It will be a huge challenge for Norton, not least because he is type 1 diabetic and has to plan ahead for spending more than an hour at a time on stage. The play will run at three hours and 40 minutes (slightly shorter than Van Hove’s 2018 Dutch version, which was four hours and 10 minutes), and, if it retains the structure of its predecessor, will feature a sink, centre-stage, that Jude cuts his wrists over. It really comes home when you see friends in bunkers asking for military aid.” So, like everyone, I’ve felt this sense of helplessness. We shot that film in Ukraine, and these filmmakers and artists are now fighting. “In the last messages I have from him, he’s asking for money to buy infrared goggles, so he can see Russian soldiers in order to shoot them. It was a state-sanctioned shutdown of the film.” He is still in touch with his Ukrainian translator from that project. And the authorities in Russia questioned the people who’d put the movie on, and not the gunmen. ![]() “The last time it was screened in Moscow,” he says, “there were masked gunmen who came and shut the screening down. It’s a subject close to his heart, after he starred in Mr Jones, a film about the Holodomor, a man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviet Union under Stalin, which killed millions in the 1930s. War & Peace was filmed in Russia, and Norton has been following the country’s conflict with Ukraine closely. it came out when we were filming the first series of Grantchester, which was a role much more similar to me, and there was a risk that if I’d just done Grantchester I’d have been known as the well-spoken floppy-haired guy who can just do that.” For me, Happy Valley was important, because it allowed me to show that I wanted to do transformative, challenging roles way away from my own life and personality. Those baptisms of fire are nuts, because you miss so many rungs of the ladder, and suddenly you’re in this quite specific, lonely space. Or look at the actor playing Wednesday Addams right now. “A lot of people, talking about baptisms of fire, could be landing a role as a teenager. “But I’m quite grateful for the way it happened with me,” he says. When the season one finale aired, in which Royce kidnapped his own son in a murder-suicide bid, Norton commented that “eight million people are currently wishing me dead” his entry into the public consciousness was something of a baptism of fire. ![]() “No programme has had a greater influence in recent years,” wrote The Independent’s TV critic Nick Hilton, “than Sally Wainwright’s blistering Brontë-country barnstormer.” The drama returned to BBC One after a seven-year hiatus last weekend, and was quickly flooded with shimmering reviews. When we speak in mid-December, Norton is being driven – “very luxuriously” – to Halifax, where much of Happy Valley is filmed, for a local screening of season three. There is a good reason why I’m asking the 37-year-old actor, in the least suggestive way possible, to describe where he is and what he’s wearing on the phone. He laughs at my line of questioning – about his appearance and surroundings – telling me, “You’re going to twist this so it sounds like I’m the Queen of Sheba!” The star of Happy Valley and McMafia is wearing a “big, baggy tracksuit” and plans to have a “hefty snooze” after our interview, because he can’t stay awake on long drives. The fields flanking the motorway are getting snowier as he travels up the country. It’s a very nice car, he tells me, with lots of leg room. Somewhere on the M1, between London and The North, a sleepy James Norton is sprawled out in the back of a car.
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