensor on the
other – it's quite sweet, the sound guy has
now called it my puck. I never called it a puck before. They cover that with a skin-colored bandage and so I look like an action man with straps on.
CARLO MAZZONI I guess glycated hemoglobin is fine, right?
JAMES NORTON It's within the range of a pre-diabetic case. I've just had a bad two months. When it changes from winter to summer it’s a disaster, and my insulin becomesless effective. Last week I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico where it's hot. Having had a good winter and my sugars were pretty good suddenly summer comes and… you know –
CARLO MAZZONI When were you diagnosed with type one diabetes?
JAMES NORTON I was twenty-two. My little sister has been diabetic since she was nine years old. Her age is closer to sort of the norm to be diagnosed with diabetes.
CARLO MAZZONI I found out when I was ten. My mom got much more scared than me – maybe because I was too young to understand the severity of it. My father has diabetes too – he got it a few years before me, when he was forty years old. When I was diagnosed, my father had already been on treatment for a few years, therefore it was not a big deal for my family.
JAMES NORTON I have always been the kind of protective big brother, taking my sister to parties. Coming back from parties, she had just had some birthday cake and her blood sugar levels were crazy high. It was my responsibility as the older brother to make sure that her sugars were relatively okay.
I remember coming back from the birthday party, and not wanting my mom to find out, so we went for a run around the local village to try and bring her sugar down.
CARLO MAZZONI Were you kind of expecting to be diagnosed with diabetes?
JAMES NORTON No, I was not. I had the traditional symptoms. I was thirsty and I was losing weight quickly – at that time I assumed it was because of all those physical exertions and exercises I was practicing at drama school. The drama school was about a lot of movement and exercise so I thought maybe it has to do with that – but in some way, in my mind, I knew that I was showing all the symptoms.
CARLO MAZZONI Why did it take so long? As soon as you had the symptoms, you just had to test your blood with a finger.
JAMES NORTON I was in denial. I was
pushing it away. I didn't want it to happen.
I liked partying all the time, going to festivals and the idea of… – I was just in denial. I went to a doctor and I already knew – when I went in and I did a blood test – my blood sugar level was like 25 or something crazy like that. The weirdest moment was when the nurse looked at the result and with a big smile on her face said «you're right you're diabetic».
I had all the symptoms. In my sleep, I was
dreaming I was thirsty and I woke up being
thirsty. Once, I was on a bus going to central London, it was a half hour long trip, thirty minutes – I didn't have the two litres of water I used to carry around with me,
and I panicked. I needed water, I needed my water. I was drinking water to the point where I was throwing up water, and then drinking it, and vomiting and drinking it...I clearly kind of knew. When it happened, I was lucky I had my sister and I spoke to her a lot. She had proven to me that one could live just fine with it. She was nineteen at the time and she had traveled around the world. I was calling her often, getting her quite upset. She told me she had spent so many years getting over these anxieties of being a diabetic, and now I was bringing it all back.
CARLO MAZZONI I keep telling myself how lucky I am to have found out when I was ten, because at ten you are still a kid with regular activities, living with your parents and with a precise daily schedule. I was a bourgeoise boy in a bourgeoise North Italian family.
At twenty-two, you were in the middle
of clubbing and going out with friends. All of the sudden, you needed to change your
lifestyle completely.
When I grew up and turned twenty-two,
I didn’t have to restrict myself because I
already knew how to deal with myself and my disease. I never had to decide to not go to any party. I was in the club, house music, vodka, dirty corners and all – and I was taking my blood from my finger to test it. I was so used to that. I can’t imagine how tough it could have been to find out in the middle of that year.
JAMES NORTON There are other sides to this, that balance it. At twenty-two your body has sort of arrived at adulthood and so you don’t have to navigate that period of adolescence where everything is changing. I watched my sister go through puberty, it was hard for her: she was becoming an adult both emotionally and biologically, and she wanted to experience
this and nothing else – instead she had to take care of her diabetes. I was grateful to have not had it through my teenage years and that my body was already stabilized and experienced by the time I was an adult.
As I see it now, I was confused and angry but I was also quite stoic. I didn't stop partying at all. I had hilarious times. For example, I threw a house party which I had organized right before I was diagnosed and that I decided to still have after my diagnosis. There were a lot of people with me in my childhood bedroom staring at my monitor – and if the result was between five and seven, it was like – wow ok, let’s go for one more shot!
