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’
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…
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 four-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 attacks. 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 I 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?’”…