‘I’d be lying if I said the James Bond rumours weren’t exciting’
After breaking through in Happy Valley, James Norton has had a string of high profile roles. The actor talks about new big screen drama Mr Jones, working with Meryl Streep and those persistent links with 007. By James Mottram
James Norton’s career seems to be accelerating a little bit faster with every passing month. In December, he joined a stellar cast, including Meryl Streep and Saoirse Ronan, in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Last month, he starred in BBC series The Trial of Christine Keeler. And now Norton plays the lead – and gives one of his best performances yet – in Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing Soviet Union drama, Mr Jones.
But if the rumours are to be believed, the 34-year-old is about to be offered a role that would dwarf everything he has so far achieved. Norton is persistently touted as the next James Bond, with one bookmaker naming him as the odds-on favourite to replace Daniel Craig.
“I’ve said it many times: the word I use about this is just ‘bizarre’,” says Norton. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t exciting and flattering. I don’t know where it comes from but they [the media] just love to write an article about it.” Has that been hard to cope with? He shrugs. “There’s nothing to cope with.”
One gets the impression that not much fazes Norton. Sitting on a stool on the third floor of Berlin’s Palast, looking neatly groomed in a maroon sweater and grey pinstripe trousers, he is certainly far too modest, despite all his recent success, to think that he has ‘made it’. “If you start to think that,” he says, “then maybe you take your foot off the pedal a little bit.”
No chance of that now Norton has had a taste of life on set with the stars, particularly his “one day with Meryl”. He breaks into a smile. “I can die happy. It was one scene, I didn’t say a word. It was a scene with Emma Watson, Laura Dern and Meryl Streep, and there was me quietly texting my mum, going: ‘F**k!’”
Norton’s big screen debut came as Carey Mulligan’s boyfriend, briefly glimpsed, in 2009’s An Education. There were roles, too, in Ron Howard’s racing drama Rush and Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, in which Norton spent months “in the trenches” developing his character via the director’s renowned improvisational methods. But there has been nothing – yet – to match the size or emotional scope of Mr Jones.
In this true story, Norton plays Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist in the 1930s who travelled to Moscow and then to the Ukraine, where he uncovered the horrors of the Holodomor. This famine, a genocide reputedly engineered by the Stalin-run Soviet government, led to millions of deaths. “I knew my European history and Second World War,” says Norton, “but relatively little about the Ukrainian famine.”
Jones became instrumental in reporting on what was believed by some to be Stalin’s way of eliminating a brewing independence movement. “It’s quite disconcerting,” says Norton, alluding to the parallels between the way Soviet media reported on the famine and fake news in the current political climate. “The terminology has changed but the meaning and the sentiment hasn’t. Totalitarian regimes, manipulating the truth for their own game… it was happening then and it’s happening now.”
The power of Mr Jones was really brought home to Norton while working on set with Ukrainian citizens. “Most of them have a very charged relationship with the subject matter,” he says. Norton remembers one actress who has a small exchange with Jones in the film. “She auditioned and broke down in the audition because her great-grandmother had died and she was still carrying this burden,” he explains. “Being there among Ukrainians [made me] really appreciate how important this story is.”
Norton, who speaks both Russian and Welsh on screen, endured some strenuous work with dialect and language coaches. So what was tougher, Welsh or Russian? “The tougher is speaking Russian with a Welsh accent,” he laughs. “It’s niche, for sure.”
Norton does have some experience of Russian, though. He featured in 2016’s War & Peace as Andrei Bolkonsky, opposite Lily James and Paul Dano. More recently, he took the lead in the superb drama Mcmafia, playing an investment broker with ties to Russian organised crime.
A second season of Mcmafia is currently in development, although Norton was deflated by some responses to it. “The show hit an audience and the people who watched it, loved it,” he says. “But I think in the current climate of fast attention-grabbing TV, it was a slow-burn and it required the audience’s attention. You couldn’t double screen. So as a result, certain people switched off in the middle… and I wanted to persuade them to stick to the end.”
It was another series back in 2014 that really put Norton on the map, though. “When people say: ‘What show moved the needle the most?’, I think it would be Happy Valley,” he
“Being there among Ukrainians [made me] really appreciate how important this story is”
says. The Sally Wainwrightcreated crime drama, set in West Yorkshire, became a multi award-winner over its two seasons.
Norton earned a Bafta nomination for his performance as psychopath Tommy Lee Royce and Happy Valley, he says, allowed him to go on “a transformative journey”, playing a character far removed from himself. Whether or not a third season will happen – “there’s always been talk” – Norton is hung up on that character. “I still think about Tommy.”
Norton was born in London but spent his childhood in Malton in North Yorkshire (his father lectured at Hull School of Art and Design). He had, as he puts it, “the Happy Valley accent” in those early years.
“There are videos of me playing Joseph in the school nativity. It’s like a little mini Tommy Lee Royce, knocking on the manger door!” He clearly loved his upbringing in an idyllic part of Yorkshire, where his parents still live. “It’s definitely home,” he says.
That Norton lost his accent over time is probably explained by his education. He attended the boarding school Ampleforth, read theology at Cambridge and then had a stint at Rada, although he left early to take a role at the Royal Court in a production of Laura Wade’s Bullingdon Club satire Posh. Plenty of theatre followed, from The Lion in Winter to Belleville, at the Donmar, where he first worked with his actress-girlfriend Imogen Poots.
Now, though, with his star in the ascendant, he’s swinging more towards film. Already lined up is the eerie-sounding thriller Things Heard & Seen, from the directors of American Splendor, and the tearjerker Nowhere Special, in which Norton plays a father with just months to live who must find his boy a new family.
Norton is about to enter the big time. But even with 007 potentially looming, he is trying not to get ahead of himself. “You want to be able to step back and go, ‘This is fantastic’ and live in that moment for a second,” he says. “The older I get, I want to stop looking forward and look at the now.”