From the archive (season 4): James Norton, actor

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07hiya now you find me with my headphones on re-listening to some of my most beloved episodes of comfort eating why you ask well i have decided to curate just for you a selection that i am calling my special summer scorcheroonie snack selection of probably the best holiday fodder you could deliver into your eardrums. This mini-series contains the episodes I deem to be absolutely right and proper to listen to when, well, when you're on a long car journey towards the Brecon Beacons, perhaps to go camping, or on a choppy ferry to the Isle of Wight, or just in a sweaty airport lounge. These episodes have made me laugh a lot.

0:56First up, It's one of our most listened to episodes ever. Stay tuned.

1:27to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

1:40Hello, friends. You find me for the very last time this series in my kitchen. Yes, I know. I hear you. Up and down the country, moaning for more. But do not fear too much, friends. Comfort eating will be back later in the year. Now I have a fabulous guest arriving in a minute for a chat and a plate of something hearty. Closing season four is none other than the actor James Norton. Yeah, that's right. James Norton from Happy Valley.

2:16Before he gets here, I'm just treating myself to a little January health kick pack of Snackajacks. They are health food, aren't they? Just dipping them in absolutely delicious spicy tomato sauce. So Moorish. Not very good for my breath, though.

2:40Chances are you've seen James Norton on your telly, in the cinema or on stage. His roles have included playing a sleuthing vicar in Grantchester, a prince in War and Peace, and as the absolutely despicable ex-convict Tommy Lee Royce in The Incredible Happy Valley, the third and final series of which is currently airing on Sunday nights. No, I won't be asking for spoilers. However, I may be asking for a ticket for his next gig as later this year he'll be on stage in an adaptation of Hany Yanagihara's best-selling novel A Little Life, which is nearly sold out, I hear. James now lives in London but I'm looking forward to hearing about his youth in God's own country North Yorkshire the adventures that he had in his 20s and how he balances life at home with his fiancée with being one of Britain's most in-demand actors oh and what he likes to eat when he's on the couch in his Jim Jams time for one last little treat

3:49that's really good oh my god

4:00James Norton welcome to Comfort Eating thank you very much Grace welcome to my house thank you, what a lovely house you have thank you very much we have recorded four seasons of Comfort Eating here at my living room table and I think that when having people around everybody falls into two camps either you're a better host or a better guest james norton which one are you 100 % a host yeah i love hosting and amongst my friends i'm the guy who brings you know the big party new year or whatever it might be i love it i love i i think i had a previous life as a pre a prison chef or i can't cater for less than 10 people so whenever i make anything it's like ridiculous those proportions partly because i'm a glutton but partly because yeah i just love people over but if i was at one of your dinner parties how do i know that you actually want everyone to go home uh it's time i i don't that's the other thing that i'm begging people to stay um my my partner is uh is in bed and is probably knocking on the floor saying fuck off i am i'm downstairs going let's have one more so I'm I'm definitely the guy who's not going to bed and and it's quite good because we come at life from two ends of that spectrum but if it came to it I guess I would I'm pretty good at just saying go home now because also I'm the guy who always hosts so I can you know why do you just open the doors and start ringing people to uber um short of yeah I might just switch the music off turn the lights on that kind of thing James you have brought your ultimate comfort snack for us to enjoy or enjoy depending on what it is please unveil your snack i have no idea what is under this pile of uh foil and tea towels i don't know where this sits in your like hierarchy of um well a taste and controversial snacks i mean it's not how nervous people get before they unveil the snack oh i love it i love it in your way you have the greatest minds celebrities through this door and they crumble on taking a tea towel off a tray every time it's because in your intro you say what it says about the you know there's nothing says more than what they eat in their private moments and so i'm like what does it say about that i do say that because you can't you can tell a lot by the snack that people can't i'm just doing my intro now.

6:32You are? Cobbled together behind closed doors. You're about to judge me. I feel like you've kind of shrunk in stature since the beginning of this part. No, no, no. When you eat this, I'm going to get my stature back. Let's do it. Wow. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It looks more simple. It looks like... Hang on. There's a random factor here. I'm going to describe what I can see in front of me. It is two beautiful pieces of, I'm going to say sourdough bread definitely uh it looks grilled buttered there's a load of uh sliced not mashed avocado on there is that scrambled egg but very good eggs yeah they are good eggs like scrambled a lot of pepper why is there some marmalade here well the other thing you can't see but will taste is underneath the avocado is the kind of secret weapon, which is a layer of gentleman's relish, Peyton Barperium.

