Sunday Times 10-11-2024 Jonathan Dean

 James Norton's most harrowing role: 'I was a mess, having panic attacks'

The king of TV drama talks bullying, break-ups and how starring in A Little Life was an ordeal that left him a 'catatonic mess'

by Jonathan Dean 

Sunday Times, 10 November 2024

'Ridiculous!' James Norton says, scoffing at my suggestion that he is perilously close to becoming the king of British TV. However, consider the CV - chameleonic, barnstorming performances in Grantchester, Happy Valley, War & Peace, McMafia, The Trial of Christine Keeler. He played the pervy osteopath Stephen Ward in the last of those, the best thing he has done. However, the 39-year-old is always good - an actor who has dabbled in Hollywood but, unlike most of his peers, is not snooty about British terrestrial TV. Next up? A terrific drama on ITV called Playing Nice, about babies swapped at birth.

"I mean, I've done some big studio stuff," Norton says, protesting lightly, as I read off his television credits. "I'm not being defensive saying 'Hold on - I did Little Women with Greta Gerwig!'" (Norton was John Brooke, in Gerwig's 2019 version.) "But then, while all the studio work I've done has been wonderful, money doesn't necessitate good storytelling. You can have as many explosions as you like, but my priority is always quality work with the best people, on the best broadcasters - I just don't agree with being snooty about TV."

And this, really, is why Norton is unique ("I'll take that!"). For years the latest big things have sought parts on so-called prestige TV, chalking up Emmy nods for HBO or Apple dramas with a few hundred pans. But the last time Norton was on the box - in flames as Tommy Lee Royce, in Happy Valley's finale last year - he was watched by more than 11 million.  It's the kind of fame where everybody knows your face and name. Norton has been recognised for Happy Valley in Los Angeles. People hug him on the street. Once, on a lake in Canada, a Grantchester fan yelled: "Oh God, you're the vicar!"

Playing Nice should be a similar hit. Norton plays a father who is told that his toddler was switched in the birthing unit and that the biological parents want the kid back. Twisted and smart, it is the first TV show produced by the actor's company, Rabbit Track Pictures. It will also put you off having children for life - as opposed to Norton's other imminent lead role in the Netflix film Joy, about IVF. Norton is Robert Edwards, who - along with the obstetrician and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and the nurse Jean Purdy - pioneered IVF and was responsible for the delivery of the first "test tube baby", Louise Joy Brown, in 1978, defying fierce criticism from opponents who said they were playing God.

It is a heartwarming celebration of life - and exactly what the fragile Norton needed after a gruelling stint on the London stage in A Little Life, the nearly for-hour-long adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara's novel about sexual abuse. Norton's then-fiancee, the actress Imogen Poots, persuaded him to take the role - the couple broke up at the end of last year. In the play, in front of packed houses - some who were there simply to gawp - he was naked and covered in blood, playing Jude, a lawyer who was abused as a child and suffers from chronic pain.

"It was the hardest thing I've done," he says. "I was naive. I thought I would be able to apply my philosophy to split work and life, but without sounding overly worthy, it felt so important because some people who came to see the play were survivors of abuse. And so, to do the role justice, I gave over my life for six months. But if the work starts to compromise one's relationships, it can become unhealthy. Suddenly you realise you haven't left any space for other people and so I was pissed off with that. We did the play 180 times."

"I was a mess," he continues. "Having panic attack. During the first week I watched the Bill Nighy movie Living [about life, death and regret] and started to cry. I was still crying 45 minutes later, coughing up tears. I started resenting the play and was a catatonic mess. I'd go home and watch Gogglebox for two hours. I got really confused, and I'd wake up and my first feeling was rage. I'd think, 'Why the f*** am I doing this?'"

Did this doubt start early in the run? "YEs." he pauses. "But by the end I felt incredible. I was exhausted and hurting, but months after the show finished I was talking to the producer and said we should do it again. "It that a good idea?" Yes."

