大象传媒

1. He’s the quiet one in his family

James is known for performing on stage, TV, cinema and on his own chat show. He’s a man who enjoys the spotlight. Yet he tells John he’s not the biggest personality in his family. “I have two sisters, one older and one younger… I am the quiet one,” he laughs. “They’re all very big personalities in my house.” James’s dad was a musician in the Royal Air Force band. His mum was a social worker. “In pretty much every way, it was a blissfully encouraging household… I think Mum and Dad saw very early that I didn’t have a choice in whether I wanted to perform or not. It was the only thing that ever lit a fire under me.”

2. He found his love of performance at a christening

James remembers the exact moment his love of performance was ignited. “It was my younger sister Ruth’s christening,” he says. He was around four. Standing at the front of the hall with his family, James couldn’t see everything properly, so someone brought him a chair to stand on. “I can remember it like it was yesterday, seeing this congregation, which was probably a maximum of 18 people but looked like 1,000. I would pull faces and remember turning around, bending over and looking back through my legs. Getting these giggles and thinking it was amazing.” He was hooked and never wanted to come down from the “stage”: “The rest of life [was going to be] a quest to be up there.”

3. Gary Wilmot made him want to a comic actor

James’s dad used to take him to the theatre once or twice a year, when they could afford it. One visit, to a production of Me and My Girl at the Adelphi Theatre, starring Gary Wilmot, changed James’s life. “I’d never seen a musical that was funny or a musical where the lead actor had the freedom to riff,” he says. “We were just in the palm of his hand… I walked out on to The Strand and said to my dad, ‘That’s it. What he just did, that’s what I want to do.’” Years later, One Man, Two Guvnors, the play that won James a Tony Award, transferred from The National Theatre to a run in the West End, at the Adelphi. James tears up remembering taking his dad back to the theatre. “I was under this huge poster with my face on it and my name on it,” he says. “Dad said, ‘Do you remember the last time we stood here and you said… ‘This is what I want to do.’ I’m so proud of you.’”

4. It took him years to get his first acting job

James started acting when he was a child and was regularly driven to auditions by his dad. However, the auditions were never successful. “I never got a single part until I was 17,” he says. After one brutal experience, when he got to the last three for a stage role, his dad asked him if he wanted to stop auditioning and save himself the pain. “I said, ‘I can’t, Dad. It’s just what I have to do.’” He finally got his first stage role in 1996, in a musical called Martin Guerre, from the writers of Les Misérables. “I had one line, which was three words,” he says. You can hear him on the original cast recording: “’Roast the meats!’ That’s me.”

5. Shane Meadows taught him his can-do attitude

James’s first film role was in Twenty Four Seven, the first film by BAFTA-winning director Shane Meadows. He says watching Meadows command a set, despite his lack of experience, and just get on with it taught him to approach his career with the same confidence. “No-one’s going to invite you to the table,” he says. “Especially if you’re from a working-class environment. You’re not bred for success… Talent is everywhere and opportunity isn’t.” He says the thing he learned from Meadows was, “you’re going to have to get people to budge up if you want to sit at the table. It isn’t just going to be presented to you.”

6. He was at his most nervous working with Mike Leigh

In 2002, James appeared in All or Nothing, one of director Mike Leigh’s bleaker films, about the everyday lives of working class families. “I felt so in awe of him and so desperately wanted to make him proud and I feel like I was spending a lot of my time hoping I had impressed him, as opposed to doing what he wants you to do, which is to just do it.” The experience was influential in a different way, because it helped inspire Gavin and Stacey, James’s huge sitcom hit. “I think Ruth [Jones, co-creator and co-star] and I may even have referenced Mike Leigh in the treatment,” he says. “Of course he’s an influence. It’s got Alison Steadman in it!”

7. He got the idea for Gavin and Stacey at a wedding

Before writing Gavin and Stacey, James had never written any kind of script. “If it wasn’t for Ruth, I probably wouldn’t have written anything still to this day,” he says. He got the idea for the sitcom while at a wedding in Barry Island, where the show is set, with his then girlfriend. “I didn’t know many people at this wedding,” he says. “I remember watching and thinking nobody had ever really shown a wedding on TV like one I had been to. I came back to Ruth… and said, ‘I wonder if that’s some kind of TV special.’ She loved it.” When they pitched it to 大象传媒 Three, Stuart Murphy, then head of the channel, said “I have a hunch… this might be the best thing 大象传媒 Three ever makes.”

8. David Bowie convinced him to leave his talk show

Since 2015, James has been the host of CBS’s The Late Late Show. He recently announced that he’ll be leaving the show in 2023. James says he feels fully confident in his decision and remembers David Bowie if he ever wobbles. “There’s an amazing clip where David Bowie talks about never playing to the gallery,” he says. “On the day of the announcement that I was going to walk away, when it was still made very clear to me that there was a job here for the next five years… I would watch that clip. I must have watched it 50 times. He says, ‘If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.’”

9. He doesn’t know what’s next

Asked what he’ll be doing next, James says, “I don’t know!” He’ll soon appear in Mammals, a marriage drama written by Jez Butterworth, but beyond that he has no set plans. “I have some things I’d like to write. I have a list as long as your arm of people I’d like to work with – I don’t know if they’ll want to work with me. Who knows. Let’s find out.”