‘There's a thug in all of us': James Norton on privacy, playing villains and pushing himself to the limit

The Guardian

09-08-2025

Two days before we meet, James Norton turned 40. To celebrate, he threw a massive party at his home in north-east London – and he's still feeling the effects. 'I didn't get any sleep,' he admits, 'and yesterday was just a huge clear-up, so if I struggle for a word or an anecdote, please forgive me.'
To be fair, I've seen Norton in worse shape. The last time I encountered him in person he was naked, crawling around on all fours while being spat at. 'Oh, yeah,' he smiles, realising I'm talking about his performance as Jude in the 2023 stage version of A Little Life. In that play, an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara's cult tragic novel, he remained on stage at the Savoy theatre in London for its whopping three-and-a-half-hour length, fully immersed in a character who suffers an immense, seemingly never-ending ordeal of sexual abuse and self-­harm. 'That was a proper … ' He trails off and exhales. 'That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.'
Norton has talked in the past about how playing Jude took it out of him – he would find himself unable to stop crying, or rendered catatonic. Despite all this, the moment the play ended he thought, 'What if that's it? What if it's never as challenging again? It's like those people who run a marathon, it nearly kills them, and then two weeks later they want to sign up for another.'
This is what we're here to talk about today: the career equivalent of that second marathon. For Norton, it's two huge TV projects, the kind that could turn him from one of Britain's most admired actors – known for playing complex men in shows such as Happy Valley and films such as Mr Jones – into a global name (not for nothing have rumours persisted that he could be the next Bond). First is King & Conqueror, the new BBC drama he has been working on with his production company, Rabbit Track, for seven years. It tells the epic story of 1066 and the battle between Harold Godwinson (Norton) and William, Duke of Normandy (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) for the English crown. Then there's House of Guinness, a glossy Netflix drama about the Irish stout dynasty, written by Steven Knight who made Peaky Blinders. They are landing at a moment that feels transformative for the actor – and not only because of any just-turned-40 jitters.
A few years ago, Norton had been worried that acting was frivolous – 'dressing up and fucking around' as he puts it. But A Little Life made him realise that, no, it has a purpose. He would meet real-life abuse survivors at the stage door every night and learn how important the show had been for them. It made him think about his own past, as a victim of bullies while a young teen at boarding school. And by literally baring all on stage, he became more open, even if said openness – such as spilling his feelings about his 2023 split with former fiancee and fellow actor Imogen Poots, during a panel at this year's Glastonbury festival, which went viral on TikTok – sometimes leaves him feeling exposed. 'If I'd known there was a journalist in the audience I probably wouldn't have been so honest,' he says with a smile. 'I'm realising more and more everyone has a fucking phone.'
We meet in Ham Yard, fittingly the same Soho hotel where Norton celebrated A Little Life's closing party. He cycled here alone and I spot him wandering around the bar, looking for someone who might feasibly be a journalist. In his baggy trousers and T-shirt, he makes for cheerful, relaxed company, though he assures me he often turns up to interviews dripping in sweat from having pedalled frantically to make it on time. He has a puppyish enthusiasm for his work and when he smiles – which is often – his eyes crinkle up and close. When a passing woman interrupts us to tell him, 'I think you're an amazing actor,' he bashfully thanks her before turning to me and pretending he's writing this piece: 'And at this point, the actor's mum turns up.'
Norton orders tea – Earl Grey with a spot of oat milk – and tells me about King & Conqueror. 'I put my hands up and admit I didn't know the story at all,' he says. 'I just had a vague gloss of it from school. I wasn't aware of the relationship Harold and William had before the battle, that they were friends and allies for many years before they realised that, because of the way Europe was being carved up, they would both inevitably end up on a battlefield – and one of them would have to die.'
The Rest Is History podcast once compared the events leading up to 1066 to Game of Thrones, and Norton agrees. 'It's mad to think nobody has really done it before,' he says. 'And that's one of the reasons we spent so long developing it.'
Producing is clearly new territory for Norton. King & Conqueror was shot in Iceland, and he found himself struggling with concepts that don't normally intrude on an actor's consciousness, such as budget. 'It's the closest I've ever come to feeling like I'd bitten off too much,' Norton says. 'I started using the word 'burnout', which is just, like, oh God.' He likes to play down any struggles he talks about, hyper aware people may be thinking, 'Oh, give it a rest, you're making television.' But he's also keen to point out that being under pressure is really his ideal performance state: 'I just do better. Too much time and space makes me slightly inert.'
Far less stressful, he says, is his forthcoming role – purely as an actor – in House of Guinness. No budget worries here: he plays Sean Rafferty, a whip-cracking hardman who keeps the stout company's workers in line while the Guinness siblings fall into a Succession-style squabble over inheritance, sparked by their father Sir Benjamin's devilishly crafted will. Norton – who used a special accent coach to nail not only the area (Dublin) but also the period (mid-19th century) – says an awful lot of Guinness 0.0 was consumed on set. And off set?
