Thursday, two days later. We’re
killing time in the low-lit wings
of the studio, talking idly about
anything – children, the charity
sector, the funny angle at which
the Eighties pop star Matt Goss wears his hat.
One of tonight’s guests, Marcus Mumford,
wanders over to take a selfie with Corden.
Mumford wants to send the photo to his
wife, the actor Carey Mulligan. “Carey’s just
woken up,” he explains. And, boy, the temp-
tation must be great, very great, for Corden
to make his excuses here. Peel away. Talk to
the rock star about his movie star wife. Even
I would ditch me for Mumford right now.
Corden, gamely, hangs on in. What was it I’d
been saying about the charity sector?
About eight years ago Corden was on holiday
in LA with his wife. He learned a valuable
lesson on this trip. These were the hinter-
land days of his early thirties, post-Gavin,
pre-Guvnor, and Corden, with time
on his hands, had been binge-
watching Breaking Bad. When he
and Julia arrived in LA there was
Walter White himself, the actor
Bryan Cranston, walking into their
restaurant. After some tense dis-
cussion (“Will I regret this, Jules?”)
Corden, who would’ve kicked
himself otherwise, shuffled over.
“Excuse me, Bryan, you don’t know
me but...” Corden recalls. “He was
amazing with me, adorable, every-
thing I wanted him to be. I would
have been the 20th or 30th person
who approached him that day.”
Corden’s relationship with the
public – as with that nebulous,
harder-to-clarify thing, public
opinion – has not always been
simple. Affection for him has lurched in wilder
and more whimsical ways than with Cranston,
say, or any number of performers who tend
to fix in the public mind as impressive or
otherwise and then stay fixed. Corden has
been garlanded, battered, garlanded, battered.
It cannot always have been hilarious to have
people shout “Gavin & Stacey!” out of car
windows. He could be short with strangers.
That brief LA encounter with Cranston,
Corden says, gave him a jolt. The senior actor
seemed so present during their interaction.
For Corden this would become the model to
strive after. Not to look to next week or last
week; not to look over anyone’s shoulder. Treat
what’s in front of you as “the thing”.
We’re in a radio studio when Corden gets
an uncanny echo of this lesson. He’s done
an hour on Virgin Radio, as a guest on Chris
Evans’ show. The pair have messed about on
air, teased each other, traded stories from the
front lines of broadcasting. As he winds upthe hour, Evans seems to forget that any-
one’s listening and he addresses Corden in
earnest, personal terms. Be in the moment,
James. Breathe. “James Corden is a force for
good,” Evans tells him, as if to contradict the
doubters. “I think you’ve realised that now.”
In the car afterwards, I ask Corden what he
thinks Evans meant. Corden shrugs. They’re
friends. They try to support each other. If
anybody knows about the fickle nature of a
nation’s affections, it’s Evans. When he got
a kicking over his reinvention of Top Gear,
Corden recalls, “I reached out to Chris. He got
an unfair bashing there.” What did you say?
“That it’s really, really easy for people to criti-
cise. It’s almost the easiest thing in the world.
But it’s fucking hard to have an idea.”
Coming down in the lift from Evans’ studio,
which is at the top of the News Building near
London Bridge, I note that the headquar-
ters of the Sun are directly below. Cordenhad been texting, humming Coldplay as the
lift went down, and when the doors pinged
open on the Sun offices he stiffened, waiting
to see who would step in. Nobody. He carried
on humming. “You’ve got to try to take the
criticism with a pinch, no, a bag of salt,”
Corden says in the car. “And that’s easier or
hard depending on factors that are outside
of your control, particularly the thinness of
your skin, your frailties, at any one time.”
Apply the same to his public interactions.
The “Cranston Model”, which impressed
Corden profoundly, has taken time to become
a habit. “I’ve only just become comfortable
with the notion – I would say in the last 12
months – that, OK, I understand the version
of me that people want to meet and I’ll give
them that and that’s all right. Cos it’s actually
harder, it’s more work to be rude and abrupt.
And I don’t want to be that ‘Do you mind?’
person. I don’t want that at all.”
A postscript to the Cranston story: a fewyears after the restaurant approach, Cranston
came to watch Corden in One Man, Two
Guvnors on Broadway. The pair became
chummy. When Corden missed some Late
Late shows for the birth of his third child,
Cranston kept his chair warm, appearing as
a guest host. Recently, when Corden was
booked to present the Tony Awards in New
York, he emailed Cranston to sound him out
about a cameo appearance... Before you say
more, Cranston emailed back: “My answer’s
yes.” Still a dude, still a gentleman, still a
model to strive after.The pretaped dodgeball segment,
the one with Michelle Obama
and Harry Styles, is the viral hit
the team expect it to be, the talk
of the morning after, 7m views
online. When it’s first broadcast in the studio,
Corden chuckles as he watches, then winces.
At one point, as the former first
lady of the United States overarms
a bouncy ball in the direction of
a pop star’s testicles at Corden’s
behest, he wipes a finger under
each eye. Were you moved to
tears, I ask him afterwards?
No, Corden says: itchy irises.
“I think we made a nice bit of
telly there. Nothing more.” It
has happened to him, though, a
bit of pretaping that felt in the
moment like a stop-and- shiver
event. Last year the Late Late
Show team convinced Sir Paul
McCartney to record a special
version of “Carpool Karaoke”,
in which Corden would drive
the ex-Beatle around his old
haunts in Liverpool. The result
of that outing has become the stuff of
TV legend. Macca sang “Penny Lane” on
Penny Lane, Corden blubbed, 43m people
clicked play.
When Corden looks back on it, the thing
that sticks happened earlier, off-camera,
when they were getting dressed. McCartney,
Corden recalls, had had a small wobble. He
wasn’t sure he wanted to visit his child-
hood home, too many memories. Corden
had to insist if there was any problem they’d
just drive on. “I remember we were in this
sort of walk-in wardrobe at the time. That’s
the moment I think back to. Stood in a cup-
board, wondering what’s happened to my
life, if I’m here giving Sir Paul McCartney
a pep talk.”
The Macca segment aired in June 2018.
Corden thinks it’s the best “Carpool Karaoke”
they’ve done. It may well be that they won’t
top it, that their best work on The Late Late
Show is a year in the rearview. It’ll happen >>Corden backstage with guest Lily James, where the actor also recorded a
segment reacting to posts from the British Problems Reddit page, 18 June09-19FeatureJamesCorden.indd 146 11/07/2019 13:38
142 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019