KARAOKE KING
constant tabloid coverage and a memoir published when he was 33. He’d grown up an hour outside London, the only son of a Royal Air Force musician father and a social-worker mother, sandwiched between two sisters. A big part of his life was the Salvation Army church that the Cordens belonged to, not always happily.
“It was a fucking disgrace,” he says. “What is a Christian? There were a lot of people walking through the door of that church and preaching something that in no way was how they were living their lives, or behaving, or acting.”
Corden remembers his first desire to perform came at age four, when he attended his sister Ruth’s christening and was placed on a chair so he could see, and began mugging for the parishioners. He bathed in the laughter. A few years later, he ditched school, rang a television programme about bullying and made up a cock-and-bull story about how he was so fearful of being picked on that he stayed home from school. It fooled everyone — except an aunt who was listening and told his parents. He was crap at school, specialising in drama and home economics. “It was just fucking pointless to me — I don’t need to know how glaciers separate,” Corden says.
He ignored his studies and instead filled the time trying to get a boy band off the ground — it didn’t happen — and temporarily losing his first driver’s license because he drove his scooter too fast. His more productive days were spent with his dad driving him to auditions around London, though none of them panned out. Finally, after years of rejections, he started scoring some parts based on the two factions of his heavyset body type.
One of his early breaks was playing a violent, depressed, overweight bully in beloved British director Mike Leigh’s bleak
All or Nothing in 2002. He then played the opposing side in the BBC drama Fat
Friends, as a teen mercilessly ridiculed and beaten up for being obese.
Throughout his career, Corden has made fun of his weight, whether having his then-comedy-partner Mathew Horne run his hands up and down Corden’s jiggling body in a skit for a BBC comedy or, more recently, in a Late Late Show bit where as an estate agent for a day, he unabashedly showers in a multimilliondollar Hollywood mansion. His Broadway breakthrough was playing Timms in
The History Boys, whose clownish character is partially motivated by being overweight.
At first, understandably, Corden spoke in cliches about the challenges of being a large man in the entertainment world, saying his parents loved him, and he never felt uneasy with himself. But on our second day, he goes into more detail. We had bonded after admitting we’d both been guilty of snatching food off abandoned room-service trays following drunken forays. “Half a burger,” Corden admits with a big laugh. “That’s the first time in my life I realised people order food and don’t eat every bite.”
Some of the moments when Corden seems most unguarded revolve around diet and food. He insists I guzzle my vegetable juice at our coffee-shop meeting the way a frat brother might implore you to down some Jager. When I say that I love fruit over vegetables, he laughs, “Of course you do, because fruit has all the sugar, mate”. At lunch, he mockingly shakes his head at me for getting rice with my sushi, whispering that sushi rice, alas, is also full of sugar.
We stop at a lunch spot for a chat and then he waves it off like the plague. “Shit, hang on. Is this us? I think it’s not, do you? There, I feel we’ll have to eat pizza.”
Later, he turns a little more introspective about being the jolly fat boy in the cruel teen years. “If you’re big at school, you’ve really got two choices,” he tells me, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “You’re going to be a target. If you go to school and you’re me, you go, ‘Right, I’m just going to make myself a bigger target. My confidence, it will terrify them’. That’s how I felt in school. Inside, you’re terrified. But if you’re a bit funny, if you’re quicker than them, they won’t circle back on you again.”
Still, Corden rolls his blue eyes when discussing the way Hollywood sees larger people. “I could never understand when I watch romantic comedies,” he says, “the notion that for some reason unattractive or heavy people don’t fall in love. If they do, it’s in some odd, kooky, roundabout way — and it’s not. It’s exactly the same. I met my wife; she barely owned a television and worked for Save the Children. We sat down one night and we fell in love and that was it.”
