James Norton on Playing Nice, masculinity and being close to burnout
The last time I laid eyes on James Norton, my heart was in my throat. As one of the 7.5m viewers glued to their screens for the series finale of Sally Wainwright’s acclaimed crime drama Happy Valley, I was waiting to see whether Norton’s psychopathic ex-con Tommy Lee Royce or BS-intolerant police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) would prevail after a nail-biting cat-and-mouse chase. For a show built around cups of tea over kitchen tables in Yorkshire, the quietly eviscerating showdown proved that one honest conversation can be infinitely more dramatic than a spray of blood and gore.
It seems fitting, then, that when I speak to Norton one autumn morning, he is propped up once again at a kitchen table. The man who terrorised the country as the Monster of Calder Valley is now sipping coffee in a shaft of sunshine from a skylight, a vision of contentment even though he’s dealing with an intense workload. ‘My head is spinning,’ smiles Norton, on Zoom from his home in London. ‘I’ve never had this experience before, but I’m straddling quite a few different headspaces in terms of characters, which is kind of weird and really a wonderful position to be in.’ Even for an actor at the peak of his powers, his diary sounds daunting: as well as juggling press for his Netflix film Joy, he’s also shooting period epic House Of Guinness in Liverpool and is deep in a ‘furious edit’ on his historical drama King And Conqueror.
And that’s not accounting for his new ITV drama, Playing Nice. Based on JP Delaney’s bestselling novel and produced through Rabbit Track Pictures, the indie founded by Norton and producer Kitty Kaletsky in 2019, the four-part thriller follows two couples whose lives become a living nightmare when they discover their toddlers were switched at birth in a hospital mix-up. Unlike shows that are shorthand for lives that are ‘not like ours’, Playing Nice presents a relatable quandry: would you keep the child you raised, or reclaim your own flesh and blood? ‘The thing about this story, particularly, is the hook. If you explain it to people, they go, “What! I can’t imagine what that would be like!”’ says Norton. ‘I don’t think necessarily being a parent is a prerequisite for empathy. I mean, if I was to find out that my parents weren’t my own parents, at whatever age, it would be horrific and traumatic and confusing. So to find out that your child is not your own, I think, is a fairly universal and recognisable trauma, which people can imagine.’
In the show, Norton plays Pete, a mild stay-at-home dad who, alongside his partner Maddie (Niamh Algar), is thrown into the world of another couple, Miles (a creepily brilliant James McArdle) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay). It presented a chance for the 39-year-old to portray a very different kind of hero. ‘In terms of my approach to Pete, what excited me about him was that I hadn’t played a sort of everyman,’ says Norton. ‘He’s a good guy. He looks out for his partner, he’s a fantastic father and he is constantly trying to do the right thing.’ He was intrigued, too, by the way Pete’s inherent avoidance causes fractures in his relationship. ‘It asks questions around modern masculinity,’ he explains. ‘Like, to be a man in this current time, in this world, the mistake is that you need to be passive and make space for your partner, make space for other people and step away from the oppressive patriarchy. And so, as a result, he kind of says, “Well, I think let’s just play nice. Let’s just try to be as amenable as possible in all situations.” And so he kind of goes too far in the other direction.’
Norton is the first to admit that producing has been a steep learning curve. Playing Nice was the first book he optioned after launching Rabbit Track with Kaletsky, an experience he describes as a ‘baptism of fire’. The company, he recalls, was in its nascent stages when Kaletsky set up a pitch meeting with Tony Strong (whose pen name is JP Delaney) and gave Norton four days to read the novel. At the time, he was shooting a film in New York, so he had to do the meeting in a sleep-deprived state. ‘It all started from a 3am, very kind of foggy memory I have of sitting in some flat in Kingston, upstate New York, on a Zoom, going, “Is this how do you do a pitch?”’ As an actor, he hadn’t yet mastered the art of talking about a project in a ‘blank-page space’, so he had to just go on instinct. ‘There was quite a lot of competition for this book,’ he continues, ‘but Tony liked what we had to offer and our enthusiasm for it.’
As an actor, Norton has always had a capacity for intense emotion, as well as remarkable range. He may have played a brooding prince with aplomb in War And Peace, but anyone who’s been paying attention will know there’s far more to him than being a quintessential romantic hero. One glance at his CV reveals a string of starkly contrasting parts, from Sidney Chambers, the saintly, sleuthing vicar of Grantchester, to Alex Godman, the British-educated son of a Russian gangster in McMafia. Though he’s sweet smiles and neighbourly warmth on the surface, there’s a deep-seated desire, it seems, to understand the human condition. As we talk, he sprinkles religious terms such as ‘salvation’ and ‘redemption’ into the conversation; a relic, perhaps, of the way faith shaped his formative years, when he was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College (known as the Catholic Eton), before reading theology at Cambridge.