CARLO MAZZONI My friends wanted to
be tested, so a lot of time I had to do tests
for everyone.
JAMES NORTON I was in a bar with a friend and he said «test me», his blood sugar was 13.
He was high – fuck, dude – I didn’t know what to do with this information – maybe you should go and see a doctor. He freaked out, you could tell, I saw his face progressively go white.
( I felt invincible, like I was going
to live forever and nothing could
stop me )
CARLO MAZZONI Did he end up getting diagnosed?
JAMES NORTON No, he didn’t. It was almost weirdly reassuring to see a non-diabetic's sugars go so high, like we're not the only ones who creep up.
CARLO MAZZONI When you're on a stage
I guess you push yourself a bit higher before the performance.
JAMES NORTON Usually, I go up to about
eight or nine around the middle of the first
half, and then by the interval I'm back
down because of the injection I took.
CARLO MAZZONI I would be concerned
about going low rather than going high.
I can stand high glucose for half an hour,
one hour maybe, whatever – not too high,
right – I would not be able to stand a low
glucose status for more than five minutes.
JAMES NORTON I have hypers on stage,
a lot. I have my Dexcom and the little receiver in my pocket. It buzzes when I'm high. You're on stage, it’s all about the play and the audience – instead your mind is about glucose.
I go to the side of the stage, I have to
consider quickly – how much insulin I should get – I must not overcorrect – ok, just go – where am I at? The complicated thing is that I spend about 20 minutes with no clothes on.
If I go high during that time, I have no idea.
The backstage people have my receiver in
their hands and they can give me a sign.
Once, the receiver disconnected from my
sensor. You know the play: we have violent
scenes, vicious and we don't skip anything, we perform it all. There's the cutting, there's the raping… I've had scenes where Caleb – Jude's boyfriend for a period, who raped Jude – people from backstage wanted to tell me I was high, so they told him to communicate it subtly with me. So, we were in the middle of a rape scene and I was there, lying underneath
his body, when he whispered «16.3, 16.3».
About a month ago, I had a bad hypo on
stage. It was one of the scariest things
I've ever gone through in my life. I was
dripping with sweat; I was discombobulated.
You know about Jude. Thank God I have not experienced the type of trauma which he has experienced but of course I'm using my diabetes every single day playing that role because it's an access point for me to
understand Jude’s pain. I hate the fact that
my immune system is killing the cells in my
pancreas every day which are creating insulin.
CARLO MAZZONI Did you not have a feeling it was coming?
JAMES NORTON When low glucose is coming, I get a kind of anxiety. I feel worried about life. I feel this existential dread. If I’m low at around 4 PM, I start to feel life is not worth living. As a play, A Little Life is full of worry and anxiety. I am on stage and I’m already feeling it – I'm not low yet – no, I'm fine – but it could be coming.
CARLO MAZZONI Which is the glucose dose you are taking when this happens?
JAMES NORTON It's called Lift. It's a shot.
It's stronger than anything else. It's the
fastest pre-coke I've ever had. If you have
ever experienced a bad hypo, these glucose doses are brilliant.
CARLO MAZZONI I have stuff like honey,
that is good and efficient, it's also healthy –
but sometimes, I guess you know what
I’m saying, honey could be the last thing
you would put in your mouth.
JAMES NORTON I hate it. At night
time, I have a smoothie, I have it by my bed. I hear the buzz, and then I kind of half-wake up, drink, and go back to sleep quickly, and it doesn't interrupt my sleep.
CARLO MAZZONI I spent a lot of time when I was younger going around with fruit juice, pear, peach, apricots, whatever, but then I realized how many conservatives they have.
And they ended up giving me stomach problems – like reflux and stuff.
JAMES NORTON You need good sleep.
If I wake up and I lose an hour or two of
sleep, there are other health implications
on top of my diabetes.
CARLO MAZZONI If I'm not precise in the
glucose level during the night, I will wake up. Even if I go just a little higher, I will wake up.
JAMES NORTON Really? You wake up at
what height?
CARLO MAZZONI 6.5. If I don't wake up,
when I wake up, it's like I've slept half of
the hours that I actually did.
JAMES NORTON Wow! I don't get that at all. I can sleep, I can get a high, crazy high
and not notice.
