PLUME: Was performing something that you were interested in as a child? Did that play any part?

NORTON: I suppose when you’re a kid it’s never really performing, it’s just showing off, really. So I suppose when people did come around – the few times they did – I suppose I did like the attention. But in my head, I never thought of it as performing. I did things in school, concerts and all that sort of stuff, but it was only when I became sort of older – I was in my late teens, 16, 17, 18 – then I did some plays, and I thought, “Oh, acting is the way to go.” I really wanted to act. But growing up in Ireland, there was no way you could do that. There were no drama schools, there was very little professional theater, so you just kind of thought, “That will always be a hobby, and I have to think on about how to get a real job.” Work at a bank, or be a journalist, or something.

PLUME: Was the social strata set up so that it actively pushed you towards that?

NORTON: Towards things like journalism and banking and stuff?

PLUME: Yeah…

NORTON: My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me. I think even if I’d left school, even if I hadn’t gone to university, and just done the job my dad had done, they’d have felt like, “Where did it all go wrong?” I think I needed to be white collar and to do something like that. They wanted me to…

PLUME: Achieve a higher social status?

NORTON: Yeah, and then just kind of be able to look after myself, be able to take care of myself. Of course you know at that point, they assumed I’d have a wife and kids and all those things, so…

PLUME: Was it your decision to go to university, or it just seemed like the thing that you were supposed to do?

NORTON: It was a thing that I was supposed to do, and also it avoided getting a job, which was very good.

PLUME: Was that a difficult thing to try to do – avoid getting a job?

NORTON: No, it was quite easy, because I volunteered to go to university, so that seemed like I was really keen. “Gosh, he’s so keen on getting a good job, he’s got to go to university.”

PLUME: I’ve heard that the university wasn’t everything that you expected it to be.

NORTON: Well, funny enough, to begin with – it was fantastic. I loved it, to begin with, because it was such a relief from school, and it was the first time in my life I met kind of like-minded people, you know, who thought about things the same way that I did, or you know, watched movies in the same way that I did, read books. I loved university to begin with. My mistake was that first summer, I headed off to Paris and to London, and it is a kind of a “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paris?” So I came back, and had a miserable second year in university, where I just hated it. Absolutely hated it. I realized there was so much more going on. In the end, I wasn’t a fool, I knew I was getting a kind of crummy arts degree that wasn’t going to help me at all – so why bother?

PLUME: It would have looked good on the Guinness application.

NORTON: I’d have been over-qualified. I wouldn’t have got the job.

PLUME: At how low a point did you get, in university? How low did your emotional state get, before you finally broke from it?

NORTON: I mean, quite low, really … I don’t know how much of it was genuine, and how much of it was me being a drama queen and kind of wallowing in it all, but I did – I became miserable. I was just crying for no good reason, and living in really vile places, for no good reason. I think I was enjoying the misery of it all.

PLUME: So you were making sure you fully explored all of the bottoms of the barrels.

NORTON: Absolutely. I remember living in a block of flats, and basically I think the building was condemned. I think I ended up being the only person living in this block of flats. People would just break in to have sex in the corridors, and things. I remember finding a dead rat on the stairs, and stuff.

PLUME: It never dawned on you at that time, that maybe that was not the right course?

NORTON: You see? It probably did – well, it did, I knew that it was awful, but on some level I think I was kind of enjoying how awful it was … I was unhappy anyway, so if you’re unhappy, you don’t really do much to make yourself happy.

PLUME: It’s too much work.

NORTON: If I was puttering along, and quite content, and came home and found a dead rat – I’d be like, “Oh, for God’s sake. I’m out of here.” But if you’re miserable, and you come home and find a dead rat, you just kind of think, “Well, typical. Of course there’s a dead rat. That’s my horrible life.” Mind you, the most worrying thing about the rat was, I knew there were rats in the building, but I sort of assumed they couldn’t climb stairs. So it was a shock to find it dead, halfway up.

PLUME: Well, then it really couldn’t climb the stairs.

NORTON: Well, no, not dead, but it had got that far. If it had been a fitter rat, it could’ve reached me.

PLUME: If you’d have left it there, it would have been a warning to the fitter rats not to even try.

NORTON: Oh, I did leave it there – I wasn’t touching it.

PLUME: So at what point did you actually make the decision to break away from university?

NORTON: What got me out of there was a thing called a J-1 Visa, which is a special – I don’t know if they still offer them – it was a special arrangement with the American government and Ireland, where you could get a work permit to go and work in America as a student. So I got one of those. Told my mother and father that I was just going away for the summer – “I’ll be back!” – but of course I knew. That was my soft way of breaking it to my family that I wasn’t coming back. Of course it was terrible when I came back, finally, a year later. They’d just assumed I was going to university, whereas in my head for over a year I’d known I was never going back to university. So it was a shock.

PLUME: There was a bit of a communication breakdown there, wasn’t there?

NORTON: Yes, well, I always think it’s best to tell your parents about things after they’ve happened.

PLUME: How would they have reacted if you had told them prior to it happening?

NORTON: They’d have been livid. You know, this thing was costing them a fortune … I hadn’t done well enough on my exams to get a grant or anything. So they’re having to fund this fiasco of university education. They’d have been livid.

PLUME: But I guess going to the US at the time you did, no matter how bad it would have been, it wouldn’t have been as bad as you’d been living at university.

NORTON: Oh, absolutely. America was fantastic. When I think about it – my parents – how they let me go, I do not know. I headed off to America with 200 pounds. Now, how had I worked it out? I’d worked it out that I could live on 50 pounds a week – this was in 1983, and believe me, even then you couldn’t live on 50 pounds a week. But that’s what I told my parents. They went, “Okay.” I know the other thing is I was 20, but that’s an Irish 20. In the real world that makes you about 13.

PLUME: So you were like a kid on holiday.

NORTON: I was really lucky that nothing bad happened to me at that time. I was so ill-equipped.

PLUME: And you went to San Francisco?

NORTON: Yeah. I think I was aiming to get to LA, but I had one of those rambler bus tickets. Is there one called Trailways?

PLUME: Yes.

NORTON: Had a rambler ticket for Trailways. The ticket, it was one of those seven day ones, and it ran out in San Francisco, so that’s where I ended up.

PLUME: Luckily?

NORTON: Oh, absolutely. I loved it. I kind of – if I’d really wanted to go to LA, I could have spent a bit more on the tickets and gone, but I couldn’t drive a car. Everyone said, “Oh you’re stupid to go to LA if you can’t drive a car, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” So, in the end, it was a much better place, and I bumped into some people who gave me loads of addresses of people in San Francisco – where if I went to LA, I knew, like, one person.

Continued below…

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