'We shot it in Liverpool, which is full of good Irish pubs. So, yeah, we were splitting the Gs and all that.' He's referring to the art of making sure your first gulp of Guinness leaves the pint settled at the 'G' on the branded glass. Did he perfect it? 'I think I did,' he says, sounding very unsure. 'It usually happened later in the night. I mean … I've got vague memories of jumping around a pub.'
Whether on or off camera, Norton feels comfortable at the centre of the action these days, which hasn't always been the case. Back when he was starting out as an actor, he auditioned for Fifty Shades of Grey. 'And I remember the director saying, 'Can you be a bit more charismatic?'' He laughs. 'That's the hardest thing to just try and do! Especially since I was too young and self-conscious to even really know what she meant.'
These days, he thinks he has acquired the age and experience to perform a darkly magnetic character such as Rafferty. 'And it felt great,' he says. 'Because it taps into that alter ego of who you'd love to be. He's violent, but he's romantic, too. There's a thug in all of us.'
Norton portrayed one of the great villains of British television in Happy Valley's Tommy Lee Royce. The character he helped create – charming, psychopathic, but in glimpses vulnerable, too – is what he does perfectly. His roles often strike a nerve because they wrestle with the pressures and flaws of modern masculinity.
The secret to playing a character like Royce, he says, is that you have to like them on some level. 'In the early stages, someone like Tommy was defined only by cruelty and violence, when in fact he's defined by damage, trauma and fear. So the way in is trying to separate acts that are inherently abhorrent and unforgivable from the context. And the context is that, nearly always, anyone capable of that type of cruelty has been subjected to cruelty. So he's just a deeply sad, damaged man. Maybe 'like' is the wrong word, but empathy for sure.'
Happy Valley made Norton a household name, but he says he has been lucky that his career has involved big next steps rather than giant leaps that might have left him out of his depth. He started in theatre, and did some guest days on TV and film, before Happy Valley was followed by shows such as Grantchester, in which he played sleuthing vicar Sidney Chambers, and McMafia, as the son of a Russian mafia boss living in London. Then came the chance to do A Little Life. The thought of playing the lead terrified Norton – which was the reason Poots and his agent told him he had to do it.
If playing Jude was gruelling, there were other factors that made it even harder for Norton. At 22 he was diagnosed with diabetes and, as a result, is constantly hooked up via Bluetooth to a glucose monitor (he has to self-inject up to 15 times a day). For A Little Life he carefully stashed sugar gels around the stage to help him stay on top of things. If the Bluetooth failed, a stage manager would be on alert to get the message to him. 'Someone might be doing an intimate scene with me, or something violent, and when they were close up they'd whisper 'three point two', then carry on. It was intense.'
On only one occasion did Norton fail to respond in time. 'One horrible thing about having a hypoglycemic moment is you get a kind of clarity at first, which makes you think you don't need sugar. Then what happens next is like a sort of terrible psychedelic trip, where you're so confused you don't know where you are.' It happened during a scene where he was required to run around the stage. 'It was terrifying. I was dripping with sweat, dropping my lines, confused. The actors could all tell something wasn't right.'
When the play first opened, some audience members disobeyed the strict no-cameras rule and snapped Norton during his naked scenes – photos even ended up appearing on MailOnline. He must have felt violated?
'Yeah … I mean, violated is probably too strong. My strongest memory is that it was just a bit sad, a bit gross, this idea that it would be framed in a kind of titillating way when the subject matter was so clearly vicious and upsetting. But I think the reaction, generally, was that it was misjudged, which was gratifying.'
The naked scenes caused a lot of noise around the show. Norton said at the time he thought 'as a culture', we are 'scared of the penis', though he thinks we have since become a lot better at accepting male nudity on screen. Have we, though, I wonder? The biggest (excuse the pun) example of male nudity I can think of is The White Lotus, which involved the use of giant prosthetic ones. If those are what we're all looking at, no wonder society is scared of the penis.
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'Yeah, that is a bit weird,' Norton muses. 'But I think it's deliberate – they want it to be big, right? It's like in Pam & Tommy, where there's an animatronic penis that talks.' He laughs while considering his position on all of this. 'I can say that I have never had a prosthetic or an animatronic penis. All my penis work is my own.'
He falls silent. 'Oh shit, that's going to be the headline, isn't it? Do I need to call my publicist?'
Norton was born in south London but grew up in Malton, North Yorkshire. He has described his childhood as 'idyllic' but that's not exactly true. He was sent to boarding school and found himself being tormented by bullies there. 'It's that thing where a lot of boys are having separation anxiety, feelings of fear and confusion as to why they've been taken out of their home at the age of 11,' he says. 'A lot of people retreat into themselves, and others deal with that same confusion by doing that Lord of the Flies thing and becoming the bully. I was young for my year and I became an exciting target because I would react to things that were thrown my way. I didn't have the self-awareness to just go: whatever.'
