Say you host a late-night talk show and you have Paul McCartney as a guest. He’s game for anything. When Jimmy Fallon had this opportunity, in the fall of 2018, the “Tonight Show” came up with a benign prank. Tour groups at 30 Rockefeller Plaza were herded into an elevator. When the elevator doors opened, they saw a tableau of Fallon and McCartney playing Ping-Pong, or sitting in armchairs, smoking pipes. Each time, a camera would catch the elevator full of tourists gasping and screaming like teen-agers in 1964. Then, before they could process what they’d seen, the doors would close. The routine, which has been watched more than four million times on YouTube, is amusing, in the vein of “Candid Camera.” McCartney is used as a sight gag, an animal in a celebrity zoo, with the ordinary folks—themselves on display—gawking from outside the cage.
When James Corden booked McCartney, in June of the same year, he came up with something much more elaborate. CBS’s “The Late Late Show,” which Corden will have hosted for five years this March, was on location in England, where Corden is from, and devised a special edition of “Carpool Karaoke,” the show’s signature feature. In a typical sequence, Corden drives a Range Rover through the streets of Los Angeles with a famous musician in the passenger seat, and a dashboard camera captures the two of them singing along to the guest’s hits. “Carpool Karaoke” videos are exuberant and almost guaranteed to go viral. There’s a democratizing effect to seeing celebrities experience their music the way the average commuter does—belting along to the AM radio, the real world gliding by. Corden acts as a kind of Everyfan, asking his guests softball questions and cajoling them into making wacky pit stops. When Cardi B did “Carpool Karaoke,” she and Corden drove to a senior center, and she rapped for a geriatric dance class.
The McCartney edition was filmed in Liverpool. It begins with Corden and McCartney singing along to “Drive My Car,” Corden honking the horn in time with each “Beep beep, beep beep, yeah!” On Penny Lane, they break into “Penny Lane.” McCartney points out personal landmarks through the window: “I used to be in the choir at that church.” They stop at the barbershop that inspired the first verse of “Penny Lane,” where all the people that come and go stop and say hello. Crowds gather. “Last time I was around here, certainly nobody was noticing me at all,” McCartney says on the street.
Back in the car, he tells Corden a story: during a stressful period in the late sixties, his mother, who had died years before, appeared to him in a dream and comforted him by saying, “Let it be.” He and Corden harmonize on the anthem that resulted. Corden, choked up, recalls the first time that he heard the song, when his father and grandfather, both musicians, played it for him. “If my granddad was here right now, he’d get an absolute kick out of this,” Corden says. McCartney, eyes fixed on the road, replies, “He is.”
They pull up to 20 Forthlin Road, the house McCartney lived in during his teens, now a National Trust site. He shows Corden the room where he and John Lennon finished writing “She Loves You.” He plays “When I’m Sixty-Four” on an old upright piano. More crowds have gathered outside, and McCartney jauntily shakes hands on the way back to the car. They drive to a pub on Hope Street where McCartney played when he was young. Corden goes in alone and stands behind the bar; he encourages a woman to choose a song on the jukebox. Suddenly, a curtain opens, and there’s McCartney and a four-piece band, playing “A Hard Day’s Night.” The people in the pub, young and old alike, freak out at the sight of the home-town hero. McCartney performs “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Then Corden joins him for a duet of “Hey Jude.” The surprise set is euphoric and inclusive: part block party, part time machine. Even McCartney seems transported. The video, which is twenty-three minutes long, has been watched on YouTube nearly fifty million times.
Corden, who is forty-one, sees his show as a delivery system for happiness. Unlike his more nihilistic contemporaries in British comedy—Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci—he believes that entertainers have a responsibility to combat cynicism and spread joy. “The Late Late Show” airs at twelve-thirty-five in the morning, and, although it slightly trails NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in live ratings, it produces a steady supply of viral videos. “Carpool Karaoke” has attracted such stars as Lady Gaga, Adele, Elton John, Barbra Streisand, and Michelle Obama, who, as First Lady, took a spin around the White House grounds while singing “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” The show does not view its target audience as insomniacs and stoned college students. “The policy that we came in with was: this show launches at twelve-thirty,” Ben Winston, an executive producer, told me. “Our competition isn’t whatever else is on at twelve-thirty-seven. It’s what’s on the next morning at breakfast. It’s what’s on your computer at work.” Within fourteen months of the show’s première, its YouTube channel had exceeded a billion views.