7:34Shit. Anchovy paste. Do you like anchovies? I mean, I like anchovies, but I think gentleman's relish is just, is a bit of an abomination. Oh, I love it. It's one of those things that people buy and then it just sits and sits and sits. See, for me, it's gone in a week. And also, can I just say, I hate the name. Gentleman's Relish is very little dated, let's be honest. But it just sounds a bit like it could be something quite rude. Doesn't it? Wait, this is Gentleman's Relish. Gentleman's Relish. This is not my... Just sounds a bit... Imagine. Do you know what I mean? It sounds a bit carry-on film.

8:19Gentleman's Relish. This is the anchovy paste version of Gentleman's Relish. so what are you going to do with the marmalade? so the marmalade is the other secret so it's salty sweet so basically I love scrambled egg with marmalade but then occasionally I'll add gentleman's reddish occasionally I'll add avocado this is the whole kind of shebang but this acts as like a chutney look I can see a method hang on here here here I'm giving you yours how do I do you eat this with a knife and fork? what do I do with the orange marmalade? should I just put it on the side? put it on the side and then put like a nice like treat it like a chutney.

8:54So my dad is a marmalade obsessive and so I would usually have my dad's marmalade but obviously this is pretty good. Does he make marmalade? Yeah, he makes a batch every year and I go home with it. Back to London with it so I love it. Oh my God. The marmalade's wobbling. It's just wobbling. It's quite a lot of marmalade. It's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. Right, hang on.

9:22You're never going to try and think about doing Celebrity MasterChef or anything. Right. It's absolutely delicious. It feels like you've got four different breakfasts and you're taking the plates back to the kitchen.

9:38When do you eat this? This wouldn't be a breakfast thing. This would be a kind of late night. I mean, I think... do you know this as so often happens on comfort eating are you enjoying it yeah you start and you get past the initial jesus christ and then it moves into something that's actually really compelling isn't it really good it's psychological i think because you don't marmalade is such a sweet such a treat you don't ever think of it as a chutney but the sharpness of the oranges if you just think of it as a chutney i don't pass me the tea towel i'm completely covered it's one of those that you can't quite eat without getting it in your hair.

10:19Yeah, yeah, yeah.

10:25You grew up in Yorkshire, a place absolutely renowned for its food. Wensleydale cheese, rhubarb, licorice, very understated Yorkshire pudding. What food takes you back to early years in the North? Funny, it's not really those foods. I mean, when I was at school at the local primaries to go, my mum and dad would be working because they worked quite far away and had a big commute. So I would go to this lady's house. She's called Liz Marshall. She's an absolutely amazing lady. And she would look after me and my sister. And she had grown up in Yorkshire all her life and was proper, sort of old Yorkshire.

11:08And we would have like apple pies with slices of cheese. And we'd have like every time we'd have a gravy meal, we'd have a slice of white bread just afterwards. I can't remember what it was called. It was some like gravy boat or something. And that was the best thing. You know, there'd always be a little bit of gravy left over in the pot. And so it would just be a plate, slice of white bread, no butter, anything, and just gravy all over it. Absolutely delicious. So those things are really, that's like when I, that's like pre 10. Do you still love gravy now? Oh, see, yes. And I love making gravy.

11:39And I, I, I hate when anyone does my gravy because it's never enough. and every single time I get a roast in a restaurant before the food has hit my table in front of me I'm like, can I have a little pot of extra gravy please? And out with the horseradish and the mustard comes my little pot of extra gravy and it just swims in it. I love it. You were born in 1985. You grew up with your parents, Lavinia and Hugh, your sister Jessica. Give us a snapshot of young James. So what was your favourite toy? um brio trains the wooden ones you know the you know ones i mean yeah and my sister has two little boys now and um i think they still have my brio set which is nice i think my my dad loves throwing stuff away but we managed to save that one yeah i loved trains i was obsessed and i think like a lot like a lot of kids you sort of fit into the strange gender stereotypes tractors and trains anyway I was obsessed wanted to be a train driver I remember on the way to the train station once with my grandpa and I was screaming so loud of excitement that he never really ticked me off but he shouted at me like calm down because I was having like a panic attack over the idea of going and seeing a train I was just yeah love trains.

