James Norton and FIA Formula E champion Jean-Eric Vergne at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London for Tottenham Hotspur against Manchester City - 2 February 2020
James Norton is in a pub just off Oxford Street, in London. He is chattering away happily, wearing an unmissable yellow shirt...
James Norton is in a pub just off Oxford Street, in London. He is chattering away happily, wearing an unmissable yellow shirt. Long hair flops over his face and he is more rugged than he usually appears on screen: textbook dashing. “I can sit in a pub and nobody bothers me,” he says, beaming. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Tom Cruise. I think I would hate it.”
However. “I know what you are going to say!” Norton says. Yes, he nods, he has heard that Ladbrokes just closed the betting on him being the next James Bond, as 4-5 odds-on favourite. “It’s crazy. It’s not real. It’s speculative. There is no truth behind it,” he says without pause. “Unless journalists know something more than I do. It’s bizarre and quite flattering to be even considered in that world, but beyond that? Pure speculation.”
Sure. But it’s fun to speculate. Ever since talk turned to who would replace Daniel Craig, debate has raged about whether 007 could be played by a black actor, not a traditional white and privileged one, which Norton, with his schooling and Cambridge degree, very much is. How would the public react to his casting? He thinks about this for a long, mostly silent time, with the occasional “Erm”. Then more silence.
“It’s really hard,” he begins, finally, “as whatever I say can become a story. I don’t know how to answer.” He is, I should say, graceful during this awkwardness. “I love the franchise and hope Barbara Broccoli continues to make it relevant. Going into the heart of Bond’s private world, as opposed to one-liners, is already progress. But there is more to be made, so future casting in all roles is going to be important. I don’t know how you do that, because I’m not Barbara Broccoli.” He laughs. We move on.
What a time it is to be Norton. First, those Bond rumours, the British acting equivalent of becoming prime minister. Second, a key role in Little Women as the nice, if poor, John Brooke. Third, the lead in Mr Jones, a powerful film about Stalin’s famines and the Welsh journalist who reported on them. Fourth, The Trial of Christine Keeler, the hit BBC drama that has breathed fresh life into the Profumo affair thanks to a mix of new perspectives and excellent acting.
In The Trial of Christine Keeler, he plays the society osteopath Stephen Ward, who overdosed in last Sunday’s episode. He barely appears in tonight’s final outing, but when he does, it feels rather profound: a happy Ward, dancing up Wimpole Mews with Keeler before his world fell apart. Last weekend, the actor had the finest scene of his career.
“They were real tears, because you know this happened to that poor man,” he says of Ward. “He wasn’t whiter than white. He basically groomed young women to give him his ticket to the boys’ club, yet he was 100% a scapegoat and paid with his life. The biggest price anyone paid.”
Ward introduced Keeler to the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, and, when the Establishment came under threat, it was he and his protégée who suffered, with the doctor taking his own life.
Or did he? Does Norton see the comparison with another provider of young women to the wealthy, Jeffrey Epstein? “Yeah,” he says, with slight reluctance. Many think Epstein was murdered. Does Norton think Ward really killed himself? “Definitely,” he says. “But there was a claim by a former Polish spy that he killed Stephen on behalf of the secret service. Apparently he was force-feeding him barbiturates. But that is far-fetched.”
There are rumours that Prince Philip was a fan of Ward’s. “We deliberately avoided all of that.” Still, the series does not dodge the prince entirely. In a flashback in tonight’s episode, Ward tells Keeler she can wave to Prince Philip as they walk past Buckingham Palace. “The thing about it all still being redacted is...” Norton begins, before adding, disappointingly, “but I don’t know enough about it.”
What a calm and collected man he is, as befits somebody who has a dozen chess games on the go on an app on his phone. “The game of all games!” he says enthusiastically as he makes a move against his father. He is chatty and wants to make the right impression, while maintaining due professionalism. Which means that a few times he appears a moment away from something gossipy, before pulling back. For instance, he founded a WhatsApp group for the Little Women cast, but, just as he is about to show me what it is called, decides it is better kept from a journalist.
What he does talk openly about, though, is type 1 diabetes. He is 34 and was diagnosed with the condition 12 years ago. Lucozade is left on set for him, while, up on stage, pockets are stitched into his costumes for glucose tablets. Just in case. “Adrenaline, sleep, alcohol — they all affect it,” he explains. “I have to inject every time I eat carbohydrates — up to 15 times a day, with 5mm needles you use discreetly. I’ll probably do one or two during this interview. [I didn’t notice.] Also, I have this device called a Dexcom, a subcutaneous glucose monitor that Bluetooths my phone and tells me what my sugars are. Before, I had to draw blood from my finger.”