It was his turn as Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley that he credits with changing the course of his career. ‘What it did for me was set me off on that path of surprise,’ he says earnestly. ‘You know, it surprised me when I read that, and thought, “This is so far from me. Am I really going to be able to do this?” And then I went for the audition and Sally [Wainwright] saw something she liked and trusted me with this incredible responsibility. For me, it was a confidence boost: you can put yourself out of your comfort zone and, with the right people around you, the right alchemy and some hard work, you can deliver. And so then I was able to take that philosophy into other jobs and constantly go on this path of sort of oblique turns, right angles, trying to make sure that I do something different every time.’
Norton’s next big role was A Little Life, a stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling, 2015 Booker-nominated novel of the same name. In the show, he gave an arresting performance as Jude St Francis, a troubled lawyer who self-harms after suffering unspeakable abuse as a child. ‘It’s not just the toughest role I’ve had, it’s the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life,’ he says. Norton is endearingly honest about the physical toll of doing a four-hour performance every day (twice on matinee days), which he refers to as an ‘attritional wearing down’. There were practical concerns, too: he has type 1 diabetes, and worried about how he was going to perform for hours without proper access to glucose and his sugar monitor. ‘It felt like an insurmountable challenge,’ he reflects. But his agent persuaded him to take the role precisely because he was scared. ‘I think that was the biggest lesson, you know? It sounds like it should be on a f*cking mug, but when you think you can’t do something, sometimes it’s worth going for it.’
The experience was formative in many ways. Every night after the show, Norton would go to the stage door and meet audience members, many of whom, he explains, were survivors of abuse. ‘Those conversations I had at the stage door, some of them will be some of the most meaningful interactions I’ve ever had,’ he says. It’s hardly surprising he feels changed by the role. ‘That play, that book, opens up the soul and makes people available and makes people honest and they just want to share,’ he continues, ‘and it made me want to share, it made me more open, it made me more empathetic and it made me more confident in myself and in my abilities.’
One might assume that Norton would take time off after such a gruelling endeavour. In fact, he did the opposite, leaping straight into production on Joy. It was, he admits, ‘kind of bonkers’, but the scheduling wasn’t in his favour. ‘The problem is, when you’re so set on having a break, often the role comes along that you then can’t deny.’ He knew instantly that Joy would be the perfect tonic after A Little Life. ‘Joy is, as the title suggests, about such a positive and selfless act,’ he says. The film explores the birth of IVF and the trio of medics who toiled tirelessly for a decade to create a procedure that would enable millions of people to become parents. ‘I guess there was something cathartic about going from A Little Life into something that was so inherently joyful, positive and warm,’ he muses. ‘And, actually, there was a part of my processing Jude, I think, which was helped by going into Joy.’
While he looks back on the summer he spent filming Joy with ‘incredible fondness’, and is now good friends with his co-stars, Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie, he found himself in a state of exhaustion in the beginning stages of Playing Nice. ‘There was a moment in the early days when I was worried I wasn’t doing my job as an actor well enough, because I was tired. I was also trying to be an exec producer and I felt I was taking my eye off the ball, and that was stressing me out,’ he recalls, suddenly sombre. ‘I started to use the word “burnout” a bit. I was like, “I think I’m close to burnout, I don’t know.”’ He leant on his friends for support, including Kaletsky. ‘She’s my best, best friend,’ he beams. ‘She’s supported me through all my stuff’. He has routines in place, too, to keep him healthy. ‘I exercise, I swim every day. I go in cold water. I’m a big advocate of cold water every day, which I think keeps me healthy, touch wood. I’m good at avoiding colds. I’m convinced that’s cold-water immersion, but I’m one of those annoying evangelicals about that,’ he smiles.
Throughout our interview, Norton continually mentions his good fortune. Is gratitude something he practises, I wonder? ‘I wish I was able to tell you that I sit every morning and meditate over a gratitude mantra, which is just not true,’ he laughs. ‘I walk in, I drink coffee and I read the paper. It’s not cultivated from anything other than I just feel lucky.’ He’s been acting from as early as he can remember, he explains, when he played Joseph in the school nativity and did youth theatre in the school holidays. ‘To be able to do my hobby all the time, and to have this company and to build these projects, you know, I have been lucky.’
At this stage in his career, Norton has proved he can play against type. Even so, he speaks with a note of trepidation about the future. ‘There is a fear, sometimes, when you do these very seminal jobs in your life, the punctuation marks – Happy Valley is one, A Little Life is one – when you finish them, you think, “Oh, God, is that it? Am I going to have another Tommy, or am I going to have another challenge, like Jude Saint Francis?” And then something comes along and a whole new challenge is...’ He drifts off, looking contemplative. ‘That’s the beauty of my job; there is no monotony. Every turn is a potential new challenge.’
Playing Nice will begin airing from Sunday 5 January 2025 at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX. Episodes will air every Sunday and Monday thereafter.
This interview is taken from the January 2025 issue of Red
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