13:00You would have been a great train driver. Thank you very much I think so as well. So what happened is he didn't pursue it because Britain always needs train drivers. It does right now we could go down that route couldn't we

13:15yeah I I don't know what happened with train driving I never really got the opportunity I went to a train station once when I was at school and got to blow the whistle maybe that was the end of the dream but yeah train driving was only a brief moment give us a sense of family life so there's you and your mum and your dad and your sister and you're in this house and is it fun? is it noisy? do you argue a lot all of those I think yeah it was definitely very fun and warm and um we were in the countryside so you know lots of outdoors um for some reason it feels me I don't know what it's like to have a kid in where you know in the area I grew up I'm sure I hope it's the same but very young age I was able just to be free I mean me and the other kids in the village it's very kind of um it's old-fashioned and kind of idyllic we would just run around the fields and disappearing in the morning and yeah yeah and just going swimming in the river it's like just william it was weird you went home and you were hungry yeah went home when i went when i was hungry or i grazed my knee or whatever it was you know and they would generally know where we were we weren't allowed to kind of go up to the top road where the cars were busy but everywhere else was free reign so it was pretty special you went up to that top road though didn't you my friends lived on the other side of it so i had to cross it every so often and they were like the naughty guys they were the ones who had the cigarettes and the booze and so i had to sort of yeah they were great i loved those guys you went to boarding school when you were 11 you spent five years at a school run by benedictine monks i think that there are seven distinct groups at every school the world over, you're either one of the jocks, one of the stoners, the teacher's pets, the prized intellectuals, the nerds, the poets, the goths, or the class clown.

15:18What are you? Would you like those categories again? Poet. I'm going to say poet. I'm going to say you're quite sensitive and you possibly wrote the odd poem. i was quite keen and i definitely was in the more creative i love theater and i was member the orchestra and and so i was doing every school player could and all that kind of stuff so maybe maybe the poet is the right space i'd started to work hard at the end so maybe i was a little bit of a nerd i definitely wasn't a jock and i definitely wasn't in the kind of cool cool category i became a bit of a stoner later on but that was when i was at university and later I think had I had that that would probably chill me out a little bit my school years were complicated I didn't have the greatest time I was quite badly bullied for five years so I sort of didn't really know and I was at boarding school so I couldn't leave so it's complicated and interestingly segwaying into food it's weird when you're boarding because food becomes like huge because you're not you don't have access to food so you have your tuck and you have your you have your access to the sort of sweet shop where you have like a 50p allowance every week or something but yeah food and if you're bloody unhappy then it must be a big deal it's a big deal gorgeous moments of yeah yeah and I remember when pot noodles came out it was huge at boarding school because it was like you had this independence you didn't have to rely on the school meals because you know everything was so institutionalized breakfast lunch dinner like you literally ate at a regimented time.

16:56Going to a certain place, going to a hall where you would see people that you didn't want to see. Yeah, I mean, it's even worse. Every evening meal, it's the main, you know, like your kind of moment of sort of breaking bread at night, you would be in your year group. I mean, I've never said this really, but you're with your, I think it was like 13 guys who are in your year. I mean, the table was set such that the jocks would be at one end and then it would be the stoners, the kind of cool, the sort of like glass clowns and then it would sort of go through the poets and then it would end up with the sort of the nerds and the bullied people.

17:33And I was thus far right at this end, not the jock end. And if I ever deigned to sit at the top end, I mean, they would have just laughed at me. They would have just been like, what are you? They wouldn't even have, it was mad. It was so hierarchical and sort of structured. And so dinner times were charged for me. You know, there were this weird time when you were sitting with people who, I mean, most of them were great, but there were a couple who were not great. And that energy fed into my whole sort of, I had a really good time at school in some ways, but it was also complicated. I absolutely get exactly what you're saying.