Corden was an unlikely choice for the job (aside from being white and male, as most late-night hosts still are). He made his name in British television as a co-creator and star of the BBC sitcom “Gavin & Stacey,” but was practically unknown in America when he took over the time slot from Craig Ferguson, in 2015; David Letterman called him “that chubby guy.” His American breakthrough occurred in the 2012 Broadway production of “One Man, Two Guvnors,” an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s commedia-dell’arte classic “The Servant of Two Masters”—not a typical path to Hollywood. Whereas most late-night hosts are offspring of “Saturday Night Live” (Fallon, Meyers, Conan O’Brien) or “The Daily Show” (Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj), Corden is more aligned with the English music hall, and his comedic influences include such British duos as Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies. Before delivering the opening monologues on “The Late Late Show,” he had never performed standup comedy.
But, in the past five years, Corden has lodged himself in the American pop-culture landscape, both on late-night television and as a movie actor, casting himself as a happy-go-lucky showman who can liven up any party. (Not incidentally, his bouncy enthusiasm is a trait that Brits tend to think of as American.) The pop singer Harry Styles, who has vacationed with Corden in Jamaica and Mexico, told me, “He’s one of those guys who just wants everyone to have a good time.” Winston, who met Corden twenty years ago, on the set of the British series “Teachers,” recalled a cast-and-crew evening out in Bristol, at “the most depressing pub you could ever imagine.” It was karaoke night, and, without warning, Corden got up and sang Robbie Williams’s “Let Me Entertain You.” “The entire pub—people who knew him, people who didn’t know him, random locals, every single person—was up on their tables dancing, singing, joining in.”
People who dislike Corden find his eagerness to entertain more like attention-hogging, his chumminess more like smarm. He has a “please like me” air that can grate, especially when it is accompanied by song and dance—and even more so when he is swathed in digital fur, as in the recent film version of “Cats.” “I don’t think I think that much about being liked,” he told me in November, when I visited the Los Angeles set of “The Late Late Show,” though, he acknowledged, “sometimes I can look like a golden retriever.” He was sitting in his office, beneath a framed letter from Michelle Obama (“Thanks for the best car ride I’ve had in years”), wearing a Gucci tiger sweater and a thin beard, to minimize his jowls. A votive candle burned on his desk, incongruous in the California sunlight. “I’m a big candle man,” he explained. (Also, Nest Fragrances supplies candles for the show’s guests, and they arrive by the boxload.)
I confessed to Corden that I had teared up when I watched the Liverpool edition of “Carpool Karaoke.” He said that on the morning of the shoot, before setting off, McCartney had told him that he didn’t want to go inside his old house. “He said, ‘I haven’t been there since I left, when I was twenty. I just feel weird about it,’ ” Corden recalled. “I went, ‘Paul, your only job today is to have a great time. So, if there is anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, we’re not going to do it.’ ” But he urged McCartney not to rule it out. They agreed that, when they pulled up to 20 Forthlin Road, McCartney would give him a look if he wanted to leave.
“When we pulled up outside, I thought, Oh, man, I wish we’d devised a code word instead, because what if he’s giving me the look?” They sat in the car, locking eyes. Finally, Corden asked, “Should we go in?” “Yeah,” McCartney said. “Let’s do it.”
The next morning, I met Corden at a dance studio on the Paramount lot. He was learning choreography for “The Prom,” a forthcoming Netflix movie directed by Ryan Murphy, based on the 2018 Broadway musical. Corden and Meryl Streep play clueless Broadway actors who try to boost their likability by descending on a conservative Indiana town to take up the cause of an ostracized lesbian teen. “They’re absolute narcissists,” Corden said, of his and Streep’s characters. “They think the world is Broadway. They think they are the world.”
He and a group of dancers rehearsed “The Acceptance Song,” a “We Are the World”-esque anthem that the limousine-liberal thespians perform after interrupting a monster-truck rally. Midway through, Corden’s character, a onetime Drama Desk Award winner named Barry Glickman, makes a buffoonish grand entrance. One of the dancers, who had been standing in for Corden in previous rehearsals, suggested that he do “a little swirl or something,” à la “West Side Story.” But Corden wasn’t sold—he wanted room to improvise on the day of the shoot. “My worry is we’ll lock into something,” he said.
The track played and Corden listened. “I wonder if he should finish in a stage split—so deeply inappropriate,” he said, eying himself in the mirrored wall. As a physical comedian, he has a nimble gracelessness that recalls Oliver Hardy. “There are not a lot of people who are entertainers, and by that I mean people who can gather people together,” Murphy told me. “That’s what an entertainer does, and I think James is that.” Casey Nicholaw, who directed “The Prom” on Broadway and is an executive producer of the Netflix version, arrived, and Corden proposed that, instead of parodying “West Side Story,” he could freeze into a pretentious modern-dance pose, à la Martha Graham. To demonstrate, he leapt into the arms of two dancers, who spun him around horizontally. “Is that too much?” he asked.
“I love it,” Nicholaw said. But Corden was still noncommittal.
