TV’s man of the moment
He has made the small screen his own thanks to Grantchester, Happy Valley and War & Peace but James Norton’s reputation is set to soar in crime thriller McMafia
HE’S best known so far for playing a vicar and a brooding baddie but it is his forthcoming role that’s tipped to take James Norton to the next level. In BBC One’s crime drama McMafia, in which he plays a man trying to escape his Russian family’s violent past, the 32-year-old will swap the Grantchester dog collar for a tuxedo.
Over eight episodes Norton will be seen confronting the Russian mob, Mexican cartels and Pakistani drug lords.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the entire series, starting on New Year’s Day, could also be the perfect audition to become the new James Bond. Londoner Norton, who also played a psychopath in Happy Valley, is being tipped as one of the frontrunners to fill Daniel Craig’s 007 shoes.
In any event it’s a certainty that McMafia will be the vehicle that enables Norton to become the next major British acting export to Hollywood.
There are said to be parallels with The Night Manager and the platform it gave another Brit, Tom Hiddleston, who is going from strength to strength across the pond.
Norton seems to have the world at his feet right now and, as you might expect, he’s excited by the prospect. However, he admits that moving on to the A-list also fills him with a sense of dread. He does not feel comfortable being a celebrity and confesses that the jet-set lifestyle often leaves him feeling lonely.
The actor, who also appeared in the BBC’s War & Peace playing Prince Andrei, said earlier this year that his hectic schedule reinforced his sense of melancholy. At the time he’d flown to LA for the Golden Globes and stayed on to do some promotional work. Most onlookers with regular mundane jobs would be asking what’s not to enjoy but Norton said: “On paper I should have been happier than ever but I’ve rarely felt so low.” It meant he was apart from his actress girlfriend Jessie Buckley for nearly two months, and he added: “It left me really confused about what was happening in my life.”
He’s also revealed that he has an unusual way of dealing with loneliness, which involves getting his father Hugh on set as an extra as often as possible.
Norton senior already has to his name blink-and-you’ll-miss him appearances in War & Peace, Grantchester and Death Comes To Pemberley. On the set of Grantchester, in Cambridge, he was known by cast and crew as “Papa Norton”.
It’s certainly an interesting reversal of the formula of sons following in the footsteps of actor fathers. Mother Lavinia prefers to be on the other side of the camera.
“He’s in pretty much every show I do,” says the actor of his dad, a retired lecturer. “It’s a great way for him and mum to see the world. So my dad comes and dresses up as these mad characters, and my mum sits on the sidelines and just laughs at him. And they love it. They are very supportive.”
For War & Peace, when Hugh played a peasant crossing a square, that entailed a trip to freezing Lithuania.
The younger Norton has already dipped his toe in the Hollywood waters, in the remake of the cult 1990s film Flatliners, about five medical students who are obsessed with the afterlife.
It didn’t get rave reviews when released in September but that’s all part of the process of being propelled to the next stage. It was his first experience of a bigbudget movie, and it’s a step up that Norton confesses he finds “terrifying”. He added recently: PRESENCE: As psycho killer menacing cop Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley. And with girlfriend Jessie Buckley “At what point do you go: I almost wish I hadn’t moved into that place because now I can’t walk into a pub?”
THE actor accepts that his discomfort won’t attract much sympathy but he has also spoken of feeling that his fame is “getting out of control”. On the one hand he craves an ordinary life without being photographed on the Tube, but he also wants to push himself professionally. “I am a worrier for sure,” he says of his growing star status. “I’ve had moments where I’ve been thinking about it at four o’clock in the morning.”
Norton was born in London in 1985 but his parents soon moved and he enjoyed an idyllic rural upbringing in North Yorkshire. He attended Ampleforth College, which is run by Benedictine monks and has been described as the Catholic Eton. He then – appropriately for a later role – studied theology at Cambridge before going to Rada.
There Norton didn’t enjoy the ultra-competitiveness of some fellow aspiring actors, perhaps another sign of his insecurities.
His big breakthrough came in the first series of Happy Valley, in 2014. As unhinged kidnapper Tommy Lee Royce he won a Bafta nomination and it also made him an unlikely, shavenheaded heart-throb.
He showed his versatility by playing crime-fighting vicar Sidney Chambers in Grantchester, alongside Robson Green. “He really is one of the best I’ve ever worked with,” enthuses Green.
Norton’s new drama McMafia has nothing to do with Scotland but is named after Chechen gangsters running their crime networks like the McDonald’s fast-food franchise model.
The in-demand star might still be ambivalent about fame but with Hollywood calling it looks like his dad is going to be having a ball adding to his burgeoning acting CV. McMafia: BBC One, 9pm, New Year’s Day.