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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘There's a thug in all of us': James Norton on privacy, playing villains and pushing himself to the limit
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. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion '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.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘There's a thug in all of us': James Norton on privacy, playing villains and pushing himself to the limit
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. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion '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.
The Guardian
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Authority: Essays on Being Right by Andrea Long Chu review
Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. 'It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument', she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Long Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes 'all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors', and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a 'pernicious form of commodity fetishism'. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness. This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Long Chu diagnoses a case of 'Munchausen by proxy' in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by 'the misery principle': 'horrible things happen to people for no reason', and the author is 'a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health'. She notes a troubling tendency towards 'infantile' idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin's autofiction, and finds 'something deeply juvenile' about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh's novels. Moshfegh's medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because 'You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie'; 'the leading coprophile of American letters' is trying too hard to convince us she's not a prude. Reviewing Bret Easton Ellis's 'deeply needless' 2019 essay collection, White ('less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts'), Long Chu bemoans his descent into fogeyish paranoia, and suggests the author of American Psycho is starting to resemble his most famous creation. 'At some point,' she quips, 'one must ask if a man who sees Nineteen Eighty-Four all around him is really just stuck in the 80s.' A takedown of Curtis Sittenfeld's 2020 novel, Rodham, which imagines an alternative universe where Hillary Clinton never married Bill, is a withering indictment of hollow girl-boss feminism: this is 'an unpolitical book by an unpolitical author about … an unpolitical person'; Sittenfeld's complacency mirrors that of her protagonist, a woman whose 'true talent lies in persuading college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence'. A recurring figure in these essays is the successful author with a gripe about oversensitive lefty youngsters and social media mobs. These include Ellis, Moshfegh, Maggie Nelson – whose complaints about art-world censoriousness in On Freedom are dismissed with a huffily italicised 'boring' – and Zadie Smith, whose 'habit of sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation frequently drives her to the political center'. Long Chu provocatively suggests this tendency is a bit of an act, compensating for Smith's failure to produce a touchstone work of social realism: since Smith has 'never actually excelled at constructing the kind of sympathetic, all-too-human characters she advocates for', she makes up for it with a lofty bothsidesism she thinks becoming of a serious, above-the-fray liberal humanist. Long Chu is similarly unsparing in her critique of the publishing industry's patronising and counterproductive tendency to over-hype minority voices in order to atone for past wrongs. ('This is to respond to pigeonholing by overstating the value of being a pigeon.') In a refreshingly clear-sighted essay on Asian American fiction, she questions whether the experiences depicted in a glut of diaspora novels have anything significant in common beyond their 'diffident, aimless, frustrated' protagonists and a vague melancholy; the much-laboured theme of identity manifests as little more than 'a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness', and 'the acute experience of racial indeterminacy has diffused into something more banal'. Alongside the literary essays, Authority features dissections of TV shows and video games, and a wryly funny meditation on Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical shortcomings. (His winning strategy as a composer is 'not to persuade but to overwhelm'.) There are also several personal pieces including an essay on vaginoplasty, a fictionalised account of undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation (a treatment for depression), and On Liking Women, a widely shared 2018 essay about the author's gender transition that kickstarted her writing career. Here Long Chu draws a connecting line between the gender separatist ideology of 1970s political lesbianism and today's anti-trans activists, whom she accuses of laundering 'garden-variety moral disgust'. In another era, such personal material would have sat uneasily in a volume of criticism, and it says something about our cultural moment that it doesn't seem particularly out of place here. As Long Chu observes in the title essay, the subjectivity of the critic is an increasingly visible presence these days. Tracing the vexed debates around critical authority from the 18th century to the present day, she concludes that the concept has always been 'an incoherent, inconsistent, and altogether empty thing'. The job of today's critic is not so much to impart expertise but to become a storyteller in their own right: 'The critic has become a witness, one whose job is to offer up an event within her own experience in such a way that the reader, if she is so inclined, may experience it too.' This checks out. Though Long Chu's writing style is not as overtly chummy as that of her fellow US critic Lauren Oyler, it has a similarly disarming first-person candour, offsetting stridency with spasms of self-effacing humility, and the sort of tentative qualifications more commonly encountered in spoken discourse than on the printed page. ('Perhaps I am being ungenerous'; 'What I mean is that …'; 'My point is that …'; 'I do not mean …'; 'If it sounds like I'm saying … I suppose I am.') These tics can be a bit cloying, and the occasional adolescent turns of phrase feel jarringly regressive: Long Chu uses 'boring' an awful lot; at one point, she introduces a particularly unimpressive quote with 'The following is an actual sentence.