CARLO MAZZONI For me, my biggest
trouble is sleeping..
JAMES NORTON That's why you need the
pump. As soon as you get to 6.5, it administers insulin. If you go low, it takes it out.
CARLO MAZZONI Being diabetic is about
being sick, but I don't feel that I am sick.
I could say that diabetes has been a teacher in my life.
JAMES NORTON I don't call it a disease nor a sickness. I always call it a condition.
It's something we live with and if you are able to control it well, you take the steps required to keep the levels as close to normal as possible, and not take too many risks, then you can lead a normal, long, and healthy life. It's an additional part of our life experience. I was able to go and party hard, but at the point I needed to pay attention to my diabetes, my brain would just clear and flick into gear and I would be able to sort of sober up.
As you're giving the condition what it requires, it can be just like bad eyesight or an allergy.
CARLO MAZZONI I have a friend of mine,
she's a mom, she got pregnant twice, she has two kids and even after twenty years of living with diabetes, she's still suffering a lot. Can it be disrespectful saying that diabetes is a teacher, not a disease? To say that diabetes is just a condition when there are people that are not able to control it yet?
JAMES NORTON You find out later how to
manage your sugar levels. Before this, you
have that kind of crazy up and down. Also,
I have to acknowledge that I have access
to the best food. I can afford a good quality
smoothie, a fruit juice which isn't full of
preservatives which is like four or five pounds a bottle and I can afford it. I can afford the glucose shots. I have my sister and my mom diabetic, who have been and still are next to me if the anxiety grows too much. As a single mom of two kids who doesn't have the time or the resources to control her diabetes as well as you and I do, yes, I can imagine saying diabetes is a teacher could be offensive.
At twenty-two I felt invincible, like I was
going to live forever and nothing could touch me. Suddenly, I found out I had this condition. I understood I became part of a community of people who had something wrong with them. In some way one piece of our bodies was dying or failing or whatever it was. People were talking about being celiac or epileptic, or maybe dyslexic. I was diabetic and I had suddenly been given this empathy for those who have something wrong with them. The fallibility of human beings.
( I hate the fact that my immune system is killing the cells in my pancreas every day which are creating insulin )
I was like, I'm fallible. I'm finite. I'm going to
die. And at twenty-two, you wrote in those
lines you sent me before this interview – you realize that you were an adult much quicker than your peers.
CARLO MAZZONI When I was thirty years
old, I wrote a book about it in Italy that got
a good audience. Writing it, I understood
that my life was not about getting older like
other kids – but it was about expiring earlier. Honestly, this gave me strength, not concern.
It was the moment I realized I was an
adult, not a kid anymore – and this moment occurred to me earlier, if I compared myself with my friends.
After fifteen years of diabetes, when I was
twenty-five, I was able to manage it –
I was feeling confident, and strong. Today
I'm a complete control freak. I don't know
about you but diabetes has made me become a control freak. I need to see every detail of everything I'm doing. On the other hand, instead, I understood that I am fragile. I understood that my fragility is the reason why I feel so strong. I am proud of my body's fragility.
JAMES NORTON When you are a diabetic
who turns into a control freak, it's good for
diabetes. I'm obsessive. I'm obsessive about my health, I'm obsessive about my diabetes. I inject probably twenty times a day because I'm trying to balance it exactly.
CARLO MAZZONI I guess it's well linked to your career as an actor: knowing yourself and your body is part of your job.
JAMES NORTON And I don't go to the toilet, I don't leave. I do it in front of people. I was worried that I was going to become a diabetic actor. I knew I was good. I wanted people to learn about me and my work in isolation and not to be noticed as that diabetic actor. I had never talked about diabetes in interviews till… I was at the Jonathan Ross talk show, one of his backstage guys saw me inject. We were
in front of a live studio audience and the host cupped the camera to me and said: Oh James, we hear that you're diabetic, do you want to talk about it? And I was like, «Fuck, I've never talked about it». It was this huge load of people watching me. I said «Yes, I am, I'm a diabetic». It was forced on me, basically.
The tabloids run it the following day… strange articles. I got this influx on social media or by my agent, or just about everyone I'd meet: mostly from parents of diabetic kids saying «My child has just found out that you're a diabetic and they are watching all your shows. It means a lot to them you're leading this normal life and you're on stage for four hours…».
