By Pat Saperstein
Jun 26, 2023 11:54am PT
When “Happy Valley” wrapped up its second season in 2016, fans of the British police thriller were devastated that the intense series seemed to be over for good. Created by Sally Wainwright and starring Sarah Lancashire (HBO’s “Julia”) as a police officer in a hard-scrabble area of West Yorkshire, the series won the BAFTA for best drama in both seasons, and attracted a devoted audience around the world.
Working in a region plagued with drugs, crime and poverty, Lancashire’s character Sergeant Catherine Cawood is a tough but empathetic cop who divides her time between solving brutal crimes and taking care of her sister, a former addict, and her grandson, whom she raised after her daughter died by suicide. Seasons 1 and 2 track her mission to bring down Tommy Lee Royce — the hardened criminal who raped her daughter and fathered her grandson, Ryan. James Norton’s nuanced performance as the violent Tommy, who still holds out hope for a relationship with his son, is the polar opposite of the crime-solving vicar he played in his next series, “Grantchester.”
Viewers were thrilled when Wainwright decided to bring the series back for a third season after a lengthy break — with the original cast including Rhys Connah as Ryan, who had gone from playing an innocent yet troubled 9-year-old to a 16-year-old who’s old enough to learn about his father’s terrible crimes.
The final episode of the third season, which drops Monday on AMC+ and Acorn TV in the U.S., seems to bring the series to definitive end, as Catherine prepares for her last day on the police force before retirement, only to find herself in a tense, life-or-death confrontation with Royce.
For Norton, that climactic scene was one of the most emotional experiences he had on “Happy Valley.” The actor, who is one of many Brits who have been tipped as the next possible James Bond, and who also runs his own production company, spoke to Variety from Santa Fe, N.M., where he was resting between runs of the play “A Little Life” on the London stage.
When you first got the role, what did you think of the character?
I remember reading and loving it, and I assumed he was the stock antagonist, the psychopath. But around Episode 5 he gets stabbed, and he’s crying in this tower block over the life he could have led. And suddenly the picture became much more nuanced, and this man became far more textured and layered. Early on, the big question was set up: Is this man a psychopath?
I didn’t ever think of him as someone who was incapable of love, and incapable of compassion. Yes, he has serious mental health issues, and he’s carrying serious trauma — but the mixture of those things has resulted in a very damaged and scared young man, rather than a man who’s just defined by his evil.
Catherine has a firm idea about Tommy’s relationship with her daughter Becky, but it’s never totally clear what happened between them, is it?
I think he did love her — or what he thought was love. There’s the moment when Catherine confronts him outside the school and he says, “I loved her. I didn’t rape her. I loved her.” I definitely believed that he didn’t think he raped Becky, and that his version of love was so warped, having been brought up in such a hostile environment. We meet his mum in series one, who is clearly dealing with a huge amount of darkness herself, and was clearly incapable of being a good mum — and so Tommy’s version of love is so distorted.
I just love the fact that in the first series the most loving thing he can think of doing for his son is to kill him. There is no more warped version of love than to say, “This world is not worth living in, let’s die together, that’s my gift to you as a loving father.” If there was one thing driving Tommy throughout the three series, it was the love for his child — and also the hatred for Catherine.
What was it like coming back to the series after so much time?
Fascinating and weird and wonderful. On one level, it was quite nerve-racking, because there was no guarantee that people were going to come back. We knew that we had a really strong loyalty from our audience, and I knew just simply from the sheer number of conversations I was having in those seven years how much appetite there was for it. But the whole TV industry changed in that time: The streaming world exploded.
How was it working again with an actor who you had started working with when he was a young child?
He went from being a child actor running on instinct to being a teenager, a sort of strapping huge brute of a man at 18. There was no guarantee that he would be able to capture that character again, so that was a huge relief and it was exciting to see Rhys, the actor, take on Ryan, and really enrich him and take him into that adult space and make him a sophisticated and intriguing character in his own right.
What was it like filming the final kitchen scene?
That last scene in the kitchen was one of the most pure and special, memorable, formative moments I’ve ever had. It was really a very special day and I will take it to my grave, you know?
At the end of the final episode, the rest of the cast were only given their own scenes. No one was given the final scene apart from Sarah, because the producer didn’t want the rest of the cast and the crew to know what happened. So I had this scene which I knew only Sarah, myself and the producers had, and I was learning it for so many weeks.