Adrenaline, though, is common on film sets, especially action blockbusters about globetrotting spies. Do directors fear casting him? “No!” Norton replies with gusto. “Being diabetic does not hold you back. It’d never hamper me, for example, in regards to any role, particularly physically.” It’s not hereditary, but there is a genetic component: both his sister and mother have the condition. Could he pass it on to his children? “It’s a lottery,” he replies. “Nobody knows what causes it, and hopefully my kids won’t have diabetes, but if they do they can live a very normal life.”
Or, like their father, travel to Ukraine during a cold snap to make Mr Jones, a film about a journalist who visited the Soviet Union in 1933 and reported on Stalin’s famines, the Holodomor, which killed millions. The shoot was tricky and interesting. Norton had battery-powered thermals, and the crew would burst into folk songs, while real babushkas were extras and days would end with Norton and his formidable 71-year-old director, Agnieszka Holland, “in weird hotels with a bottle of vodka and a load of herring, talking about Brexit”.
Gareth Jones was extraordinary, his story barely known. Like a mix of Indiana Jones, Ernest Hemingway and Edward Snowden, he once wrote of a plane journey he took with the Führer: “A few feet away sits Adolf Hitler... He does not look impressive.” The film is haunting and, when I speak to Holland, she praises Norton for wanting to make it. “He is intelligent,” she says. “Someone less curious would be unable to play this guy.” In one scene, a living toddler is thrown onto a cart of dead bodies. “It was horrible,” Norton recalls, clearly shaken. “When we re-enacted it, there was this poor child, sobbing his eyes out.”
This is a long way from Grantchester, the popular and pleasant ITV drama in which he starred for several series. Yet his sister, Jessica, is a doctor, and he admits it can be strange around the dinner table when he talks about his day of dressing up and she talks about the oncology ward.
That said, when oncologists go home, they don’t want to be reminded of oncology. He does realise his job is important too? “Of course,” he says. “I am very aware of the importance of entertainment, but also, if I put something political on social media, I get shot down — ‘Back in your box. You’re a f****** actor.’ That’s absurdly narrow-minded, but it’s a middle ground. With my work, I’m proud if it can be a catalyst for conversations, but also aware I’m not laying down all the answers, because we’re actors. We’re storytellers. We can only really be catalysts in encouraging questions.”
Tell that to Laurence Fox. As it is, Norton’s career has been, if not overtly political, then quietly so, not least in the many female directors he has worked with. This began a while ago, with Happy Valley (Sally Wainwright), before Little Women (Greta Gerwig), Mr Jones (Holland) and The Trial of Christine Keeler (Andrea Harkin) made a run that is hard to achieve, as there are significantly fewer female directors than male ones.
Did he actively seek out women to work with? “No,” he insists. “I planned to work with the best storytellers, and a lot have been women.” But many actors have yet to work with any female directors. Is there an in-built bias among his male peers? “I have no idea,” he says, not as brusquely as that reads. “But Agnieszka is a brilliant director. Her career speaks for itself, so, aside from being a woman, that is enough to want to work with her. The fact she is a woman, though — and, right now, we want to turn up the volume and strive for equality as much as we can — just makes it a no-brainer.”
He says Gerwig not being nominated for an Oscar for her directing was a “criminal omission”. He raves about how what seems like chaos on screen in Little Women, in various bustling family scenes, was planned to the minutest detail, and how Gerwig does so much work before rolling that nobody notices any has been done in the final cut.
“There isn’t a sense of a self-conscious director going, ‘This is me, having my moment,’” Norton says. “She puts the performances and story first, and then, as a director should, retreats into the background.” There are, of course, other styles of directing, such as stitching together an apparent one-take shot. “I wonder if that is something to do with male hubris,” Norton says. “But I would need to work with some of those male heavyweights to find out.”
The actor’s breakthrough came in 2014, after a few years of small film roles and well-received theatre work. The limelight arrived with Grantchester (in which he played a hot vicar before there was ever a hot priest) and Happy Valley (hot psycho). Then, via War & Peace and the Russians-in-London drama McMafia, he was the country’s biggest TV star and so, as night follows day, decided to try out a career as a lead in cinema.
