PLUME: What lead to your decision of which drama school to go to?

NORTON: It was one that let me in.

PLUME: Based on your credits or your application?

NORTON: No, it’s purely vocational, so you just audition.

PLUME: What was your audition?

NORTON: Do you know, I can’t remember. I think I did “All occasions do inform against me,” from Hamlet. But my modern… I might have done a play, some modern play about a hunger strike. It all sounds so unlikely. It was at that stage when I was taking myself very seriously, and thought that that’s what acting was all about. You know, that it was all very worthy and serious. So I know that I was doing very serious pieces.

PLUME: So Hamlet and Pinter.

NORTON: That kind of thing. It wasn’t quite Pinter, but I can’t remember who it was. I think it was a Scottish guy.

PLUME: Did you feel comfortable at that time, doing those type of roles?

NORTON: Well, at that time, God love me, I thought I could do them. That was really the only thing that I learned in drama school, was that I was rubbish at anything serious. Which is a good thing to learn. I mean, that’s really all they can teach you at drama school is what you are bad at.

PLUME: How quickly did you learn that?

NORTON: It took me about two years to learn that – or at least to accept it.

PLUME: Did they tell you that was the case, or did you just have to say, “I’m not really good at this”?

NORTON: It was a bit of both, really. You’re constantly getting feedback from things that you do, and whenever I did do a comedy thing, or whenever I did an improvisation, of course my natural instinct was to make it funny. I used to hate myself after these improvisations. I was like, “God, it was so cheap. It was so easy.” It’s that weird thing where you think that, because you find something easy, it’s not valuable. It’s only when you watch other people being miserably unfunny doing something, you sort of, “Oh, right, they don’t find it easy.”

PLUME: So was it a two year degree, or was it two years in when you made the decision this just wasn’t working?

NORTON: Oh no, it was three years. I finished it. It was all fine, because there’s lots of comedy roles out there … It didn’t make me think, “I don’t want to be an actor,” it just made me think, “I now know the sort of actor I will be, and the sort of things I might be cast in.” And I loved it. I loved the whole three years – I just thought it was great. It was such an indulgent time… you just go to work every day and think about yourself.

PLUME: And this would be the late ’80s?

NORTON: Yeah. I left in ’88 or ’89.

PLUME: Now, did it prepare you in any way for a career outside the university?

NORTON: It was kind of good. You know, they tell you what you need to know – it’s just you don’t believe them until you are out of the school. So, you know, they tell you, “Look, you won’t be getting work, you’ll have long periods of unemployment, and this is what you need to do to get a job …” and you’re kind of going, “Yes, yes, yes.” But of course, in your heart of hearts, you’re thinking, “But the minute I leave these doors, I’ll be snapped up.”

PLUME: It’s going to rain equity cards…

NORTON: Yes… they will recognize my genius, and it’ll all be marvelous. So that was hard, coming out and realizing, “Oh God, it is really like that.” And of course, the other thing was when you did get jobs, they were rubbish jobs. You know, you had five lines or whatever. You realized that, when you were at drama school, you weren’t training to be an actor at all – you were training to be a star. It was very disillusioning. I found that, actually, the job of being an actor, I didn’t enjoy. You know, I loved drama school, I liked all the indulgency side of it, I liked all the attention side of it – but the actual humdrum, no one could care less about you, small parts, bit of actor, I didn’t really like. The trouble of being in actor is it is a job, and it doesn’t actually feed the show business bit of you, that you actually thought would be fed. Some people, they’re fine. Actually, they wanted to be actors. They didn’t want to be stars. But I suppose I just wanted to be a big show-off.

PLUME: How do you go about doing that? What was the next step?

NORTON: The next step was starting to write sort of comedy monologues for myself. I put together a show, and some friends of mine owned a pub …

PLUME: Was this the pub that you were working at?

NORTON: Yeah, I was working there as well, and then at a gallery space upstairs. I sort of said, “Ooh, can I put on a show up there?” They said, “Yes.” I kind of thought, “That’s all right, I’ll never have to do it.” But then they’d started telling people I was doing the show, so everyone kept saying, “Oh, I hear you’re doing a show.” So it was really good, because it kind of forced me to do it. “I have to write the thing, I have to do it.”

PLUME: What was your show like at that time?

NORTON: It was called Mother Theresa of Calcutta’s Grand Farewell Tour…

PLUME: Ten years too early.

NORTON: I know. It was me dressed up as Mother Theresa, in sort of Irish linen tea towels, and sort of doing Mother Theresa like an Irish housewife.

PLUME: Well, at least it was high concept.

NORTON: It was very high concept. Actually, it’s funny, because now I look back – I still think some of that was some of the funniest things I’ve ever done. But, it was very, very, very, very niche. I think, if you weren’t Catholic or Irish, it would be very, very hard to understand.

PLUME: Was it something you could have gotten away with in Ireland?

NORTON: Yes. Ireland, weirdly, is quite happy to laugh at religion. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Father Ted… a huge hit in Ireland. They absolutely adore Father Ted. No Irish production company or television station would commission it, but the Irish people just adored it. I think, because religion is such a part of the landscape there – it’s so kind of interwoven into everything – people are just relaxed about it. So it’s sort of in the same way that, you know, gay people can make jokes about gay people, black people can make jokes about black people – Irish people can do all the Catholic religious jokes you want.

PLUME: Was it well received when you did those shows in the bar space?

NORTON: Yeah, it did very well, and I got invited to the Edinburgh Festival. Then my life after than became a sort of a round of arts festivals, really. Where I was still working in restaurants, but I did Mother Theresa for a couple years, then I moved on, then wrote an equally tasteless thing called The Karen Carpenter Bar and Grille. That had different characters in it – that wasn’t just one character, it was different monologues. Then I stopped with characters, and just started doing monologues… stories and things. Finally – you know I wasn’t making much money, because I was just doing these art festivals, which there are only about 4, 5 a year – finally somebody said, “Look you idiot, what you’re doing is stand-up. Go do stand-up, you’ll make some money.” So that’s what I did. I sort of took to it like a duck to water. I really enjoyed doing the stand-up. I didn’t expect – I always said I wouldn’t do stand-up, because I thought I would hate it, but in fact I loved it. I loved the kind of control of it, I loved how self-contained it was, that you didn’t rely on anyone, it was just you – not quite fighting for your life, but you lived and died by yourself.

PLUME: And the spotlight never moved off of you.

NORTON: Exactly that.

Continued below…

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