I love my work and I love being an actor. I also enjoy the sideshow of being in the public eye, going to all the parties and that stuff – but the most rewarding part of that whole thing has been communicating
with diabetics or parents of diabetics.
Without being too grand, it's like acknowl-
edging that I can be a role model to people.
I didn't become the diabetic actor at all.
CARLO MAZZONI Before editing magazines, when I was younger, I released three novels – one of them was about diabetes. I wrote it when I was thirty-one. We didn't have social media at the time, but a lot of letters came to the publisher and many times it was because they were scared. Messages were coming from diabetic kids, but most of the time, the senders were their parents.
And I felt I could help people who were
scared. We can give a lot of help to a lot
of people, but helping and comforting
someone that is scared is a different layer.
JAMES NORTON One of the women who's doing the prosthetics on the play – about three or four weeks ago, she found out her six-year-old son was diabetic. I can sense her anxiety is going to affect him and his life.
I see the guilt those parents feel about a kid who runs high after a birthday party having eaten a piece of cake. And the parents think, I'm killing my child, I'm damaging my child.
I'm counseling more parents than natural
diabetics saying it's okay. It's okay if they
go a little high sometimes. People live their
lives and you live in a city and the pollution
is bad for you. You have no idea what's going to happen. So just ease off because you, as a parent, will damage your child more than the diabetes if you let the anxiety get to you.
CARLO MAZZONI In order to play the main role of the story – in order to play Jude in A Little Life – was it enough to read, to study the book, to put yourself in it – or did you feel that you had to meet the writer?
JAMES NORTON Meeting Hanya Yanagihara and building a friendship with her, has been an integral part of this whole experience. I cannot imagine what this would have been, without knowing her. She doesn't discuss her personal relationship with the book. She said
she felt quite lonely in her relationship with
Jude – we joined together through our relationship with Jude. I spend four to sometimes eight hours of my day in that headspace. We are kind of married in that strange space together.
CARLO MAZZONI When I read the last page of that book, I told myself I would not like to meet the author. I knew she was a woman and my first question was how a woman could imagine such a story about men in such a strong way. I didn’t want to mix those characters with the human mind who created them.
I read some lines when she gave a kind of
explanation to these wanderings of mine.
«I was – she said approximately – I was interested in men. I'm not a man, I'm not in a relationship with a man, I have male friendships and I was fascinated. I wanted to learn about men and so I thought I'd write about them».
JAMES NORTON I don't think she ever
intended to be a voice for young masculinity.
She sort of accidentally stumbled into, well
not accidentally, maybe she intended it, but she was almost sort of prophetic in her depiction of a young modern sensitive man.
CARLO MAZZONI The novel, A Little Life,
is about fragility – as these pages are,
as well as Lampoon is. Jude, above every-
thing, is a fragile man. This book is about
males, about masculinity, about fragility
amongst men. Could masculinity and femi-
nism – to be noted, the two concepts are
intentionally not mirrored – be part of
one topic only?
JAMES NORTON Feminism exists in relation to men. How men perceive themselves in relation to women. A Little Life is about men and yet you could describe it as a successful feminist book. It redefines male friendships and male power in light of fragility, as you say. Something we should do, something we are beginning to do, is address feminism
from the perspective of men. Maybe it could be an obvious thing to say. If we are going to redress hundreds and hundreds of years of inequality, part of that isn't just empowering women. It's about understanding the men's need to feel superior both physically and emotionally to women. Many discussions I've had are around male friendships and sexuality. Hanya Yanagihara rarely talks about sexuality in her book and we only mention it in the play once, and yet these are men falling in love with men and feeling comfortable or not with it. This idea that to
love your friend, in an emotional sense or in a physical sense, would somehow compromise your masculine power.
In the story, Willem is a strong man, a successful actor. He provides the guidance
and the strength which Jude requires. He
provides the redemptive love which Jude
needs to lift him out of his trauma – and that is Willem's strength – yet it's not
a male strength.
CARLO MAZZONI Power comes from
fragility. In A Little Life men power comes
from men's fragility.
JAMES NORTON Power within fragility
is not male disempowerment. A Little Life
is an example of men finding strength not in relation to women, just in relation to each other’s vulnerability. If we are going
to redress the imbalance of thousands of
years then we need men to come to terms
with their own fragility.