After rehearsal, he drove to the “Late Late Show” offices in his Range Rover. I sat in the passenger seat, half expecting us to break into song. Instead, Corden switched on BBC Radio 1, to catch up on news of the House impeachment hearings. Corden does not use his own car for “Carpool Karaoke,” but he told me that we were following the same route: “We just drive as far as you can in a straight line away from the sun and then turn around and drive back.” Once, he and Adam Levine got pulled over for driving too slowly on a freeway. “Just be careful,” the cop said, when he realized who it was.
On Beverly Boulevard, we drove up to the gates of Television City, where “The Late Late Show” films. Six weeks after the show’s première, Corden said, he went out to lunch and forgot his I.D. The security guard wouldn’t let him back in. “But that’s me!” he said, pointing to a billboard with a giant image of his face. The guy looked up and said, “I don’t see it.” Corden recalled, “I was, like, We’ve been on for six weeks. It was quite the wake-up call.”
Corden had been reluctant to take the late-night job. At the time, he was pitching a single-camera series and was also in talks to star on Broadway in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Les Moonves, the chief executive at CBS (who later resigned, after allegations of sexual misconduct), had seen Corden in “One Man, Two Guvnors.” In a meeting with executives, Corden mentioned that the twelve-thirty slot, which Ferguson was about to give up, had never made any sense to him. “Unless you make a show that will embrace the Internet, it is pointless,” he remembers telling them. “That show should feel like a party.”
He claims to have been completely surprised when they then offered him the show. He declined—the initial offer, he said, was terrible—but reconsidered after CBS came back with more money. Winston, with whom he has a production company, tried to talk him out of it. “I said, ‘I think you’re going to get really frustrated having to be in the same place every night,’ ” Winston told me. But Corden had turned bullish. “He said, ‘Imagine if we had a blank piece of paper every single day, and you could fill that piece of paper with anything that you wanted to, and it would be on the No. 1 network in America.’ ”
Corden abruptly pulled out of “Forum,” closed up his newly renovated London town house, and moved with his family to Los Angeles. Not sure how long they’d be there, he and his wife rented furniture for the first six months. He and a small staff had only thirteen weeks to put the show together, but they decided that Corden’s relative anonymity was a blessing. “We want to be a show that’s dripping in a sort of scrappy ambition,” Corden said. They knew that they needed a recurring feature, along the lines of Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks” or Jay Leno’s “JayWalking.” They remembered a 2011 sketch that Corden had done for the Comic Relief telethon in the U.K., in which Smithy, his character from “Gavin & Stacey,” drives through London with George Michael singing Wham! songs. The segment had been wildly popular, and Corden, still adjusting to Los Angeles traffic culture, hit on the concept of “Carpool Karaoke.”
“I’ve never been so sure that an idea would work,” he said. “But what I didn’t know is that we wouldn’t be able to get anybody to do it.” Everyone the bookers approached declined, until a chance encounter with a publicist from Mariah Carey’s label led to their first big get. More followed: Jennifer Hudson, Justin Bieber. After Stevie Wonder appeared in a segment, one of his greatest-hits albums jumped to the top of the U.K. iTunes charts, turning “Carpool Karaoke” into a promotional bonanza. Publicists started pitching their clients, and musicians whom the show had been chasing, such as Chris Martin, suddenly came around.
Since the 2016 election, late-night hosts have had to reëxamine the role of comedy in a dystopian news cycle that seems funnier than it is. Stephen Colbert, whose show precedes Corden’s—and who, upon starting that job, in 2015, had shed his patented conservative-blowhard character from “The Colbert Report”—found his footing only after Donald Trump won, and he now leads in the ratings. Rather than lean into political satire, Corden has stuck to his strengths: musical numbers, silly games, and high-concept stunts. Whereas “The Daily Show” and its descendants have repositioned comedians as public intellectuals, Corden goes for the antic mood of a variety show. The contrast with Colbert is deliberate. “Nowhere else in television would you be, like, ‘From eight till nine we’re going to have a hospital drama, and then from nine till ten we’re going to have another hospital drama with the same diseases,” he told me. But frivolity in the age of Trump also has its pitfalls. During the 2016 campaign, Fallon was denounced for playfully mussing Trump’s hair when he came on the “Tonight Show” as a guest. Corden encountered a bit of similar backlash after the 2017 Emmy Awards, where he was photographed backstage kissing Sean Spicer on the cheek. He quickly defused the situation in his monologue the next night, joking, “Now, I know you think that’s a picture of me kissing Sean Spicer, but, in the spirit of Sean Spicer: no, it isn’t.”