“I guess I have taken the traditional route from TV into film,” he says with a rare bristle. “But I hate being called a television actor. The way some see television as inferior is narrow-minded.” Is there not demarcation in TV, though? People see a qualitative difference, for instance, between being in Grantchester and, say, The Sopranos.
“No,” he replies. “Happy Valley is probably my biggest leg-up into the American film industry. Grantchester is incredibly popular in the US. It’s weird how many have watched it. I was in the most remote part of Canada, on a lake in this canoe, and someone shouted, ‘Oh God, you’re the vicar!’”
So he is not completely anonymous, then? “For better or worse,” he says, back once again in full unruffled mode. “We do a job where one’s appraisal comes from an audience, so inevitably there are moments when the audience, as it grows, will want to know stuff beyond roles you play. I just try not to overthink it. My social media presence is light. I never really post about my girlfriend [the actress Imogen Poots]. But I’m also acutely aware that the fans have given me the opportunity in the first place. For me to cut myself off? It seems ungrateful.”
The Happy Valley actor plays society osteopath Stephen Ward in The Trial of Christine Keeler, a brand new drama coming to BBC One exploring the infamous Profumo affair of the 1960s
1. Did you have to do a lot of historical research for your role?
The writers provided us with a lot. We had a huge pack [of notes], and then there were many books that were specific about each character. It’s also recent enough to have video recordings, so that was really interesting to find, without being too mimicking [as an actor], it was good to find the sounds and tempos.
2. Is it scary playing real people? There’s so much already out there about these characters and viewers might have a perception about them before they watch the series...
Yeah, I’ve done it a few times and I actually quite like it. There’s an added responsibility, you always have a responsibility to the writers and the producers and the people who have conceived the piece, but then you have this added responsibility to do it for the person you’re portraying.
You have to honour them to a point and capture them and their soul, but also not mimic them. It’s about finding your version of them, or a way to express that person. But I like the challenge.
3. What did you find most challenging about your role?
For me, it was not falling too heavily in love with Stephen, because he’s such an enigmatic, charismatic and peculiar man, and it was fascinating doing the research and reading various people’s accounts. He was obviously very likeable, and that comes across in all the literature, but the challenge was to counter that with the responsibilities he had to people.
He has a lot to answer for, so it was constantly about reminding ourselves that he was far from excused. We needed to explore his likeability and charisma, but also the fact he groomed women from a very early age, largely for his own profit, so that was challenging
4. The Profumo affair was mentioned in The Crown in relation to Prince Philip. Is the Duke of Edinburgh mentioned in this series at all?
There’s one scene in the gallery where someone comes from somewhere in the community of that [royal] world and takes some of Stephen’s artwork down, which is totally true, but that’s as far as we go. It could have been anyone [but we assume it was the palace].
5. Are there any things that people won’t know about the Profumo affair that they’ll find out in this series?
It’s all about seeing it through a different filter. It’s now from Christine [Keeler] and Mandy [Rice-Davies]’s point of view. And from my point of view, Stephen was written off in the trial as this seedy man who was obsessed with orgies and sex, but actually we’ve further progressed now, we’re having conversations about openness and progressiveness and inclusiveness, and now we can look at Stephen’s sexual tastes in a different way. All these different filters shift the story.
I would love to have seen Stephen Ward now. He would dress like a Grayson Perry and ripped up every social engagement, and people would have loved him for it. Hopefully he would have stopped the whole grooming thing a long time ago, but as far as the way he expressed himself, he was completely oppressed.
6. What themes from the show are still relevant today?
[In regards to the theme of abuse of power], Stephen’s is a nuanced journey, and in his world he thought that he was enabling these women and giving them an opportunity. He called them alley cats, and he would go and find these young women, sometimes prostitutes, sometimes not, and he would give them a life.
Of course, the truth was that he was using them to decorate his parties. In light of #MeToo, and the world we’re living in now, it’s not an excuse at all, but it’s complicated.
The other important theme is media, and trial by media. We see these kids [now] on these reality TV shows, and there’s this huge media storm around them as they’re thrust into this life that they didn’t necessarily want, which can cause extreme distress and damage. So the fact that this story was probably the first of its time, and nothing’s really changed.
7. Lastly, Happy Valley season 3 has been confirmed, but it hasn’t been revealed whether you’ll be returning. Have you had any conversations with Sally Wainwright about that?
Not since probably three years ago, but I know that her plan and her intention is to have three [series], so I’m hoping... but I haven’t had the call yet. I think we’re waiting for the kid to get a bit older.
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