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In a postscript to one of the greener pieces in this volume, Long Chu, who is in her early 30s, winces at the prose style deployed by her younger self – 'that kind of bloggy 'voiceyness' was dated even then'. Her anxiety on this score is symptomatic of a generational dilemma for a cohort of American writers who, having been raised to distrust authority – not just as a concept but perhaps especially as a register – and steeped in the highly self-conscious patter of online communities, must now work out how to be publicly clever in a non-overbearing way. In an anti-intellectual media landscape, one way to make yourself legible is to make yourself small. This is the striking thing about Long Chu's authorial tone: she combines the expert and the naif in a single voice, which chimes with a similar dualism in her reader. These essays are essentially journeys – knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone's interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you're doing something right. Perhaps the true source of authority is companionable intelligence, and what we think of as sound judgment is just a function of familiarity – comfort in another person's psychic skin. Authority: Essays on Being Right by Andrea Long Chu is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Authority: Essays on Being Right by Andrea Long Chu review
Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. 'It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument', she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Long Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes 'all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors', and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a 'pernicious form of commodity fetishism'. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness. This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Long Chu diagnoses a case of 'Munchausen by proxy' in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by 'the misery principle': 'horrible things happen to people for no reason', and the author is 'a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health'. She notes a troubling tendency towards 'infantile' idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin's autofiction, and finds 'something deeply juvenile' about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh's novels. Moshfegh's medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because 'You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie'; 'the leading coprophile of American letters' is trying too hard to convince us she's not a prude. Reviewing Bret Easton Ellis's 'deeply needless' 2019 essay collection, White ('less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts'), Long Chu bemoans his descent into fogeyish paranoia, and suggests the author of American Psycho is starting to resemble his most famous creation. 'At some point,' she quips, 'one must ask if a man who sees Nineteen Eighty-Four all around him is really just stuck in the 80s.' A takedown of Curtis Sittenfeld's 2020 novel, Rodham, which imagines an alternative universe where Hillary Clinton never married Bill, is a withering indictment of hollow girl-boss feminism: this is 'an unpolitical book by an unpolitical author about … an unpolitical person'; Sittenfeld's complacency mirrors that of her protagonist, a woman whose 'true talent lies in persuading college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence'. A recurring figure in these essays is the successful author with a gripe about oversensitive lefty youngsters and social media mobs. These include Ellis, Moshfegh, Maggie Nelson – whose complaints about art-world censoriousness in On Freedom are dismissed with a huffily italicised 'boring' – and Zadie Smith, whose 'habit of sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation frequently drives her to the political center'. Long Chu provocatively suggests this tendency is a bit of an act, compensating for Smith's failure to produce a touchstone work of social realism: since Smith has 'never actually excelled at constructing the kind of sympathetic, all-too-human characters she advocates for', she makes up for it with a lofty bothsidesism she thinks becoming of a serious, above-the-fray liberal humanist. Long Chu is similarly unsparing in her critique of the publishing industry's patronising and counterproductive tendency to over-hype minority voices in order to atone for past wrongs. ('This is to respond to pigeonholing by overstating the value of being a pigeon.') In a refreshingly clear-sighted essay on Asian American fiction, she questions whether the experiences depicted in a glut of diaspora novels have anything significant in common beyond their 'diffident, aimless, frustrated' protagonists and a vague melancholy; the much-laboured theme of identity manifests as little more than 'a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness', and 'the acute experience of racial indeterminacy has diffused into something more banal'. Alongside the literary essays, Authority features dissections of TV shows and video games, and a wryly funny meditation on Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical shortcomings. (His winning strategy as a composer is 'not to persuade but to overwhelm'.) There are also several personal pieces including an essay on vaginoplasty, a fictionalised account of undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation (a treatment for depression), and On Liking Women, a widely shared 2018 essay about the author's gender transition that kickstarted her writing career. Here Long Chu draws a connecting line between the gender separatist ideology of 1970s political lesbianism and today's anti-trans activists, whom she accuses of laundering 'garden-variety moral disgust'. In another era, such personal material would have sat uneasily in a volume of criticism, and it says something about our cultural moment that it doesn't seem particularly out of place here. As Long Chu observes in the title essay, the subjectivity of the critic is an increasingly visible presence these days. Tracing the vexed debates around critical authority from the 18th century to the present day, she concludes that the concept has always been 'an incoherent, inconsistent, and altogether empty thing'. The job of today's critic is not so much to impart expertise but to become a storyteller in their own right: 'The critic has become a witness, one whose job is to offer up an event within her own experience in such a way that the reader, if she is so inclined, may experience it too.' This checks out. Though Long Chu's writing style is not as overtly chummy as that of her fellow US critic Lauren Oyler, it has a similarly disarming first-person candour, offsetting stridency with spasms of self-effacing humility, and the sort of tentative qualifications more commonly encountered in spoken discourse than on the printed page. ('Perhaps I am being ungenerous'; 'What I mean is that …'; 'My point is that …'; 'I do not mean …'; 'If it sounds like I'm saying … I suppose I am.') These tics can be a bit cloying, and the occasional adolescent turns of phrase feel jarringly regressive: Long Chu uses 'boring' an awful lot; at one point, she introduces a particularly unimpressive quote with 'The following is an actual sentence.