‘I’m dazzled by talent, not wealth’
James Norton tells Chris Harvey about grim schooldays, Bond rumours and his role in a new drama about the Profumo affair
No one could accuse James Norton of allowing himself to be typecast. The 34-yearold has played a vicar-turned-sleuth in Grantchester, a violent rapist in Happy Valley, and the aristocratic hero of War & Peace. He’s also been suggested as the new James Bond. And he’s just about to add to his library of opposites with two new roles: the staid tutor John Brooke, who marries Emma Watson’s Meg March in the starstudded new film adaptation of Little Women; and the flamboyant real-life figure at the centre of the Profumo scandal – Stephen Ward – in BBC One’s The Trial of Christine Keeler.
“Ward was 100 per cent the fall guy,” says Norton, sporting a dark-blue crushed velvet jacket and settling in on a chaise longue in an upmarket London hotel. The actor looks every bit as debonair as you’d expect for a man playing the high-society osteopath with connections that ran from Soho to the aristocracy. “The government needed to clear their own name by tarnishing someone else’s.”
It was Ward who introduced John Profumo (Ben Miles), the 46-year-old secretary of state for war, to 19-yearold showgirl Christine Keeler (Sophie Cookson) at a party at Lord Astor’s country house estate of Cliveden in 1961. It led to an affair that exposed Profumo as a security threat – thanks to Keeler’s simultaneous relationship with a Russian naval attaché.
Keeler and her friend, Mandy Rice-davies (Ellie Bamber), often stayed at 50-year-old Ward’s London mews flat, and the former public schoolboy would later be prosecuted for living off immoral earnings, in a dubious case of establishment revenge. The two had contributed small amounts to household expenses. Ward committed suicide after the judge’s summing up amounted to a direction to the jury to find him guilty.
Amanda Coe’s stylish, evocative drama establishes Keeler and Ricedavies as sexually liberated young women. Does Norton think they were victims? “Ward definitely used certain relationships he had with young, beautiful women to ingratiate himself with the wealthy elite,” he says. “He also groomed them to a point… but it’s too simplistic to say he was a man who groomed young women. His relationship with these young girls was often a positive one
– he would enable them, take them out of poverty.”
Keeler was from a disadvantaged background, and fitted the mould of the “alley cats” Ward liked to befriend.
Norton gives a terrific performance as the sleazy Pygmalion.
“I really warmed to
‘If people don’t like what I do, they can go and watch something else’
him… he was way ahead of his time, so brave in how he lived his life and expressed himself, his sexual tastes, his flirting with cross-dressing. “And the final reckoning was that Stephen Ward had somehow corrupted these Tory ministers, and it was all his fault, which is absurd.” I wonder if Norton, the son of a retired college lecturer and a mother who taught medical ethics, is as dazzled by the truly posh as Ward was. “Wealth or class are not things that I’m particularly dazzled by,” he says. “I am by talent.” He cites Little Women director Greta Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, who made Netflix’s Marriage Story, as an example. Norton himself is part of a powerhouse acting couple, with British star Imogen Poots, to whom he became close when they starred in a play in 2017. They seem very happy. “It’s good,” he says, but adds, “my personal life is very normal. I have a house in Peckham, my [parents] live in Yorkshire. There’s very little glamour and scandal.” There was a little bit of the latter when actress Jessie Buckley, his ex-girlfriend, said their break-up had been “acrimonious”, but Norton is far too canny to add fuel to that particular fire.
Similarly, he won’t comment on the rumours linking him to James Bond, insisting they are “based on nothing”. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have opinions on the series in general.
“We all know that with James Bond, large parts of it, and all the versions of it in the past, are now antiquated and it needs to be updated,” he says.
“And I think Barbara Broccoli and the producers are very aware of that. Bringing in people like Phoebe Waller-bridge can only help.”
Might the spy be a little too onedimensional for someone who has taken on so many interesting parts? Daniel Craig, who is stepping aside after the latest film No Time To Die comes out in April, has often seemed unhappy with the role. “If I was to take on a franchise,” Norton says, “I would always want to complement it with something completely different.”
He has just taken on a big HBO sci-fi series, The Nevers, he says, and is in negotiations with the BBC about doing a second series of Mcmafia.
We chat about the fact that the first series attracted a measure of criticism, including some for his own performance as Alex Godman, the scion of a Russian mafia family drawn reluctantly into the underworld. “There was an article about the three wooden faces of James Norton,” he says, with a laugh.
How did he take it?
“It’s a rite of passage that you have [bad reviews],” he replies. “Ultimately, it’s an art form that is deeply subjective and you’re never going to please everyone.” The character was intended to be “inscrutable and calcified”, he adds. Nevertheless, he admits he might play it slightly differently second time around.
“Possibly,” he says. “But, then again, you don’t want to pander to the people who didn’t like it. There’s so much content out there that people who don’t like it can go and find something else.”
One of the factors that Norton and director James Watkins agreed upon when sketching out Godman’s background was his public school education. Norton is a public school boy too; a former pupil of Ampleforth, the leading Catholic boarding school which was found to have covered up the sexual abuse of scores of children in a devastating report in 2018.
Norton never saw any wrongdoing during his time there, but does admit to being “quite badly bullied” and credits one of the monks – a Father Peter – with helping him get through it. “I was able to go and just talk to him and he basically became my therapist,” says Norton. “I just sort of sobbed my eyes out.”
Has it left a mark? “It probably has a bit,” he says. “It’s not defined me, but it has informed who I am. I’m hyper aware if someone is being in any way ostracised on a film set, for example.”
On Little Women, he found himself on set with big stars including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep and Laura Dern.
Did he fancy 23-year-old Chalamet as much as everyone else seems to?
He smiles. “He’s a beguiling and bizarre, unique force of nature,” he says. “Whenever he’s around, I feel about 10 years older than I am.”
The film’s a deliriously romantic take on the novel’s sibling rivalries – but among all its bold women, I wonder if John Brooke is just a teeny bit dull. He laughs. “He’s a little quieter than the other characters, but that allowed me to just witness all these great women actors. It was incredible.”