But his dimensions accelerated his rocket to British fame. While appearing in The History Boys, Corden would tell stories backstage, and Alan Bennett, the play’s author and one of Britain’s most respected playwrights, told him he should write them down. “When Alan Bennett tells you to start writing, you listen,” says Corden. So Corden and Ruth Jones, another actor from Fat Friends, began writing the BBC comedy Gavin & Stacey, with Corden and Jones playing supporting roles as heavyset best mates of the leads. It was a comedy that celebrated the everyday pleasures of British life — hanging out drunk with your mates at the chip shop, a wedding remarkable for its ordinariness, Corden’s character singing along to Do
They Know It’s Christmas? on the car radio. The show started on the little-watched BBC Three and concluded three years later with 10 million viewers for its finale, on New Year’s Day, 2010.
Corden was hailed as the next great British comedian, but England’s penchant for cutting down the tall poppies caught up with him. For every success — a comedy sketch of Corden critiquing members of the English national soccer team while hilariously fawning over David Beckham — there was a crashing failure: one critic described the colourfully titled film,
Lesbian Vampire Killers, as “profoundly awful”. Corden’s initial image as a non- traditional fresh face in the UK turned to criticisms that he was too “laddish”. He was photographed around London having the time of his life, which, in fairness, only seems like a crime to the British press. Corden was painted as ungrateful when
Gavin & Stacey won two Baftas, and he mentioned in his speech the fairly logical point that the sitcom won for best show, while not even being nominated for best comedy. While hosting an awards show, he was called out by Sir Patrick Stewart for “looking around as though you wish you were anywhere but here”.
Winston, one of The Late Late Show’s executive producers, has been Corden’s best friend for nearly two decades, since they met on a television show where Winston was working as a gofer. He insists that Corden wasn’t on a path to ruin; it was just an easy arc for the British press. “I didn’t think James was heading for a breakdown, or I’d step in like I’ve done with other people,” Winston tells me. “I think that just became a convenient shorthand for the media to talk about James.”
I ask Corden about the controversies. He’s blunt: he says some of the projects were simply not good enough, and he had some growing pains with fame. “I think I’ve very much had times where I haven’t been the best version of myself. You have to put the time in,” implying he didn’t always put the time in.
Despite his Tony and the talk show, Corden still seems a little insecure about his talents. When I mention I’m a big fan
‘There’s two kinds of performers. Aliens like Daniel Day-Lewis, and humans. Neither is better. I’m definitely in the human camp’
of British director Michael Winterbottom, who has employed Corden’s comic heroes Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon to great effect, he begins by profusely praising their work. Then he adds, “I don’t think I’m cool enough for a Michael Winterbottom film.”
Perhaps being pigeonholed as laddish in the UK is what made the itch to succeed in America so strong, even if it seemed like a tantalising bauble just out of reach. While doing a Broadway show, he was invited to a taping of Saturday Night Live and sat in show maestro Lorne Michaels’s office for 20 minutes, chatting about comedy. Michaels then invited him to the show’s after-party, where they talked some more.
“I left that night and thought, ‘I think he’s going to ask me to audition for
Saturday Night Live’,” Corden says. “But I never heard from him again.”
Despite the setbacks, Corden had a good creative life going in 2014 when CBS first beckoned. He was in talks to do another Broadway show and was hard at work on a HBO pilot. (It might resurface, so he won’t mention what it was about.) He’d had critical success with another BBC sitcom,
The Wrong Mans, and scored a major role in the film version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. Always close to his family, he was married with a kid and another one on the way.
The first time the CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, contacted Corden, the actor was uncertain he wanted to be a late-night gabfest host. “The fact that the first offer was really low helped,” says Corden. But a few months later, he was filming The Wrong
Mans in South Africa, while his family was thousands of miles away in England. “I just thought, ‘This is going to get harder and harder,’ ” says Corden. “I thought if I could do something creative and interesting on the show, it was an opportunity that wouldn’t come my way again.”
When Moonves came in with a better offer, Corden took it. “Outside of my being white and male, choosing me was a bold choice,” he says with a wry smile.
Corden and Winston knew from day one the show had to be appreciably different from other late-night options to make up for Corden’s semi-anonymity. On the show’s first night, they debuted with Corden and Tom Hanks doing a seven-minute re-enactment of all the best lines from Hanks’s movies. It was a hit, but Corden knew they needed a signature recurring piece like Letterman’s Top Ten lists, Jimmy Kimmel’s celeb readings of angry tweets and Fallon’s slow-jamming the news.
