James Norton: Happy Valley got me out of the public schoolboy pigeonhole
Dominic Maxwell - Published at 12:01AM, March 25 2016
So far this year, millions of us have seen James Norton play a 19th-century Russian prince, a crime-fighting Fifties vicar and a shaven-haired Yorkshire psychopath. He’s starring in so many big-deal dramas he almost makes Tom Hiddleston look like a low-profile lazybones.
Yet appearances can be deceptive, he points out, as we meet to discuss his return to theatre after four years conquering telly. His recent roles as the brooding Prince Andrei in War and Peace, the thoroughly nice Rev Sidney Chambers in Grantchester and the thoroughly nasty Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley were all on within weeks of each other, but were made over the preceding year or more. “You have no power as an actor [over] how it is scheduled,” he says. “But you have to be a little bit aware of over-exposure. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve decided to do this play.”
Norton, 30, proves delightful company in the hour or so we steal from rehearsals for the first British revival of Bug, a compellingly odd play by the American playwright and actor Tracy Letts that opened here in 1996 before William Friedkin turned it into a film in 2006. He is considered, good-humoured, softly spoken. And if he sometimes drops into the first-person plural to discuss career decisions that “we” have made — to become a “brand ambassador” for the luxury goods firm Smythson, say — I take that less as a royal affectation than as a reluctance to pretend he is the sole architect of his success.
He knows that the past couple of years have been the making of him. Last year he also appeared on the BBC as the sexually busy Duncan Bell in Life in Squares, the drama about the Bloomsbury set, and as the impotent Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He flies over to America now and then to discuss potential roles. For the next six weeks, though, he’ll spend his evenings in a cramped hundred-seat theatre in a disused arts school on Charing Cross Road, London. He’ll be playing Pete, the paranoid, obsessive Oklahoman who shacks up and smokes crack with Kate Fleetwood’s Agnes, an older waitress who lives in a motel.
He could, you’d imagine, make more money by doing a Coward in the West End. Yet the director, Simon Evans, is a friend from his days at Cambridge. Norton liked the space, where Evans had a success with Andrew Scott and David Dawson in The Dazzle over Christmas. He liked the play, and he liked the chance to play his first American — a deeply disturbed one, to boot.
“Actors run the risk all the time of being typecast, because it is less of a punt for producers to give you the role that is closest to you,” he says. “So there is nothing more exciting than to play people like Peter or Tommy, as well as playing people closer to home like Sidney. If you were to do the same role again and again that would be incredibly boring. And of course you always have half an eye on — and it’s a horrible expression — the brand, you know? If you start to be put into a pigeonhole then you have to do something to take you out of that pigeonhole.”
We wouldn’t be having this conversation now if Norton hadn’t de-pigeonholed himself so phenomenally well in Happy Valley. Up till then, he got work in smaller roles in shows such as Inspector George Gently and Doctor Who and Blandings. Yet he risked getting stuck in a well-spoken ghetto. How, then, did a floppy-haired public schoolboy get to play the brutalised local tough guy in Sally Wainwright’s modern masterpiece of a police show, set in small-town Yorkshire?
Well, having grown up in Malton, a village in north Yorkshire, Norton knew he could do the accent. Even so, his agent warned him that “it’s not your casting” when she sent him the script while he was in South Africa, working on a film called Northmen: A Viking Saga. Charlie Murphy, who ended up playing Ann, the businessman’s daughter whom Tommy kept captive and raped in the first series, was also in the cast. They practised their lines together dressed as Vikings on the side of a mountain. And then Norton did his audition via an iPhone he propped up on the top of a chest of drawers in his hotel room. It worked. Soon he was putting a peroxide streak in his hair and facing off against Sarah Lancashire.
After the first series two years ago, he got an offer for a film. The casting agent’s only concern, he was told, was whether he could pull off a posh accent. He was delighted. “So Happy Valley was an absolute gift for getting me out of that.”
