James Corden: ‘I’m not sure people even think of me as an actor at all’

The comic actor is starring in One Man Two Guvnors in the West End, but he fears people still associate him with the mis-steps he took after his hit with Gavin and Stacey. Will his new memoir redeem his public image? In a small side room at the Guardian, with Al Pacino glowering from a poster above us, James Corden is performing a masterclass in modesty. He is quiet, contained, thoughtful. He rubs his nose, strokes his chin, considering his answers; if he had a forelock, I suspect he’d tug it. The main message is how fortunate he is. He feels privileged to be an actor, he says, grateful to appear on television, surprised at the breadth of his career, dumbfounded to be starring at the National Theatre . “I just feel lucky that I’m able to do so many different things,” he says. “I feel constantly amazed that I’m allowed to, you know?” If he were a superhero, he would be Humility Man: leaping small molehills in a few stuttering, stumbling steps. This is not the Corden I expected to meet. It certainly isn’t the Corden that makes people shudder. Every time I tell someone I’m interviewing him they flinch visibly and a horrified noise explodes through their nose. The consensus seems to be that the actor, comedy writer, co-creator of hit sitcom Gavin and Stacey , presenter of sports gameshow A League of Their Own , is arrogant and loud, his humour laddish and dated, that he has an unappealing, thespy air of entitlement. Also, most essentially, he’s attention-seeking. The title of his new autobiography – May I Have Your Attention, Please? – confirms this last point. I had expected the book to be a mea culpa , an attempt to win people over, and it is in part. Corden emphasises that over the past 18 months or so he has changed enormously, since falling in love with charity worker Julia Carey and having baby son Max. But he certainly doesn’t hide the side of him that sucks the air from the room. In the first few pages he writes about his earliest memory, aged four, standing on a chair at his younger sister’s christening, pulling faces while people laughed. “This felt good. Really good,” he writes. “In my head it became simple: if people are looking at me, and only me, it feels amazing. And that was that. From that day forward, every day became a quest to be noticed. To have the attention of people. Of you.” I searched for some explanation for this overweening neediness, riffling the pages with rising desperation. A dead parent? Dead sibling? Dead tortoise? Nothing. Admittedly, his father was once an RAF musician, who was sent to Iraq in the early 1990s as a stretcher-bearer, and while Corden says the day this was announced was one of the worst of his life – and the day his dad arrived back the very best – it’s bizarrely flat in the telling. He writes about going to RAF Uxbridge for the homecoming, and launches into a grumpy aside about the catering. “Someone had tried to set up some kind of a ‘buffet’ in the mess, but they shouldn’t have bothered. There were just lots of little bowls of crisps – rubbish crisps – and two bowls of peanuts. Now that’s all right, but that’s not a ‘buffet’.” This continues for some time. As I’ve scrawled in the margin:

Posted by on October 2, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.