Corden had the idea for Carpool Karaoke for years, since he did a charity fundraising bit where he cheered up a grumpy George Michael by singing I’m Your Man, with Michael smiling and then joining in. Early in the show’s run, Mariah Carey’s rep was at the Late Late Show office with another client, and Corden convinced her that Carey should do the first karaoke bit. It was an instant hit, with more than 26 million views. Everyone from Wonder to Justin Bieber followed, including Elton John, who appeared on the show immediately after the Super Bowl broadcast.
All of the segments are marked by Corden’s enthusiastic hamminess. In the segment with Adele, Corden hit a high note on Hello. Adele’s eyebrows arched, then she sings alongs with gusto. The segments are simple productions — a camera is posted on the dash; there’s a tucked-away microphone and a single trail car. It’s up to Corden to put everyone at ease.
“You’re getting in a car,” says Corden, talking about how it goes. “The doors close. It’s the two of you. You’re going to put the music on. We’re going to sing our hearts out. What I say to everybody is, ‘This is a safe place. The more you go for it in the songs, like you’re playing Madison Square Garden, the better it is’. I have to meet them half-way with that. If I am at all timid in those moments, then they’re going to be like, ‘Wait. Hang on. What am I doing?’”
The reason it all works so well is that there’s a natural huggability to Corden. Unlike the Lettermans and Conans of yore, Corden isn’t some kind of dark lunatic. He’s just a chunky guy on your television asking you to love him. Carpool Karaoke is a major plank in Corden and Winston’s commitment to a different kind of talk show, one that relieves the audience from the 24/7 news cycle of terror and mayhem, rather than playing off its idiocies.
“When Letterman was on, when Leno was on, you were watching very, very different news to the news you’re watching today,” Corden says. “I feel like what you might want and require now is a bit of light at the end of your day.”
Lightness has proved a good business move as well. Carpool Karaoke has led to a prime-time special, and Apple Music recently bought a version of the franchise. It’s what Corden is known for, which is great, to a certain point. One time, while we walk back to his car after talking, he jokes, “Thank you for asking questions about other things besides karaoke”.
But that’s the rub. Despite colossal fame in England and his talent as a writer, James Corden is best known as the guy singing along with celebrities in an SUV. But he knows it’s all a series of trade-offs; hang around him, and you get the sense he misses acting. He admits to not being sure how long he’ ll do The Late Late Show. One afternoon on set, I overhear him talking with guest Keegan-Michael Key about Key’s independent film Don’t Think Twice.
“I have people on who do sitcoms and I’m, ‘OK, I’ve done that’,” Corden tells Key of his time as a character actor. “But I see a movie like yours, and I miss it.”
It does have its commercial benefits. On a scorching July night in LA, Grammy winner Meghan Trainor is onstage at the Greek Theatre playing before a typical crowd of screaming tweens and their mums. Glow sticks are being banged and Instagram accounts are being updated. About halfway through the show, the opening chords of Trainor’s recent hit Like
I’m Gonna Lose You ring out, and a pudgy man in a black shirt appears from the shadows to sing the part originally sung by John Legend.
And here’s the thing: The 13-year-olds go nuts. They recognise Corden en masse and stand on their seats and screech for the one-time target of bullies. It’s hard to imagine a 38-year-old Conan O’Brien or Letterman having that kind of popularity among adolescent girls. Corden belts out the bubblegum words: “So I’m gonna love you/Like I’m gonna lose you/I’m gonna hold you/Like I’m saying goodbye”.
Corden sells it unapologetically. He’s an ardent supporter of pop culture and will defend the likes of Coldplay until his final breath.
“There’s two kinds of performers,” he says right after the soundcheck for the Trainor appearance. “Aliens like Daniel Day-Lewis, and humans. Somehow, we think the aliens are better because they’re more mysterious. Neither is better. I’m definitely in the human camp.”