‘It’s easy for peopleto criticise. It’salmost the easiestthing in theworld. But it’shard to have an idea’>> Ever since he was a boy, seeing his
first play, Corden can remember thinking,
“Well, this is incredibly boring by compar-
ison, sitting down here when you could be
up there.”
So began the pursuit of up there. Before
Gavin & Stacey caught on, Corden was a
supporting player in a low-flying teatime
soap (Hollyoaks), a decent comedy- drama
(Teachers) and a hit London play (The
History Boys). He hoped to be a lead, “But
I was learning that if you looked like me,
people reckoned you were about right for
playing a newsagent in a Hugh Grant movie...
Nobody was about to pull a seat out at the
table and say, ‘Come and sit down.’ I was
going to have get to this table and budge
people up.”
Corden knew Ruth Jones from an acting
job and they’d become friends. They scripted
episode one of Gavin & Stacey in a Shepherd’s
Bush hotel room, in 2005. The show broadcast
on the BBC in 2007 and went boom. Corden,
who played the best mate of the lead char-
acter, became famous, “single, sort of dating,
going out quite a lot, drinking quite a lot
and embarking on a few years of, uh, just...
I don’t want to say... cos it wasn’t as bad as
anyone [else]’s...”
Back at school, a heavy kid, he had settled
on overconfidence as a sure way to confound
any bullies. “They can’t stand confidence.
They don’t know what to do with it. And
I think there was an element of that after
Gavin & Stacey, when I became more well
known. I was conscious of the fact I looked
bigger. I thought I would just make myself
a bigger target.” He was nearing the end of
his twenties. “Suddenly, you’re being offered
the lead in a few films and you can’t believe
it. This table! The metaphorical table that
you wanted to get a seat at – you’re there!
‘You want me to be a lead? OK!’ Cos who
knows how long till it’s figured out, around
this table, that they’ve made a mistake.” He
sighs. “It’s the kind of thinking that can lead
you, as it certainly did in my case, to making
choices that aren’t professionally great.” After
Gavin & Stacey, the low: Corden was in a run
of really bad stuff, on TV and in the cinema.
He was 30, “still going out all the time, still
drinking quite a lot”. Did anyone intervene?
Friends? “Well, what happens is, in moments
like that, you tend to not seek out your true
friends. Because you’ve got some new friends!
And they’re full of shit! But you don’t realise
that. Not till later.”
A play changed Corden’s fortunes. He was
the lead in One Man, Two Guvnors, a London
smash that made triumphant progress to
Broadway. It was in New York that CBS exec-
utives noted Corden’s frisky energy and,
eventually, tapped him up for the vacant >>JAMES CORDEN09-19FeatureJamesCorden.indd 143 11/07/2019 10:01
SEPTEMBER 2019 GQ.CO.UK 139