THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 55
you behave has an effect on people,’”
Brydon recalled. Corden’s sisters also
intervened, according to his mother:
“They would come in and say to James,
‘Don’t be a dickhead.’” Chastened,
Corden began seeing a therapist. At
his first session, he said, “I used to be
a better person than this.” He tried to
figure out why he felt so empty. He
began forcing himself to stay home at
night and eat TV dinners. “The abso-
lute biggest thing I had to learn to do,”
he said, “was just stay in and be com-
fortable on my own.”
O
n the morning of December 23rd,
Corden stepped out of a car in
London and headed into a BBC build-
ing. A paparazzo snapped his picture
and wished him a happy Christmas.
“And you,” Corden replied merrily. “See
you, mate!”
Inside, he greeted the cast of “Gavin &
Stacey,” with whom he had filmed a re-
union special after a decade-long hia-
tus, to air on Christmas Day. It would
be comforting fare for a Britain riven
by politics; in the home-for-the-
holidays plot, Brexit and Boris John-
son were conspicuously absent. As the
cast waited to do a radio interview,
Corden hummed “Sleigh Ride” and
chatted with Brydon by the coffee ma-
chine. The day before, he had taken his
nine-year-old son, Max McCartney
Kimberley Corden, to a soccer match,
then strolled around shops in London,
listening to holiday music. “Have you
heard the Kacey Musgraves song ‘Christ-
mas Makes Me Cry’?” he asked Bry-
don.“I’m fifty-four,” Brydon deadpanned.
The actors filed into a studio, where
Corden and Jones sat side by side. “James
Corden, he’s gone off to Hollywood—
has he changed?” the host asked. There
was an uncertain pause, and then ev-
eryone laughed.
“I think that silence was filled with
love,” Jones said.
After 2009, Corden’s public image
didn’t rebound overnight. His bad rep-
utation was compounded by another
awards-show incident, in which he
sparred onstage with Patrick Stewart.
(They’ve since reconciled.) In 2011, a
Guardian profile summed up the “con-
sensus” view: that Corden was “arro-
gant and loud, his humour laddish and
dated, that he has an unappealing, thespy
air of entitlement.” Corden and Coo-
per had moved into a sparsely furnished
bachelor pad in Primrose Hill, where
they subsisted on junk food. Cooper
recalled, “I remember him coming home
one night, and I was just eating baked
beans with a ladle out of the can.” One
evening, Cooper lured him out to a
Bulgari charity event and introduced
him to a friend, Julia Carey, who worked
for Save the Children. Corden was
thrilled to learn that she had never
watched “Gavin & Stacey.” Now his
wife of eight years, she still hasn’t
watched an episode.
Although his personal life was be-
coming more stable, it was unclear how
much patience England had left for
Corden. He continued to make ap-
pearances as Smithy, his gregarious
alter ego, including in the George Mi-
chael sketch that spawned “Carpool
Karaoke.” A boost finally came from
Nicholas Hytner, at the National The-
atre, who devised “One Man, Two Guv-
nors” as a vehicle for Corden. “So he
went to a few parties, got hammered
a couple of times, shot his mouth off,
and made a terrible movie,” Hytner
told me. “Serial killers get an easier ride
than he did for ‘Lesbian Vampire Kill-
ers.’ But he was still the guy who made
‘Gavin & Stacey,’ and I needed some-
thing purely enjoyable for a season that
was otherwise wall-to-wall Ibsen and
Jacobean tragedy.”
“One Man, Two Guvnors,” which
reset Goldoni’s 1746 comedy in nine-
teen-sixties Brighton, provided Corden
with a slapstick tour de force. Within
moments of his entrance, he throws a
peanut in the air, tumbles backward on
an armchair, leaps up, and reveals the
peanut on his tongue, proclaiming, “I
got it!” Later, after his character be-
comes frazzled by his split allegiances
to his two bosses, he gets into a one-
man schizoid brawl—slapping, sucker
punching, and choking himself, before
finally slamming his face with a gar-
bage-can lid. There was no way not to
root for him. The Telegraph called the
show “absolute bliss.” A year later, it
went to Broadway, where Corden had
none of the baggage that weighed him
down in England. In the Times, Ben
Brantley called him “a comic star in
Britain who seems poised to become
one here in short order.” For Corden,
it was a new lease on comedy, a chance
for a do-over. “My God, I’ve never been
so aware of the great time I’m having
as I was when I was doing that show,”
he told me. One night, he pulled Don-
ald Trump onstage from the audience,
to assist with a heavy trunk. “I fired
him,” Corden recalled proudly. “At one
point, I spanked him.”
Corden was recounting the incident
at his house in London’s Belsize Park,
as he packed for a Christmas vacation
with his wife and three children. That
morning, at the BBC interview, he had
inadvertently made headlines when he
revealed that he had not yet seen “Cats”
and joked, “I’ve heard it’s terrible.” The
film had been out for three days and
was being ridiculed as an epic fiasco—a
new generation’s “Xanadu.” “I can’t imag-
ine I’ll see it,” Corden told me, shov-
ing a hoodie into a suitcase. But he was
good-humored. “It’s important to say
I had the best time making it,” he added.
“At some point, you have to go, How
am I going to judge my own experi-
ence? Am I only going to have enjoyed
something if it was successful?”
Last summer, Corden extended his
contract at “The Late Late Show” for
two more years, but he will not stay for-
ever. He wants his children to know
London better, and he dreams of repris-
ing “One Man, Two Guvnors.” At his
L.A. office one afternoon, he had shown
me a new book of Garry Shandling’s
diaries, edited by Judd Apatow. On one
page, from 1990, Shandling, whose hit
sitcom “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”
had not brought him contentment, had
scrawled a note to himself: “Don’t iden-
tify yourself with your career. You are
you. You are not your job. Also, this sum-
mer, work on your stand-up.”
“It’s weird, innit?” Corden said, look-
ing up. “That’s why the jury’s out for me
on how healthy it is to do these shows
for that long. I’m not sure it’s healthy to
have a standing ovation every day.”
