THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 53
we all down here? We should be up
there! That was it, really. Then it was
just a quest to perform in any way, any-
where I could.”
His parents struggled with mon-
ey—“Crumbs, we didn’t have two
ha’pennies to rub together!” Malcolm
said—but they enrolled him in an after-
school drama program. Malcolm duti-
fully drove him to professional audi-
tions, but his son, who became chubby
in adolescence, was never cast. After
one unsuccessful audition, for “The
Sound of Music,” Malcolm gently told
Corden that he could give up audition-
ing if he wanted. “I can still hear him
now in the car, as we were driving out
on the Westway out of London,” Mal-
colm recalled. “He said, ‘Dad, I can’t.
It’s what I’ve got to do.’”
When Corden was twelve, the Royal
Air Force unexpectedly summoned
Malcolm to Bahrain in the first Gulf
War, as an auxiliary medic. Corden was
distraught. “I just couldn’t fathom it,
because my dad was a saxophone player
in the R.A.F.,” he said. “He used to play
big-band jazz on the QE2, and sud-
denly he was in army camouflage gear.”
Malcolm called home every weekend,
but the sound of his voice reduced Cor-
den to tears. “I couldn’t talk to him when
he was away. My sisters could.” His fa-
ther returned after four months, hav-
ing faced nothing more dangerous than
practicing injections on an orange.
At school, Corden became a bawdy
class clown. “As soon as I got big, I just
thought, Well, I’ll be the biggest target
in the room. I’ll be the loudest voice. I
will have so much confidence that it
will almost be unnerving,” he said. As
a teen-ager, he was obsessed with the
boy band Take That and formed a se-
ries of knockoff groups, with names like
Insatiable and Twice Shy (“so we could
call our album ‘Once Bitten’”). Deter-
mined to be an actor, he blew off school,
except for drama and English; his last
two years, he rarely brought pens to
class. When a career counsellor advised
him to have a backup plan, he pointed
to classmates who were planning to
study leisure and tourism and asked,
“What are they falling back on?”
At seventeen, he was finally cast in
a West End musical, “Martin Guerre,”
by the writers of “Les Misérables.” His
one line was “Roast the meats!” The
show was an “abject disaster,” he said.
After a few months, he was offered a
spot on the barricade in “Les Mis,” but
he remembers thinking, “I’m going to
get stuck in the company of big mu-
sicals, and that’s not the plan.” Instead,
he took a job at a pizza restaurant. Tele-
vision gigs came, including one on “Boyz
Unlimited,” a short-lived series about
a fictitious boy band, and a few epi-
sodes of “Hollyoaks,” the soap opera.
When the show offered him seventy
thousand pounds a year to stay—more
than anyone in his family had ever
earned—he agonized. His father ad-
vised him not to accept the offer, since
he clearly didn’t want to do it. “I swear
to God, if I had done that show I’d
have been there for five years, and I’d
probably be on ‘Dancing with the Stars’
right now,” Corden said.
In 2000, he was cast on “Fat Friends,”
an ITV show about a slimming club,
filmed in Leeds. One weekend, his girl-
friend, Shelley, invited him to a wedding
in Barry, a resort town in South Wales.
At the party, he overheard two middle-
aged men comparing themselves to cars.
“I’m not a Porsche,” one man argued, in
a deep Welsh accent. “Of course, I’d love
to be an Audi, but I’m not. I’m a Mondeo,
and that’s fine.” Corden burst out laugh-ing. As he watched the two families (one
Welsh, one English) on the dance floor,
he thought about how weddings bring
together not just two people but their
separate worlds: “I just felt like I was
watching all of life happen.”
Back in Leeds, he told a Welsh co-
star named Ruth Jones about what he’d
seen. “He said, ‘It would be lovely to
write something about a wedding where
nothing really happens,’” Jones told me.
At their hotel bar, they riffed on the
idea as strangers came and went. “We
would sort of people-watch and go, ‘Oh,
she would be the drunken auntie. He
would be the geeky uncle,’” she said.
“All we came up with was a series of vi-
gnettes, really, little bits of conversation.”
They dropped the idea, and Corden
auditioned for the National Theatre’s
production of “The History Boys,” Alan
Bennett’s comedy set at an English
grammar school. “The door flew open,
and in barrelled this big guy who never
stopped talking,” the director, Nicholas
Hytner, told me. “He later claimed he
was terrified, which I’m sure was true,
but he seemed to brim with confidence.”
Corden was cast as Boy 3, a role that
Bennett promised to make more prom-
inent in order to lure him away from a
television offer. The young men in the“Sign here, initial here, rassle Zeke for the keys, and you’re all set.”