54 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
“Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow.”• •
cast, including Dominic Cooper and
Russell Tovey, formed an instant cama-
raderie, but they were intimidated by
the play’s breezy references to Auden
and Wittgenstein. Hytner swore the
cast to a “vow of stupidity,” meaning
that they would all learn together.
The play was a smash, and it trav-
elled to Hong Kong, Australia, New
Zealand, and Broadway, where it won
the 2006 Tony Award for Best Play.
Cooper recalled, “We’d literally roll up
to the stage door, throw a tie on, and
run onstage, often missing the entrance.”
It was all a gas, but Corden was disap-
pointed to see his thinner castmates
booking major movie auditions, while
he grasped for bit parts. “I was good for
playing a bubbly judge in a courtroom,
or I’d be the guy who drops off a TV to
Hugh Grant in a movie,” Corden told
me. He added, “If someone came from
another planet and put on the televi-
sion, you would think that people who
are big or overweight don’t have sex.
They don’t fall in love. They’re friends
of people who fall in love. They’re prob-
ably not that bright, but they’re a good
time, and they’re not as valuable as peo-
ple who are really good-looking.”
Realizing that he would need to cre-
ate his own material, he revisited the
wedding idea with Jones, and they wrote
up a treatment for a one-hour TV spe-
cial. A BBC 3 executive told them that
it might work better as a series, and they
turned it into one, called “Gavin & Sta-
cey.” The title couple—she’s from Barry,
he’s from Essex—would be played by
skinny, telegenic actors. Corden and
Jones cast themselves as the couple’s
wacky best friends: Smithy, a beer-swill-
ing handyman, and Nessa, a fabulously
trashy arcade attendant. “We were being
realistic that neither of us is roman-
tic-lead material,” Jones told me. Yet
the two characters shared a raunchy sex-
ual bond and, eventually, a child. In one
scene, they flirt over takeout from KFC:
SMITHY: Do you want that corn on the cob?
NESSA: Is that a euphemism?
SMITHY: What? No, I’m just saying, there’s
one corn on the cob left, and you can have it.
(He looks at her lustfully.) If you want it.
NESSA: (Setting down her fried chicken.) Do
you want me to have it?“Gavin & Stacey” premièred in May,
2007, with half a million viewers, and
ran for three seasons. The last episode,
which aired on New Year’s Day, 2010,
was watched by ten million people, a
sixth of the British population. Its re-
gional humor may be lost on Americans,
but the show has the soothing famil-
iarity of Sunday dinner at the in-laws’,
and it made Corden a household name.
Nevertheless, he felt lost. He had bro-
ken up with Shelley after nine yearsand begun a volatile on-and-off rela-
tionship with Sheridan Smith, who
played Smithy’s sister. Feeling cool for
the first time in his life, he’d go out
drinking every night. The British tab-
loids delighted in printing photographs
of him stumbling out of pubs. For a
time, he lived out of his Mercedes
hatchback, crashing with Cooper or
drifting among one-night stands. “He
thought he was Jack the Lad,” his
mother told me.
At the 2008 British Academy Tele-
vision Awards, Corden won for best
comedy performance, and “Gavin &
Stacey” received the Audience Award.
Accepting the latter, Corden bemoaned
the fact that the show hadn’t also been
nominated for best comedy. The audi-
ence recoiled at his ungraciousness. The
British press, which never needs an ex-
cuse to go into attack mode, painted
him as an arrogant jerk, which, he ad-
mits, he was. “I started to behave like
a brat that I just don’t think I am,” he
told me. “It’s so intoxicating, that first
flush of fame. And I think it’s even
more intoxicating if you’re not bred for
it.” Back in Hazlemere, his parents
prayed for him. “You can try and say,
‘Look, James, you’re making a prat of
yourself,’ but you can only do so much,”
Margaret said.
At the beginning of 2009, Corden
and Mathew Horne, the actor who
played Gavin, launched a sketch show,
“Horne & Corden,” and co-starred in
a comedy-horror film called “Lesbian
Vampire Killers.” Both were flops.
Corden blames his dwindling work ethic
for the failure of “Horne & Corden,”
which inspired the Sun to call him “that
fat git, with a laugh like a neutered
howler monkey.” The entire country
seemed to delight in his humbling. “Be-
cause of the characters he plays, he’s
like a man of the people, so people feel
like they’re his mates,” Cooper reasoned.
“So he gets horrible things written about
him compared to anyone else I know,
and if he doesn’t respond the way Smithy
would, for example, then they imme-
diately turn on him.”
At one point, Rob Brydon, who
played Stacey’s lovable Uncle Bryn,
confronted Corden over lunch. “I said,
‘Look, this is a bit awkward to say, but
I’m just hearing these things about you,
and you’ve got to know that the way