Norton’s parents, Hugh and Lavinia, have both just retired from their jobs as lecturers. They gave him and his sister, Jessica, now a doctor, an idyllic childhood, he says. “I was quite feral, running around in fields, climbing bales, until around the age of 14 when you are suddenly aware that there is this big old party going on and you are not really able to get to it. After 18 I realised how lucky I was to have grown up there. But I think there were a few years in the middle when my poor parents took a hit from my adolescent rage.”
He went to the nearby boarding school Ampleforth College, run by Benedictine monks, where he developed his interests in theatre and religion. He lost his faith after school, yet still went on to study theology at Cambridge, although he admits he did at least as much theatre as theology. “If you don’t feel quite blessed when you are there then you’ve got a problem. There is so much opportunity.”
He went to Rada next, but started two weeks late to linger in Cambridge to be directed by Trevor Nunn in Cymbeline. He left a term early, too, in 2010, to act at the Royal Court in Laura Wade’s Bullingdon Club satire Posh. More theatre work followed, including one of his favourite jobs, acting in a play in Sheffield directed by Richard Wilson. Wilson — nothing whatsoever like his grumpy image, Norton assures me — was forever on at him for frowning too much on stage, for making too many faces to reassure audiences that he was actually acting. A few Sundays ago, while War and Peace was on, he got a text from Wilson: “A still face at last!”
And Norton keeps a still, sometimes smouldering face in the photoshoots he has done for Smythson (the company whose creative director used to be Samantha Cameron). It’s hard to talk about this without being either fawning or facetious, I say, but did he have any worries about becoming a poster boy for a brand? He takes this rather well: on the one hand cheerfully accepting the oddness of a life in which such opportunities arrive, on the other hand sticking up for the product and his right to promote it.
“There is a crossover. Eddie Redmayne is doing the Burberry thing; certain people endorse a brand. We’d said no to a lot of things, but then …” At which point he offers all sorts of praise for Smythson’s Britishness and devotion to craft. Is it lucrative? “It’s a job, so it does have … It gives you some freedom for waiting, for choosing. I can spend two or three months doing something like this play, which is a complete passion project. Um, also, I do like the product.”
Well, sure. I liked the look of the messenger bag I saw him wearing, I say, but when I found it cost £900 I couldn’t figure out how I could afford one. Then I had an idea. Right now Paddy Power is offering odds of 20-1 on Norton becoming the next James Bond. Juicier odds than you’ll get for Tom Hardy or Hiddleston. So should I stick my savings on him being the new 007?
“I would hold out for a moment. Buy yourself a Smythson bag instead.” I can’t afford it, I insist, unless I get that Bond payday. “Well, no, it’s lovely, and very bizarre and flattering to be, um, included in that conversation, but, er, it’s only a conversation. It’s not based on anything that has actually happened.”
Would he have a conversation if Barbara Broccoli rang him? “We would, we would, but I don’t know quite how the conversation would go. I think Daniel Craig said himself, think long and hard about it.”
Norton is a good-looking man. However, whereas his cheekbones all but carve their way through a television screen, he is less conspicuously chiselled in the flesh. This, perhaps, is why his great-aunt Grania came to be scrutinising him at a recent family lunch before declaring, “I don’t understand how you can look so good on telly because you’re so bland in normal life.” Norton chortles at the memory. His family, he says, are impressed but not that impressed by his glittering showbiz career.
He shares his house in Peckham, South London, with a primary school teacher who went to Ampleforth with him, who is quick to remind him that is was he, and not Norton, who won the school acting prize. His girlfriend, Eleanor Wyld, is also an actor, currently appearing in the BBC series Thirteen. “Having your other half being in the industry helps, because it is so bizarre. It is nice to have someone to compare experiences with.”
Although there is nothing definite lined up after Bug, there are all sorts of things “floating”. There may be more series of Grantchester and Happy Valley. He reads a lot of scripts, takes a lot of meetings. The night before we met he was using his iPhone again to record another audition.
You suspect that Norton is only getting started. Just as long as he doesn’t go damaging the brand by playing, oh, I don’t know, some crack-smoking Oklahoman weirdo. “I know, I know. What would Aunt Grania think of that?”
Bug is at Found111, London WC2 (020 7478 0100) to May 7
