This appealing man

Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s Rogue Agent star James Norton with Anne-Katrin Titze: “We didn’t want it to feel like a predictable charm, the kind of suave spies in the James Bond vein.”

In Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s percipient Rogue Agent (co-written with Michael Bronner, a co-producer on Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips) we first encounter James Norton (the tutor John Brooke in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and Oliver Ashford in Amma Asante’s Belle) as Robert Freegard in the process of applying for a job as bartender in a rural English pub, located near a small agricultural college.

Robert Freegard (James Norton) with Alice Archer (Gemma Arterton) listen to The Cure (Just Like Heaven) and he does a “bad-dance” to George Michael’s Faith.” Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films

Shot by Larry Smith (John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary and The Forgiven, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, and longtime Stanley Kubrick crew member, including Eyes Wide Shut), the year is 1993, the IRA bombings flood the news and we learn that MI5 is recruiting freelance spies to inform on those suspected of plotting terrorist activities.

A female voiceover conveys the tricks of the trade: For an instant connection, look into a stranger’s eyes exactly long enough to register the colour of their eyes. Hide in plain sight. Most effectively, find out which story the person across from you is dying to be told. With Freegard recruiting three students, Sophie (Marisa Abela), Mae (Freya Mavor), and Ian (Rob Malone), as freelance agents, the story soon jumps ahead nine years to Alice Archer (Gemma Arterton), a successful solicitor in London and her encounter with Freegard who now works as a salesman of luxury cars.

Based on actual events, what follows is a riveting game of espionage and craftiness, manipulation and ruthlessness, deception and hocus-pocus, ghosts, heroism, and perfidy. There is “mad, sad, and bad” says Alice’s detective acquaintance Phil (Julian Barratt). Bad stands for a sociopath who will never ever stop, a bit like Longplayer, the Tibetan music bowls, conceived and composed by Jem Finer at the Lighthouse in Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, commissioned by Artangel that will keep playing until exactly one thousand years have passed (from just before midnight on the 31st of December 1999 until the last moment of 2999).

From sweltering London, James Norton joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Rogue Agent.

James Norton on Robert Freegard: “[He] had this incredible power of seeing what people lack.” Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films

Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi James!

James Norton: Hi, how are you doing?

AKT: I’m fine, where are you?

JN: I’m in London, in a very very hot London. It’s uncharacteristically sweltering. I was in a shirt earlier and I had to put a T-shirt on because it was just so hot. Where are you?

AKT: I’m in New York in a heatwave as well. I just spoke to Declan and Adam, your directors, and I had to change too, because it’s just too terribly hot. You have been involved in this Freegard project almost from the get-go, haven’t you?

JN: Yes.

AKT: The first time you read the unpublished article by Michael Bronner, do you remember what you thought? Did you look at it as an actor or were you just flabbergasted by the story?

JN: I remember it very well. I actually dug out the original email that I received from Robert Taylor who produced the film with us who works for the TDP Development Partnership. And he was told by Michael about the unpublished article, read it, sent it to me. With a very simple heading like: This is a movie. We need to make this movie! This was about six years ago. I think I probably had the experience that everyone is having when they are watching the movie.

You just can’t quite believe that someone is able to manipulate and brainwash people to such an extent that he’s able to kidnap them without constraining them. You know, the idea of this kidnapping by fraud, then being convicted of it and then also being released - it felt too bizarre to be true. And at the centre this bizarre but also compelling character who had this incredible power of seeing what people lack. Like a kind of warped therapist able to sort of ascertain what it is that people need and use it against them. It was just so interesting.

Robert Freegard (James Norton) with Sophie Jones (Marisa Abela), one of his freelance MI5 recruits Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films

That was, as I said, six years ago, then we worked with Michael a little bit and then two and a half years ago, I set a company [Rabbit Track Pictures] up with this wonderful producer called Kitty Kaletsky. Kitty, myself, and Rob really spearheaded the project

AKT: She worked with Elizabeth Karlsen who did Todd Haynes’s Carol, didn’t she?

