Telegraph 23 dicembre 2019

James Norton: 'I was bullied at school. A monk became my therapist'

By Chris Harvey
 

23 December 2019 

‘If people don’t like what I do, they can 
go and watch something else’: James Norton 

James Norton tells Chris Harvey about grim schooldays, Bond rumours and his role in  a new drama about the Profumo affair

No one could accuse James Norton of allowing himself to be typecast. The 34-year-old has played a vicar-turned-sleuth in Grantchester, a violent rapist in Happy Valley, and the aristocratic hero of War & Peace. He’s also number three in the betting to be the new James Bond. And he’s just about to add to his library of opposites with two new roles: the staid tutor John Brooke, who marries Emma Watson’s Meg March, in the star-studded new film adaptation of Little Women; and the flamboyant real-life figure at the centre of the Profumo scandal – Stephen Ward – in BBC One’s The Trial of Christine Keeler.

“Ward was 100 per cent the fall guy,” says Norton, sporting a dark-blue crushed velvet jacket and settling in on a chaise longue in an upmarket London hotel. The actor looks every bit as debonair as you’d expect for a man playing the high-society osteopath with connections that ran from Soho to the aristocracy. “The government needed to clear their own name by tarnishing someone else’s.”

 

James Norton
CREDIT: Andrew Crowley for the Telegraph
 

It was Ward who introduced the 46-year-old Secretary of State for War John Profumo (Ben Miles) to 19-year-old model and showgirl Christine Keeler (Sophie Cookson) at a party at Lord Astor’s country house estate of Cliveden in 1961. It led to an affair that exposed Profumo as a security threat – thanks to Keeler’s simultaneous relationship with a Russian naval attaché.

Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies (Ellie Bamber) often stayed at Ward’s London mews flat, and the 50-year-old former public schoolboy would later be prosecuted for living off immoral earnings in a dubious case of establishment revenge. The two had contributed small amounts to household expenses. Ward committed suicide after the judge’s summing up amounted to a direction to the jury to find him guilty.

Amanda Coe’s stylish, evocative drama establishes Keeler and Rice-Davies as sexually liberated young women for their time. Does Norton think they were victims? “Ward definitely used certain relationships he had with young, beautiful women to ingratiate himself with the wealthy elite,” he says. “He also groomed them to a point… but it’s too simplistic to say he was a man who groomed young women. His relationship with these young girls was often a very positive one, he would enable them, take them out of poverty.” Keeler was from a disadvantaged background and fitted the mould of the “alley cats” Ward liked to befriend. Norton gives a terrific performance as the sleazy Pygmalion.


“I really warmed to him… you fall in love with these characters, and Stephen Ward was way ahead of his time, so brave in how he lived his life and expressed himself, his sexual tastes, his flirting with cross-dressing, in a world that was still incredibly repressed.

“And the final reckoning was that Stephen Ward had somehow corrupted these Tory ministers and it was all his fault, which is absurd.”

I wonder if Norton, the son of a retired college lecturer and a mother who taught medical ethics, is as dazzled by the truly posh as Ward was.

 

James Norton
CREDIT: Andrew Crowley for the Telegraph 

 
“Wealth or class are not things that I’m particularly dazzled by,” he says. “I am by talent.” He cites Little Women director Greta Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, who made Netflix’s Marriage Story, as an example.

Norton himself is part of a powerhouse acting couple, with British star Imogen Poots, whom he became close to when they starred together in a play in 2017. They seem very happy. “It’s good,” he says, but adds, “my personal life is very normal, I have a house in Peckham, my [parents] live in Yorkshire. There's very little glamour and scandal.”

There was a little bit of the latter when his previous girlfriend, actress Jessie Buckley, said their break-up had been “acrimonious”, but Norton is far too canny to add fuel to that particular fire.  

 

"He’s a little quieter than some of the other characters, but that allowed me to just witness all these great women actors": Norton plays John Brooke in Little Women
CREDIT: CTMG 

Similarly, he won’t comment on the rumours linking him to James Bond, insisting they are “based on nothing”. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have strong opinions on the series in general.

“We all know that with James Bond, large parts of it, and all the versions of it in the past, are now antiquated and it needs to be updated,” he says. “And I think that Barbara Broccoli and the producers are very aware of that. Bringing in people like Phoebe Waller-Bridge can only help.”