Norton has a tendency to play it down, but he acknowledges that the scars have stayed with him. 'Oh, for sure. It's something that is part of the jigsaw puzzle of my 40-now years.' In fact, part of the reason he took on the role of Jude was that he thought it might somehow rid him of the bullied child within. Did it go deeper than that: did he see fame as an act of revenge on the bullies?
'There's a sort of byproduct to the acting thing, which is that the barometer of your success is the public reaction,' he says. 'That can get hijacked by parts of your personality which are needing affirmation, which we all have. That part of me is gratified by the feeling of being on a billboard or whatever. Then you step away from that and realise it's not going to really get rid of that need for affirmation, because nothing will.'
Norton thought he had a decent gauge when it came to not letting work intrude on his personal life. 'I've always been clear about it taking up too much space at the expense of relationships and friendships,' he says. 'But A Little Life, more than any other job, was where that didn't happen. It took everything out of me.'
As an outside observer, it's hard not to wonder if the pressure he put himself under contributed to his split with Poots after six years. But he says no. 'That happened naturally and amicably. Two actors going out is always challenging because of scheduling. We were travelling a lot. And that was one of many factors that brought a very happy relationship to an end.'
Norton has given a decent impression of a man pretty comfortable with all aspects of fame – but since the split he has found the attention on his love life oppressive. 'I've always tried to balance authenticity with privacy,' he says. 'I want to be honest but I don't want to talk about my relationships at all and I don't like it when I get photographed with a friend walking down the street and it's then told the next day like it's a romance. Another romance!'
The week before we meet there has indeed been tabloid speculation about various women in Norton's life. He was photographed with the socialite Flora Huddart; before that he was hanging out at the Lido festival in London with Lily Allen. 'Snogging', one tabloid reported, although if you actually looked at the pictures … 'I'm not snogging them! Funny that, isn't it?' he says. Norton is laughing while we discuss this, but there's a subtle vibe shift in the room. Five minutes ago it felt as if he would have happily sat here chatting away for hours. Now, maybe he has an eye on the clock.
'Look,' he says, 'I'm a man in London going on occasional dates, meeting people, living my life, and it's kind of no one's business really.'
Which is, of course, fair enough. The only reason he talked about his romantic life at Glastonbury, he says, was because Annie Mac asked him if he had experienced any big life changes, and he always tries to answer things honestly. 'I was like, well, I had a breakup and that was a massive change.' He says he has been fortunate to go through life without having to deal with any major grief, but that he came to realise the split was a kind of grief in itself. 'I lost the person,' he told the crowd, 'but I also lost the life I was about to lead, the kids we had named, all that kind of stuff.'
It probably didn't help matters that, as he approached 40, Norton was starting to pick up roles as dads in shows such as Playing Nice (he calls it his 'sad dad era'). 'If you'd asked me at 25, I probably thought I might have a kid by 40,' he says. 'But equally, I had a fucking great 30s, and hopefully kids might still be in my life at some point. That's the privilege of being a man and not having to worry about my biological clock.' In a way, he says, he's more relaxed now than he was a decade ago when everyone around him started having kids. 'I think I did feel that pressure to get on the train, do the same thing.'
If Norton sounds Zen about it all now, there are good reasons why. After the split from Poots he went to Plum Village, a Buddhist retreat in France set up by the Vietnamese monk and activist Thích Nhat Hanh. Norton actually studied theology at Cambridge before he trained at Rada, specialising in Buddhist and Hindu faith, and as a teenager he had a period where he became 'very committed' to Catholicism. But this is different, he says. 'With Buddhism, you don't really talk about faith. The teaching isn't about worship. It's about the self. It's about one's own journey and experience of the world. And it's been amazing for me. It's an incredible community and it's given me an opportunity to just stop and recognise the value of quiet, peaceful space, which I don't often give myself in life. Even just to rest and sleep. I think for a lot of my younger years I thought inaction and stasis was just a waste of time.'
There's certainly not too much sleep or rest going on. Norton's new producing gig is almost a full-time job, and a different one. 'I sit at a desk, discuss ideas and read scripts. It's broader and more empowering than just turning up very late in the development process as an actor.' He will be appearing in about half of the shows Rabbit Track produce, and there are other gigs, too – he has been filming Sunny Dancer, a British comedy about a teenage cancer survivor going to 'chemo camp', and will appear as Ormund Hightower, leading a march on King's Landing, in season three of House of the Dragon.
Norton has been generous with his time, but it's the moment to wrap things up. I sense a hint of relief that there will be no more prying questions. 'Was that OK?' I ask. 'Or was it a bit … ' 'Yeah, you went close,' he says, laughing.
It's only later that I start to wonder what he meant by that. I went close … to what, exactly? Him storming out? Throwing me a Tommy Lee Royce-style punch before drenching me in Earl Grey and oat milk? It's all rather hard to imagine. The James Norton of today seems to be able to smile gracefully, suck up any negativity and take it all in his stride. He seems extremely content; secure in his own skin while restlessly creative. And all of that with a whopping hangover.
King & Conqueror airs on BBC One and iPlayer from 24 August. House of Guinness is on Netflix in September.