18:09I'm not sitting quietly going, I've no idea what it's about. I went to a comprehensive school in the North in the 80s, and it was equally as hellish. Like there was some lovely people there and some people that I still to this day in 2023 think about daily and go, oh, what was all that about? Like the determination of them to be like that every day must have been exhausting. I think for me, for me now, having moved on from it a long way and actually had some amazing, I've had a great therapist for the last four years. And it's not from a place of drama or, you know, I'm luckily not sort of suffering from depression or anything like that.

18:56But it's been really, really helpful just understanding what that was. And actually, I've realized that boarding schools are really weird places. I mean, we're the only country who still send our kids away voluntarily. You know, most countries, if you've got some sort of discipline problem or the parents are in the army or whatever, then maybe they send them away. But we do it because it's this old fashioned hangover from colonial era, really. And so you're stuck with these people and all these young kids are just deeply, deeply homesick and they're just lost. And some of them, that pain manifests itself in kind of being needy or rebellious, maybe the class clown.

19:34But some of them get angry and rather than crying out for their mum, they just like bully someone. And so these kids were just like me. We were all just looking for our mums. We were all missing our mums, but some of them got hold of the bit between their teeth and realised that they felt better if they were cruel to someone else. And I was unfortunately the victim of that. Now, boarding skills and tuck boxes go together like bubble and squeak. If you opened the tuck box and you didn't know what was going to be in it, what is the one thing that your mum could have put in the tuck box that made you feel really loved?

20:0950 quid. Thanks, mum. yeah it's cash um what would it be i mean my mum loves chocolate like she but she loves shit chocolate like you she has this big cupboard it's just stacks of dairy milk and fruit and nut and so fruit and nut for me and my sister i know for her as well like that's such an association with my mum so probably a bar of fruit and nut because i love it as well you know i mean i am actually now much more into like 85 i try and keep it to the dark chocolate but yeah chocolate for me I love the amount of guilt that you have around the fact that you actually just love a lovely slab of Cadbury's dairy milk.

20:49Yeah, Cadbury's fruit and nut. Cadbury's fruit and nut. How do you stop other people stealing your tuck box? Yeah, padlock. See, I'm getting stressed already.

21:07when you were back home during the holidays was food a way of reconnecting with your family you see that's another thing yes massive because obviously when you get school food is school food I mean it was fine it was institutional big mass-produced school food and when you've had that every single day every single meal apart from like occasional bits of toast you make in the kitchenette or a pot noodle whatever you get home and it's just heaven and a lot of people ask me like did you not get really angry with your family because you went away to this thing you didn't really enjoy it and I didn't I mean my mum and dad both went to those schools and I think my sister and I I know that my sister won't send her kids away and I definitely won't either I think this of I think the that whole system is becoming out of date now and I think that's a good thing in this country people are going wait let's not maybe do that anymore that's not great for the kids um but one thing it did i think lead me with is a really good relationship with my family because every single time i went home it was absolutely sacred i would eke out every moment when i was there it wasn't that i was you know like most kids you know the parents having to persuade their kids to have a sit you know sit down meal let's all sit down i was like desperate for that so every Sunday lunch I got I would you know it was it was magical.

22:26Religion feels like a theme as you were growing up Ampleforth College Catholic school it prides on giving its students and I quote a spiritual compass for life. I love the way that you laughed that and then after graduating you go off and read theology at Cambridge. How big a role did God play for you in your teenage years it's quite a big question yeah I mean big in a way you know I because at the time when I was at that school and like everyone at that age I was a bit confused and a bit lost and I had this other thing where I was like some people were making my life a bit difficult and so add all those things together adding the fact that you're a bit homesick but you know and also I was also very aware that I was very privileged and I was having this incredible education and i was access to all this amazing resources and stuff so you're a bit like what the hell and then the framework within that confusion is incredibly certain it knows exactly what it is it's this ancient institution and it's saying to you you know wake up in the morning and and if you've got problems pray if you are feeling good about something you're feeling full of awe i mean it was a really beautiful school that was in the middle of the countryside and i would And I'd wake up from my dormitory or in the sixth form, you have your own room, and I'd open the window.