JN: Yes, she did, you’re absolutely right. Kitty originally worked at Black Bear with Teddy Schwarzman and Number 9 Films before that. And the Black Bear TV department in L.A. for about five years. I was incredibly lucky to start working with her two and a half years ago.

Then having a vehicle within which to make it, we suddenly felt galvanised and ready. And yes, the film would not have happened without Kitty and Rob. And it’s been really eye opening and a really gratifying satisfying experience for me. Usually as an actor you come in so late. All the decisions are made. The character, the world you’re living in, so much of the canvas.

AKT: And here you were preparing also for it.

JN: Yeah.

AKT: I want to get to your acting as well. When you have a role in a film like Little Women or Belle, the costumes help you immediately to get into character. With Freegard you have 1993 and 2002, which is quite different. Did the costumes help you here to get into the skin of this big manipulator, this ruthless charming monstrous man?

JN: It did help. I think you’re absolutely right, costume and makeup and just the visual elements to a movie, to a story are so important and particularly from an actor’s point of view. Costume in particular. When I’m rehearsing a play, one of the first things you do, like in the second week, at least I do, is ask the costume department to give me my shoes so that I can find my walk, you know, how I relate to the ground.

John Brooke (James Norton) with Marmee March (Laura Dern) and Meg (Emma Watson) in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women

AKT: That’s the same thing Isabelle Huppert told me. It’s all in the shoes.

JN: Oh did she? Shoes are really important to me as well. And also things like hair. The things you control about your image. With Freegard we had certain limitations, often actors do. With other roles you’re kind of returning to. You can’t just have a complete blank canvas, but definitely part of his charm and manipulation was being this appealing man.

We didn’t want it to feel like a predictable charm, the kind of suave spies in the James Bond vein. We wanted it to feel real human, vulnerable, kind of messy, a bit peculiar. Some of his costumes felt a little gauche.

AKT: I noticed.

JN: The whole leopard painting seems really gauche.

AKT: Very much so.

JN: The way he eats with this ferocious appetite. He has this love of the sensual, the physical. Elements that we really wanted to make him feel, we keep coming back to this word, peculiar. I really fought to make him weird. As a result we had lines which were lovely, like Gemma’s line “You’re so [expletive] random!” came out of that. Because the victims fell in love with the unpredictability and the peculiarity of this man and how he is such an enigma.

AKT: And you have George Michael and The Cure to aid you in that peculiarity.

JN: My very very bad dancing, which was meant to be bad! I want to really reiterate that! I was meant to bad-dance, to dance badly.

AKT: In one of your next films, I am sure, you will have the opportunity for a fantastic dance scene to right this possible misconception. Another very interesting moment is when you look in the mirror and spit at yourself. Can you talk about that moment?

James Norton as Oliver Ashford with Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in Amma Asante’s Belle

JN: Yeah, Adam and Declan talked about this a lot, the way good drama holds a mirror up to each character and allows them to kind of understand themselves. And Alice certainly goes on a journey of self-reckoning and understanding. She starts as this kind of repressed lawyer, quite sad and feeling trapped and then finds this freedom and this power. But out of the law, out of the shadow of her family.

And Freegard is unable to really go on that journey because every time he looks at himself he sees self-hatred and lack. The reason why he’s gone on this journey is because he feels like he is a void. There is nothing there. So when slowly the house of cards, the construct of this delusion is stripped away from him and he realises it is falling away, we wanted a moment where he looked in the mirror and realised that he was despicable to himself. And actually the spitting was an impulse of mine and it came out of so many things I had seen.

Like that scene in Nightcrawler where Jake Gyllenhaal smashes the mirror - we have seen so many moments of violence. But I felt like it wasn’t violence towards the mirror, it was this disgust. And what’s the most disgusting thing you can do is spit on yourself. I think it was trying to tap into this idea that his centre is just darkness and lack.

AKT: I think the audience needs his self-recognition at this moment. Overall great, great performance! I was very impressed by what you did.

JN: Thank you!

AKT: Enjoy the heat!

JN: I’ll try to! Thank you! See you, bye-bye!

Rogue Agent opens in cinemas and is available on AMC+ in the US on August 12 and is currently on Netflix in the UK.

Coming up - Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson on Rogue Agent.