To understand why, Norton looks beyond the turmoil of being stripped on stage to the reason he wanted the role of Jude in the first place.

"I'm wary to say this, but my therapist came to see the play." Norton bristles. "There's little worse than middle-class people who can afford therapy regurgitating all their bullshit, but the play threw up big questions for me that I would chat to my therapist about." Go on. "I can't really put it into an interview because it would literally be like writing out my sessions."

We could skirt around it? "About why Jude came close to me?" Sure. "Well, I guess everyone carries within them a saboteur - the person who doubts, the ugly child screaming for attention, and I had an idea that A Little Life would kill that child in me. That ugly, vulnerable side - my self-doubt." He laughs nervously. "How the f*** is going to come out in print?"

He continues. "Well... I was bullied at school."

Norton was born in London, but educated at the Catholic boarding school Ampleforth College in Yorkshire. "And sometimes, being an actor, this famous thing in a magazine, gives you the misconception that you're unbullyable. But that's bullshit. Ad so I thought playing Jude, the ultimate bullied child, would make me unbullyable. I thought the job was an opportunity. Rather than playing a matinee idol, I would play someone wretched. I thought if I put my bullied child on stage, I'd get rid of him It would be a moment of exorcism, but it wasn't. And so every day, I just thought, it's not working. There is no getting rid of that voice. Or the self-doubt. There is no killing that child."

No wonder he wanted to make Joy. "It's about good people, good at what they do, doing good for the greater good. Good, good, good and good!" Yes, there is conflict, he accepts. The film shows how the church and media were against IVF, accusing the doctors of being "Frankensteins". But, mostly, it is upbeat, about "curing childlessness" and giving women choice - showing how the science was a team effort - with Norton's Edwards backed by Steptoe (Bill Nighy) and the largely forgotten Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie) - to create babies and history.

Norton pauses to inject himself with insulin. "My diabetes is buzzing." The actor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes aged 22 - he inject insulin up to 15 times a day, monitored using a device called a Dexcom. He smiles as I suggest that his medical solution may e seen as "playing God" too.

"Perhaps there are some people who question if I should be alive; weird nuts who say, 'God gave you a faulty pancreas! F***ing own it!"

Back to Joy and time to get personal again. Norton has told me before that he would like a family, but the end of his six year relationship with Poots, 35, has put those plans back. I wonder if this makes roles like Joy hard for him, celebrating children when he is till without one.

"Not at all," he says. "I don't sit on set where I'm playing a dad and feel sad and broody. I love hanging out with kids - most of my friends have kids so I'm not quite in step with my peers - but the past few years have been the busiest I've been, so it would not have been fair to bring a child into that. Also, the inherently unfair benefit of being a man is there is less rush. I am lucky I can have kid later, so now I'm happy, actually, with my life. I feel really excited by the choices I've made."

So there is no impending crisis about turning 40? 

"Weirdly, no," Norton says, grinning. "Getting older is a struggle if you are freaking out about the choices you've made, but I don't carry regret. And, you know, some of the choices recently weren't mine, yet I don't feel begrudging. Maybe next year I'll have a family and a relationship."

I have to ask, given his recent split, about those choices that were not his. "I guess by that," he says, cautiously, "I just mean that you have a certain amount of control over yor life and choices you make, and at other times you don't. But if you made those choices or not, it's a shame to spend time agonising over either."

There is a lot going on with Norton - more, perhaps, than his relaxed demeanour suggests. "People sit in their living rooms and feel a deep familiarity with you," he says, about his performances reaching millions of homes. "They feel they know very personal detail about you, but of course they're just watching the characters you play."

He says he is most like his part in Playing Nice - "Everyman, a nice guy" - but that only tells half of the story. The actor is, in the best way, a little weirder than that. 

For instance, a few months ago Norton went by himself for six days to Pyrenees, where he slept under the stars without a tent. "Most of the time I was alone in my own thoughts," he says. He loved it. "There were weird, low moments, sure," he admits, but then smiles. "Sometimes, though, it was just breathtaking."