Dashing actor and emerging producer James Norton played Dido’s would-be suitor, Oliver Ashford, in Amma Asante’s ravishing 2013 period drama . He also depicted Laurie’s tutor, John Brooke, in Greta Gerwig’s update on Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, Little Women. But he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed.
“The industry does like, once you’ve done one role, to put you back into that, because it’s, less risk,” Norton grins rakishly. “If someone’s tried and tested, then they might as well do it again. But I’m proactively pushing against that.”
After popping up briefly opposite Carey Mulligan in Lone Scherfig-directed An Education, Norton’s first major screen role was in the Felicity Jones-led 2012 dramedy . “I was desperate to do some screen work when Cheerful Weather came along,” he recalls. “The cast was so, so good with Felicity, Elizabeth McGovern, Luke Treadaway, John Stanley and Mackenzie Crook, I couldn’t quite believe my luck.”
James Norton, centre, in 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding'. Credit: Mark Tillie
From there, he’s leapt nimbly from Grantchester’s mystery-solving tipsy vicar to Island Records founder Chris Blackwell in music biopic Bob Marley: One Love. From War & Peace to Black Mirror via stage credits, including The Lion in Winter with Robert Lindsay and Joanna Lumley and the West End adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s grim tome, A Little Life.
“A Little Life was the most terrifying experience, and I really didn’t want to do it,” Norton reveals. “The subject matter’s so harrowing, and it was four hours a day on stage, eight on a matinee day, and I’m a diabetic. How am I going to handle that? There were so many things that made me want to run away.”
There were so many things that made me want to run away
His closest friends convinced him not to. “They said, ‘This is the reason you should do it, is because you are so scared of it,’ and they were right. It was fucking hard, and I hated most of it because it was so painful and gruelling, but it’s the thing I’m most proud of, so pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is key.”
It’s why he took on Happy Valley, Norton says. “Playing a Yorkshire psychopath, a drug-dealing, murdering, rapist monster early on in my career, set me up for taking on transformative roles.”
'Sad dad' days
Despite Norton’s resistance to retreading pathways, Kitty Kaletsky, co-founder of their production company Rabbit Track Pictures, ribs him about his recent choices. “She thinks I’m in my sad dad era,” Norton chuckles.
It’s a tag that fits his recent turn in the Rabbit-produced domestic thriller . Adapted by writer Grace Ofori-Attah from the best-selling book of the same name by JP Delaney and directed by Kate Hewitt, it’s a gut-wrenching drama in which Norton and lead Niamh Algar play a wits-end couple battling to retain custody of their kid after a baby swap disaster at the local hospital.
It will send a shiver down your spine, whether you’re a parent or not, Norton says. “What would you do if faced with this horrific decision?”
Norton also depicts a sad dad in Uberto Pasolini’s Nowhere Special, the heart-tugging 2020 drama about a terminally ill Belfast window cleaner looking for a new family to raise his son. “I know they say don’t work with animals or kids, but it really is wonderful,” Norton insists. “On one level, the hours are a nightmare, but their unpredictability is kind of magical, because everything they give you is truth.”
James Norton in 'Nowhere Special'. Credit: Nowhere Special Ltd/Peter Marley
While the cruel hand of fate threatens John’s gentle but determined sad dad, John, in Nowhere Special, in Playing Nice, the antagonist is much earthlier. Glaswegian actor and Mare of Easttown star James McArdle plays real bad dad Miles, a simmering, menacing type who not only wants his biological son back, but also to keep the boy he’s raised, too, leaving Norton’s Pete and Algar’s Maddie with nothing.
“It’s a brutal, brutal role, and he’s very convincing as a monstrous guy, but I’ve known James since we went to drama school together and we’re very close,” Norton says. “So it was a lovely phone call, offering him the part.”
Norton also knew Jessica Brown Findlay, who plays Miles’ harried wife, Lucy, from working on the short film Hero together with Game of Thrones star Charles Dance. So Niamh was the only unknown quantity. “I’d seen her in Calm with Horses and she’s extraordinary,” Norton says. “With all the nuances and knottiness Peter and Maddie go through, it really required Niamh and I to really trust each other and find a very quick intimacy.”
The black rock
Relocating the story from London to the breathtaking coastal wilds of Cornwall helped amplify that intimacy. “We spent a lot of time running and surfing and we both dove in together,” Norton says.
“London does provide that class difference, given the book’s set between Hampstead and Kilburn, but there’s something stark about setting it in Cornwall, with the foreboding cliff edges and the waves crashing. You get that sense that these people are literally pushed to the edge.”
James Norton as Pete Riley in Playing Nice season 1.
Not that it was deadly serious on set all the time. “James realised that we looked like Abba, with two brunettes and two blondes,” Norton laughs. “We actually went dressed as them to a Halloween party.”
But sometimes Norton does take his work home with him. Quite literally, in the case of Nowhere Special. “Uberto gave me a black rock and he said, ‘I want this to be in your pocket, because I want death to be present in every single scene,’” Norton reveals.
“Most people spend a lot of their lives running away from death, doing all we can to distract ourselves,” he adds. “But in a very quiet and personal, private and poignant way, it felt right to sit and contemplate it while shooting Nowhere Special. And that stone sits on my desk now, reminding me to live life a little bit more vividly.”
Four-part series Playing Nice is streaming now at SBS on Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Playing Nice
series • drama
M
series • drama
M
Nowhere Special airs 11pm 17 March on SBS World Movies and will then be streaming at SBS On Demand for 30 days.
Stream free On Demand
Nowhere Special
drama • 2020
drama • 2020
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is streaming at SBS On Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
Comedy drama • 2012
Comedy drama • 2012
Belle is streaming at SBS On Demand until 31 March.
Stream free On Demand
Belle
