From the beginning of his career, James Norton was aware of the power and the pitfalls of being a wavy-haired British actor with a posh accent.
“There was a world in which I was going to get stuck in a kind of period drama, English thing,” the 40-year-old actor says. After all, Norton has a face – cleanly rugged, with teeth of a natural shape and hue – that is more Merchant Ivory than Instagram and continues to be among Britain’s most reliable on-screen exports.
But Norton, who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London after graduating from the University of Cambridge, wants to avoid being pigeonholed. “Maybe it’s just a furious appetite for stress and chaos,” he says, chuckling. “But I’ve always wanted to keep challenging myself.”
So while his latest role is a period drama – House of Guinness, a rollicking new show from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, about the rise of the Irish brewing family – it also required him to perfect a convincing 1860s Dublin accent. (“I just knew if I didn’t work hard, I’d be really exposed,” Norton says.)
Early on, he made sure his agent knew about this appetite for challenge, and after working in theatre and smaller TV roles, Norton was cast as the villain of the BBC crime drama Happy Valley, which premiered in Britain in 2014. He played Tommy Lee Royce, a murderous, impoverished and disturbed man, locked in an ongoing battle with a police officer.
“Tommy is about as far removed from James as you can get,” says Sally Wainwright, the show’s creator. Yet in the dozens of auditions she saw for the role, Norton was the only actor who instinctively played the character as quite shy, with the vulnerability of someone who had survived a difficult childhood, she says. Norton brought something to the character that Wainwright hadn’t imagined when she wrote Tommy – which for her is the mark of a great actor, she says.
Happy Valley, which returned for new seasons in 2016 and 2023, made Norton a star in Britain. After the first season, when his agent told him she’d got a call about a potential role but there was concern about whether he could play someone “well spoken”, Norton was delighted; that confusion was “exactly what we want”, the actor recalls thinking.
In the years since, Norton has continued to be led by his appetite for challenge and learning – with a little fun thrown in.
For House of Guinness, which arrives on Netflix on Thursday, he learned a lot about social, religious and political upheaval in 19th-century Ireland, but he also got to “put on a cool top hat and a long black coat, and smoke a rollie, and feel like a badass”, he says.
Norton plays Seán Rafferty, the foreman of the Guinness factory and the man who does the dirty work that allows his employers to rise through Dublin society and rub shoulders with the aristocracy. Knight wanted an actor with a manager’s authority who could also convey emotional complexity when Rafferty becomes romantically involved with a Guinness family member.
Norton, whose performances are defined by charisma and a broad emotional range, was the showrunner’s first choice and signed on while Knight was still writing the script, he says. “When you get an actor that good, you can relax a bit,” Knight says, “because you don’t have to work too hard to get a point across.”
His status as one of Britain’s best and most strapping actors means that for more than a decade, Norton’s name has been coming up as a possible next James Bond. When the conversation moves to rumours about the role during a recent interview in a London hotel, Norton shifts in his seat.
“It’s all speculation and fun, weird, amusing, nonsense,” he says, laughing, “but it doesn’t mean anything.”
This summer, soon after Denis Villeneuve was announced as the director of the franchise’s first Amazon-produced film, Variety reported, citing anonymous “insiders”, that the studio wanted to cast an actor under 30. “I’m probably too old now,” Norton says, with what sounds a little like relief. (He celebrated his 40th birthday this summer with a 200-person party.)
As the Bond rumours swirl, Norton has continued working hard, often on overlapping projects. “If I have too much time and space, I start to become inactive,” he says. “The more spinning plates, the better.”
Since 2019, one larger plate has been a production company he helped found, Rabbit Track Pictures, so he could develop new projects from the start. He has produced several well-received movies and shows through the company, all of them (so far) starring himself, including the tense parenthood drama Playing Nice (which is streaming on BritBox), and King and Conqueror a BBC historical epic about the Battle of Hastings.
There’s no aspect of the company that Norton’s “DNA doesn’t touch” says Kitty Kaletsky, Rabbit Track’s other founder. Initially, she hadn’t expected such commitment or attention to detail from an already busy actor, she says.
Norton describes producing as “a bit like throwing the best dinner party ever”.
The art, he adds, is “knowing that that person will get on with that person, that the vibes will spark each other and will create something special”.
That alchemy was certainly at play when he took the lead role in the acclaimed Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s London stage production of A Little Life. Based on the hit 2015 novel by Hanya Yanagihara, the show centres on Jude, a New York City lawyer with a horrific past and tortured present. (Yanagihara is also the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)
Van Hove had previously directed a Dutch-language adaptation of the novel (which toured to New York), but working in another language, with a whole new team and Yanagihara sitting in on early rehearsals, was nerve-racking, the director says. As soon as he saw Norton as Jude, however, van Hove says he felt “totally at home”.
The actor was a “thinker,” with huge intelligence, as well as “a daredevil” who went to places that other actors wouldn’t, van Hove says.
Jude is onstage for almost all of the play’s four-hour run time, sometimes naked and sometimes slicing himself with a razor. Because Norton has Type 1 diabetes, he had to hide glucose shots around the set to surreptitiously take while onstage. There were up to eight performances a week. “It’s probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do,” Norton says.
And yet, when the run ended, he contacted the producers to suggest reprising the role. During the marathon performances, he went into something “like a flow state”, he says.
“You get into hyper awareness, which is really addictive,” he says. (Perhaps for the best, Norton acknowledges, another run hasn’t happened.)
Since A Little Life, Norton has been going to a Buddhist meditation retreat in the south of France, and has “started spending more time thinking about how to live one’s life,” he says. During what he called a “bucolic” childhood in the countryside of Yorkshire, northern England, he went to a Catholic high school, and then studied theology at college when his “relationship with faith turned into more of an academic interest”.
Now, “therapy and my Buddhist retreat have basically allowed me to just chill out”, Norton says, adding that they helped to manage the self-doubt that sometimes gets in the way of performing. He has also been letting go of the idea that acting is a “craft” with a “right and a wrong” approach. Instead, he has realised that “the brilliance is in the mess and the mistake”.
And for his next challenge? Norton met for the interview this summer during a break from filming season three of House of the Dragon, in which he plays Ormund Hightower. He had also been thinking about directing, he says, which “for some reason feels like the ultimate expression”.
“It scares me a lot,” Norton says of the director’s chair, “which is exactly why I should do it.” – New York Times