23:53And often the whole valley would be full of this mist. And it really was very, it's a very, very beautiful part of the world. And so then you go downstairs and then the housemaster who's a monk, Father Gabriel, would say, right, let's all give thanks. And, you know, you're 15 and you're going, wow, thanks very much. And, you know, now all this sort of everyone's now trying to find their space, their self-help space, you know, giving, finding places to be grateful and give gratitude. I had that every day, you know, whatever you think about Catholicism and all the problems and complications that it has.

24:26Something really wonderful about waking up every day and just going, thanks very much. Or maybe help me out right now. You know, I had a channel to something. And I mean, I got very religious. I became like really wrapped up in it. I think partly because I was having a bit of a tough time and I found a lot of solace in it you know I had this amazing man called father Peter who I'd go and chat to and I'd be like I'm not sure what's going on and he'd be like it's all good don't worry about it so he became kind of an unintentional therapist and and then I became got older and got interested in it and then went away from school and left and let rip found freedom and autonomy and was and also found confidence and also went away to when I went left school I went to like um spent most of most of a year in South Asia and India and Nepal and I was really interested in Buddhism and Hinduism and Eastern religions and so my theology degree became much more of a sort of um outsider looking in at religion rather than it coming from the place of faith I wasn't one of those people studying it with the intention of going into the church I was just really interested in there so you're interested in eastern religion you explore the world traveling but with this newfound autonomy I mean were there like full moon parties and dodgy tattoos so that's what happened when I went away having been pretty much it was good there were girls there but not many it was an all-boys school pretty much there's like a handful of girls and i mean i know that the whole gap year thing changing you and giving you but it really gave me confidence and and i was also able just to like let rip i mean i just took every drug under the sun i had sex it was just amazing i had sounds incredible yeah i basically went what did all the stuff which you meant to do as a teenager in one year for about a month i didn't wear any shoes because i lost my flip flops broke and i was like who needs shoes so i was walking in and out of like honestly on in buses across india I spent four days on a train going from the top of the northernmost town on the Nepalian-Indian border, Gorakhpur, down to Trivandrum.

26:32I mean, I just, and I had no plan. I was just sitting with no shoes, eating samosas. It was nuts. But I had the time of my life. In 2010, age 25, you are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. It means your body doesn't naturally make insulin. the hormone that processes the sugar that you eat. How does diabetes affect your eating and your enjoyment of food? It obviously affects my eating significantly in the sense that I have to be aware of what I'm eating and I have to eat more sugar than I would like in order to keep it balanced. And I have to be aware of eating a lot of refined sugar all at once because it will mean that my sugar levels rise quickly and it's harder to control.

27:26And then it spins me out for the rest of the day. So the answer to the question is, I try and not let it control what I eat. And I generally will eat puddings, eat desserts, eat chocolate. Are you a good diabetic? Or are you one of those that plays fast and loose? I'm not the best, but I'm pretty good. my mum and my sister both have diabetes so we're from a family apart from my dad who's the weird freak of the family doesn't have, he has a normal functioning pancreas, the weirdo but the rest of us we you know I've grown, my sister who had it first has been, she's my younger sister but she's been an amazing role model because she lived very much by that mantra of you know not letting it control you, you control it and so you know when we would have a dessert and we do love our chocolate on my family and my sister would tuck in and she would enjoy it and occasionally her sugars would go a little bit out of whack but she would bring it back into control and you sort of just get on with it you went to drama school in fact you went to rada i went royal academy of the dramatic arts and often actors they slog away for years getting rejected before they get work not you you didn't graduate from drama school because steady work started coming in what do you consider your lucky break if you had to peak tell us that moment I mean I guess the first job is a lucky break in a sense you know I did a play called posh at the royal court which took me out of drama school halfway through my final year and that definitely set me off on a great trajectory because it was a professional job it was a great high profile play everyone loved it and it's a difficult subject posh it was i mean we were doing it in the court royal court which is in south kensington and it's basically a skewering of like the bullingdon club um a lot of our audience probably were in or at least had friends who were in the bullingdon club so you know it was quite interesting having an audience some like probably very progressive left-wing theater goers and then you had like oh do you fancy a night at the theater kind of um popping along with you know their um their their partners and then so you know we it was interesting hearing the audience laughing at different things you know when the satire kind of changed its target and then obviously and then halfway through our run david cameron it went from um david cameron got into power and so our prime minister was suddenly an ex-bullying member it suddenly became incredibly um poignant this play we were doing.