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In a postscript to one of the greener pieces in this volume, Long Chu, who is in her early 30s, winces at the prose style deployed by her younger self – 'that kind of bloggy 'voiceyness' was dated even then'. Her anxiety on this score is symptomatic of a generational dilemma for a cohort of American writers who, having been raised to distrust authority – not just as a concept but perhaps especially as a register – and steeped in the highly self-conscious patter of online communities, must now work out how to be publicly clever in a non-overbearing way. In an anti-intellectual media landscape, one way to make yourself legible is to make yourself small. This is the striking thing about Long Chu's authorial tone: she combines the expert and the naif in a single voice, which chimes with a similar dualism in her reader. These essays are essentially journeys – knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone's interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you're doing something right. Perhaps the true source of authority is companionable intelligence, and what we think of as sound judgment is just a function of familiarity – comfort in another person's psychic skin. Authority: Essays on Being Right by Andrea Long Chu is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Forbes
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Power Of BookTok: Why TikTok's Book Community Is Driving A New Era In Publishing
What began as a cozy nook on the corner of the internet, has quickly transformed into a global phenomenon. As of 2025, #BookTok has accumulated 370 billion views, with over 52 million creations jumping on board–skyrocketing bestsellers, reviving backlist titles and informing reading habits worldwide1. At its core, BookTok thrives on community-driven content: emotional reviews, hot takes, character impersonations and viral recommendations land these reads on the feeds of not just the literary set, but diverse audiences around the world. To help publishers tap into this momentum, we've compiled strategies, insights, and case studies on the Publisher Insights Hub to make the most of the BookTok boom. Building Communities Around Authors and Books The line between author and reader has changed. What once required a book tour or a late-night interview now happens on a phone screen. TikTok has given rise to a new kind of literary connection—immediate, unfiltered, and deeply personal. Authors don't just market their books; they build communities. And readers, in turn, don't just consume stories—they comment on them, review them, and share them with their fellow readers. Unlike traditional platforms built for polished, static content, TikTok thrives on performance and participation. A single clip can revive a forgotten backlist title or launch a debut into an instant best seller. A clear example of this phenomenon is the renewed global recognition of 'A Little Life' by Hanya Yanagihara, where users shared their emotional reactions, discussions and anticipations surrounding the book, and the characters within it. The scale and authenticity of user-generated videos is a key driver of success on TikTok. Readers create reviews, trends and fan content that drive organic reach and real world sales. This is where the true power of BookTok communities lies–in their ability to create buzz through recommendations and real-time conversations. TikTok as a Platform for Buzz Around Book Releases Let's talk about the #BookTok effect. When your devoted fan community already exists, all you need to do to generate buzz is simply to feed it. Through sneak peeks, cover reals, behind-the-scenes content and interviews, authors can charge their online communities with the right cocktail of anticipation and intel to ensure that upcoming book releases go off with a bang. Reviving Classic Stories and Expanding Existing IP The beauty of BookTok is that it doesn't exist to serve just the up-and-coming. It brings new life to older, under-the-radar books by re-engaging past readers and attracting new fans. It's not just contemporary fiction that reaps the benefits here. BookTok has played a huge role in introducing new readers to classic literature, giving long-time classics a resurgence in popularity. TikTok has supplied a platform for readers to dive deeper into themes, dissect plotlines and characters, and discuss adaptions – all of which work towards keeping stories alive in ways that traditional marketing never could. Creating Content Around Adaptations, Releases, and Series BookTok is a global phenomenon, and the love for books—and their adaptations—transcends borders and languages. A great example of this is Maxton Hall - The World Between Us, a German-language Prime Video series that found viral success on TikTok. The show sparked a wave of excitement among German readers who shared their love for the books online. That momentum quickly spread, inspiring English-speaking readers to seek out translated versions so they could dive into the story ahead of season 2. TikTok ensures that books don't fade into obscurity after publication–they go on to thrive, evolve and capture new audiences. What It Means for Publishers and Brands Leveraging TikTok to stay relevant in the digital-first landscape is essential to ensure books stay visible in a rapidly moving market. From organic hype to strategic partnerships, publishers that capitalise on TikTok for book marketing can drive measurable outcomes in three key areas: sales growth, brand awareness and fan engagement. Discover the Power of BookTok at the LA Times Festival of Books! Join TikTok on April 26, 2025, at the LA Times Festival of Books, YA Stage for an exclusive panel on how BookTok is shaping today's most exciting book-to-screen adaptations! Industry leaders and talent will explore how TikTok is driving literary trends, fueling fandoms, and bringing beloved stories to life on screen. Featuring an incredible lineup of speakers, including: The Future of Book Marketing on TikTok As BookTok continues to grow, its significance as a cultural driver for the publishing industry is undeniable and essential for scalable success. TikTok has evolved into a content hub that allows publishers and authors to build lasting connections with readers, foster brand loyalty and drive tangible business growth.