Might the spy be a little too one-dimensional for someone who has taken on so many interesting parts? Daniel Craig, who is stepping aside after the latest film No Time To Die comes out in April, has often seemed unhappy with the role.

“If I was to take on a franchise,” Norton says, “I would always want to complement it with something completely different.”

He has just taken on a big HBO sci-fi series, The Nevers, he says, and is in negotiations with the BBC about doing a second series of McMafia. We chat about the fact that the first series attracted a measure of criticism, including some for his own performance as Alex Godman, the scion of a Russian mafia family drawn reluctantly into the underworld. “There was an article about the three wooden faces of James Norton,” he says with a laugh.

How did he take it?

“It’s a rite of passage that you have [bad reviews],” he replies. “Ultimately, it’s an art form which is deeply subjective and you’re never going to please everyone.” The character was intended to be “inscrutable and calcified”, he adds. Nevertheless, he admits he might play it slightly differently second time around.

"Ward was brave in how he lived his life and expressed himself, his sexual tastes, his flirting with cross-dressing": Norton on playing Stephen Ward alongside Ellie Bamber as Mandy Rice-Davies and Sophie Cookson as Christine Keeler CREDIT: Ben Blackall 

“Yeah, possibly,” he says. “But, then again, you don’t want to pander to the people who didn’t like it. There's so much content out there that people who don't like it can go and find something else.”

One of the factors that Norton and director James Watkins agreed upon when sketching out Godman’s background was his public school education. Norton is a public school boy too; a former pupil of Ampleforth, the leading Catholic boarding school which was found to have covered up the sexual abuse of scores of children in a devastating report in 2018.

Norton never saw any wrongdoing during his time there, but does admit to being “quite badly bullied” and credits one of the monks - a Father Peter - with helping him get through it. “I was able to go and just talk to him and he basically became my therapist,” says Norton. “I just sort of sobbed my eyes out.”

Has it left a mark? “It probably has a bit,” he says. “It’s not defined me, but it has informed who I am. I’m hyper aware if someone is being in any way ostracised on a film set, for example.”

On Little Women, he found himself on set with some of the industry’s biggest names, including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep and Laura Dern. The film’s a deliriously romantic and sentimental take on the novel’s sibling rivalries, but it takes its duty to Louisa May Alcott’s study of the economic subjection of women seriously. “It's important for us to go back to those punctuation marks in the struggle towards equality and recognise how far we've come, but also how we're not quite there yet,” Norton says.

He and Watson were given the task of writing their own marriage vows for the film, which he says he laboured over but arrived with them unfinished to discover that Watson had already written hers and they were beautiful. He was just young enough to read the early Harry Potter books, he notes, but has only seen a couple of the films – “Don’t tell Emma.”

He plays Chalamet’s tutor – did he fancy the 23-year-old as everyone else seems to right now? He smiles. “He’s a beguiling and bizarre, unique force of nature,” he says. Norton had been wondering about wearing a suit to today’s photoshoot, but is glad he didn’t as he’s just bumped into the younger man in a Gorillaz tee-shirt and sunglasses. “Whenever he’s around, I feel about 10 years older than I am.”


Among all its bold women, I wonder if his own character – John Brooke –  is just a teeny bit dull. He laughs. “He’s a little quieter than some of the other characters, but that allowed me to just witness all these great women actors. It was incredible.”

There’s certainly nothing dull or quiet about the character he plays in the film Mr Jones, which is released in February. It’s the surprisingly little-known story of Gareth Jones, the journalist who uncovered the Holodomor – the man-made famine genocide inflicted by the Soviet Union upon Ukraine in 1932-33, which is estimated to have killed up to 7.5 million people. “He blew the whistle on the Soviet Union,” says Norton. “He was the first person to go [to Ukraine], and come back and tell the world.”

In the West, the economic crash of 1929 had led to the Great Depression. “Everyone was looking at the Soviet experiment thinking, ‘Oh, it's working’,” Norton says. “They were getting into bed with Stalin and trade deals were being made. And no one was calling them out. Until this one serious, bespectacled, earnest Welsh journalist got on a train and risked his life to blow the whistle.”

I wonder if those types of films can command a big enough audience to keep getting made? He accepts that independent cinema is in a period of shrinkage, but says, “while the audience for this type of film might not be as big as a Marvel movie, we have to protect those stories because film isn't just about escapism. It's also about education.”


Little Women is released on Boxing Day. The Trial of Christine Keeler starts on BBC One, on Sunday, at 9pm