30:06You do posh. Things start to go really well. You're working really hard. I hear that you're playing just as hard as well. You're young, fresh, upcoming actor. You're in this play everyone's talking about. I always wonder that if I stumbled into the right back room of a Soho boozer around this time, finding the cast of a play hanging out after hours, drinking dirty martinis long into the night. Is it like that? Paint me a picture. i mean it's pretty good has someone from posh been on the podcast certainly that first play yeah like we would we would you know we were all young not kids we were like mid-20s and we'd all got our first paycheck and it was a west end paycheck so and it wasn't it was royal court but it's still pretty good you know it was still like i can't remember a few hundred quid a week i mean it was enough and um and we were all this like we were this like band you know it was like being in a sports team or a band like we would do our thing every night almost almost almost yeah there's a couple of a couple of them but a young young men yeah so of course and like lovely men as well really lovely you know like kit harrington was his first job um tom meissen harry hadden payton like really lovely good guys henry lloyd hughes i mean we we and we would take we would go from from set feeling amazing because i don't know if people who hadn't seen the play like there were moments when we would break from the dinner talk about food it was um it was a feast we were eating a 10 bird roast bird inside a bird inside a bird inside a bird roasted i mean it was nuts drinking wine downing wine coming up doing like jay-z raps to the audience dressed in tails i mean the whole it was like you felt fucking amazing was it a real bird inside a bird that you ate or was there just a plastic one that they brought it was probably a bit of chicken because i honestly i find those things eerie oh they're disgusting but i think that they're an amazing they really nail a mindset gluttony yes introducing a bird inside a bird instead of the birds smaller than the other thinking that that combination of meat somehow denotes luxury yeah So at the end of the night, so you're pumped up, you're doing rap on stage, and then you all go out somewhere together?

32:27Every night. Every night we would get, we'd roll out at the front, the Royal Court bar would close, some people would have friends in, we'd roll out the front, we'd wave down like three black cabs, we'd go straight to Black's, we'd order like three or four bottles of the house red wine, we'd drink that. Black's, back in my days, was much more sort of loose. Please explain Black's to people that have never been there. I have done some very stupid things in Blacks. Anyway, please. Blacks is like the quintessential, like old fashioned sort of dark corners and there's always weird art on the walls, very little light, real fires burning.

33:09And what was his name? This wonderful kind of host who had sort of, he took a shine to us all. We all had membership because when you're doing a Western show, you get membership. but it's it's like this tiny little kind of oldy dordian look isn't it in soho the sofas that are like beds yeah so you end up really hammered horizontal and then you're kind of in bed yeah you're right with a fire like two o 'clock in the morning and you're basically lying in bed with a load of strangers and you're thinking this is this is amazing it's amazing and we were we were just behind those curtains but just 10 dudes just like telling each other how wonderful you are

33:582014 you're cast as tommy lee royce the villain in the bbc's much-loved drama happy valley okay this character probably one of the most truly despicable characters that's ever been on television you are absolutely lovely thanks how how hard is it to do that i'm fascinated by you doing this character because you inhabit a kind of uh you inhabit a space that i only saw in the the biggest i'm trying to think the biggest i'm trying to think of psychopaths that i hung around with in the northwest of england i didn't have any choice to hang around with them they were just in the community so right i don't know how you do that how hard is that where did you get it from i mean i i i have to credit sally who gave me the best role ever i mean she you know we actors are only looking for good character and good writing and and she is the best like she's She's amazing, like no doubt.

35:08I mean, someone said to me recently, directors, if you can just act as, if you're just still, you can fill in a lot with everything, all the music and the edit and the grade. I mean, I'm not going to take, I'm proud of Tommy. I'm not going to say it was all created around me. I definitely feel like I went somewhere with him and I had an amazing amount of help, both through Sally's amazing writing. BBC put me in touch with criminal psychologists. I mean, I did a lot of work. I knew that the stakes were high and I wanted to do as good a job as I could. Sally gives you a lot of prescription in the stage directions.