I put a lot of pressure on myself, because I just knew the stakes were so high. It was like this showdown moment. Everyone loves that relationship, and actually in the whole series we only meet once. We only meet once in the second season in the cemetery and we only meet once in the third series, face to face.
How did you prepare for it?
I learned the lines weirdly early for me — I’m not the best person learning lines in advance — but I learned them weeks in advance, so I felt really empowered and excited to get on that set.
A good director with a good script will create an atmosphere on a set which is close to theater, almost like a church, where there’s this sort of sacred space in the middle of all of the chaos and the moving and the lights. There was no moment at the beginning of the day where I was like, “This is the most important scene. Everyone needs to shut up.” Everyone just knew.
Did you shoot the final blaze in a real house?
It was a studio build. It wasn’t the actual kitchen, because that’s owned by some members of the public — so we couldn’t burn it, you could run the risk of burning down their house. So the incredible art department rebuilt it down to literal scratches on cupboard doors, smudges on the fridge. It was unbelievable the kind of detail. Everyone was walking around in hushed tones. Everyone was whispering. It was like this kind of unspoken acknowledgement that today everyone needed to bring their absolute best.
Everyone’s focused, so you immediately feel that atmosphere, and it imbues your performance. I get to do, like, a 10-page scene playing a character I’ve known for 10 years. I have a bank of memories as that man. I remember what it was like to play him 10 years ago, when I was a much younger man and he was a much younger man. Playing this role, you could plunk me in any situation and I know how Tommy would react. Because I know him, I know his fiber and his electricity.
And then I have this incredible scene and I know the words. They’re brilliant, the way it plays, the way Sally is like kind of conducting now, like a conductor of an orchestra. Sometimes her stage directions are wonderful and very funny, she writes her stage directions as Sally and they’re really irreverent. You know, “She drops the tea, for fuck’s sake. Why can’t she fucking hold on to the tea cup?,” you know? She lets you be conducted by the language, and you feel the crescendos and the diminuendos, and you feel the twists and turns.
Did you ever get a bit stuck in Tommy’s dark mindset while you were filming?
The character of Tommy is so intriguing, and I have such a strange love for him. Even in those seven years, he would creep up in the weirdest moments in a conversation. And because he was incarcerated, it was like, oh, there’s Tommy in prison, tucked away in the back of my brain, locked up, but ready to be released again.
Having said that, there were scenes where it did leave me in a strange place sometimes. The BBC put me in touch with a criminal psychologist and he helped me through Tommy’s inner workings, and why he is the way he is.
I’m not the kind of actor who goes home and says, like, “I need three hours in my room locked up, please don’t talk to me.” I like to go to the pub, have a beer with the crew and decompress.
But with Tommy, I drew the line. I was quite disciplined. One thing I do remember, though — I had some pretty nasty, violent dreams. I was working with this incredible stunt woman who was covering Sarah, I was having to kind of hit her head against the wall. She was like, “You need to stop censoring yourself in the scene. This is my job. You need to throw me around.” It just felt so wrong. So it was a relief to know that I have a mechanism in me which just won’t let me do that, and that’s reassuring.
How did Sally Wainwright approach writing such violent material?
Sally did something incredibly powerful at the time for violence on television. She redefined it, in a way — violence towards women, particularly, had often been portrayed in quite a gratuitous, at worst titillating way. Sally didn’t allow that. She was like, no, I’m going to tell the story where violence happens towards women because that happens, and we should acknowledge it — but I’m going to do it in a way which is deft and elegant and often suggested.
I have to ask, have you tested for the Bond producers, or had any preliminary discussions with them?
No, no, no, none of that. It’s a really lovely piece of clickbait media in the U.K., and anyone can write any story about it and it will get the most incredible sort of hype around it. No, no conversations. Basically nothing else to say other than I think they’re probably still working it all out. It’s a big challenge to know which direction to take that huge franchise in. But beyond that, it’s lots of quite fun and bemusing media coverage. There’s nothing concrete behind it.
I know you still have “A Little Life” to wrap up onstage, but how are your own productions coming?
My wonderful producing partner Kitty Kaletsky and I set up Rabbit Track pictures three years ago, and it’s going really well. We made a film that just came out last year called “Rogue Agent.” I have a newfound respect for anyone involved in script development and script editing. I will never walk on set again and go “I don’t really like what I’m saying here. Can I change it?” The amount of work which goes into a script, if it’s a good script, was a complete eye opener for me. I just find it so empowering.
But I love acting, and I will always love acting. It will be my first love. There’s nothing quite like being on the set like a set with Sarah in that sacred space, and feeling that crackle.
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