When Corden addresses politics, it’s often filtered through vaudeville. The day that Trump announced his ban on transgender people in the military, Corden sang a parody of the Nat King Cole standard “L-O-V-E,” retooled as “L-G-B-T.” In less than six hours, the number was written, rehearsed, and staged, with a quartet of top-hatted dancers. Like Jimmy Kimmel, who, in 2017, as lawmakers were debating the repeal of Obamacare, opened his show with an emotional speech about his infant son’s heart problems, Corden is selective in his earnestness. Last September, after Bill Maher ended an episode of his HBO show with an appeal to bring back fat-shaming (“We have gone to this weird place where fat is good”), Corden delivered a pointed eight-minute rebuttal. “I’ve struggled my entire life trying to manage my weight, and I suck at it,” he told the camera, adding, “We’re not all as lucky as Bill Maher, you know? We don’t all have a sense of superiority that burns thirty-five thousand calories a day.”
Corden said that he and his writers had spent three days working on the speech, but held it an extra day, unsatisfied with the tone. “I was, like, We can only do this if it’s funny,” he said. “It can’t be a rant.” They added jokes, including one about fat people being tempted by pies on a windowsill. Maher, normally eager to have the last word, did not respond. “I just think it’s out of touch with actual people,” Corden said, of Maher’s derisive attitude. “You cannot forget what most people’s lives are like. You cannot forget how fucking hard it is. And maybe the only slice of joy in your life is that cheeseburger. And it’s cheap. There are no chubby kids at my son’s school, because it’s a private school on the West Side of L.A.”
Corden was speaking over dinner, his only meal that day. Although he wouldn’t mind losing twenty pounds, he rarely makes an issue of his weight. (Recently, his writers came up with a list of insults of their boss for a roast segment. Corden’s favorite was “You look like someone tried to carve Matt Damon out of butter.”) One of his first jobs, in England, was on the soap opera “Hollyoaks,” playing a college janitor. For a scene set in the character’s bedroom, he was appalled to see that the set designer had decorated the walls with posters of junk food. He refused to film the scene until they were taken down. “I thought that they were just really being nasty about anyone that’s overweight,” he told me. “I remember saying to the guy, ‘I don’t know one person who would take a picture of a hot dog and a burger and stick them on the wall.’ ” I wondered about his character in “Cats,” the gluttonous feline Bustopher Jones, who gorges on garbage—wasn’t he a walking fat joke? “Oh, but he’s revelling in it,” Corden said. “He’s going, ‘I’m the greatest! I’m big and I’m fat and I live the best life! I eat everything! It’s incredible.’ ”
The formula for American late-night shows has stayed remarkably consistent for six decades. In 1954, Steve Allen began hosting a ninety-minute show on NBC called “Tonight Starring Steve Allen,” which became the “Tonight Show.” Although his tenure was short, it brought about such lasting innovations as the desk, the couch, and the monologue. Jack Paar, who took over in 1957, was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and imported his skill for celebrity banter. Johnny Carson took the reins in 1962 and didn’t let go for thirty years. He didn’t reinvent the “Tonight Show” so much as build it into a cornerstone of American culture, a monolith even in fractious times. In the late seventies, he pulled in more than seventeen million viewers a night.
Carson’s Pax Romana gave way, in the early nineties, to a Cold War of Leno versus Letterman. They retained the desk, the couch, the monologue, and the celebrity chitchat, but they had sharply contrasting styles: Leno was county-fair broad and inoffensive, while Letterman was bone-dry and ironic. Leno’s not-quite-departure, in 2009, kicked off another succession drama. Conan O’Brien got the “Tonight Show,” but Leno stuck around, Pope Benedict-style, in the ten-o’clock slot. The resulting skirmish ended with O’Brien’s premature exit (he’s now on TBS) and Leno’s return to the “Tonight Show,” until he finally ceded it to Fallon, in 2014. At CBS, Letterman’s handoff to Colbert was relatively frictionless, but by then late-night television was fragmenting into cable and online platforms, all competing for smaller slices of the pie. “The ratings have gone totally to shit,” one late-night producer told me. “You’re fighting over such tiny pieces of the audience that it’s pretty irrelevant.”
Corden has tweaked the formula ever so slightly. Instead of interviewing guests one by one, bumping them down the couch as the show unfolds, he brings them out together, for more of a dinner-party feeling, a format he borrowed from British chat-show hosts such as Graham Norton. The set, dotted with lampshades, resembles a homey cabaret. A few rows of audience seats are placed in front of the cameras, for extra intimacy; Corden told me that he wanted the atmosphere of a “cozy playground.”
One Thursday in November, Corden arrived at the studio at 11 A.M., for Episode No. 702. The news had already thrown him a curveball: two teen-agers had been killed that morning in a school shooting in Santa Clarita. That evening’s show was supposed to include a game called Flinch, in which celebrities are positioned behind a pane of glass and try to stand still as a cannon fires fruits and vegetables at them. Corden and his executive producers, Winston and Rob Crabbe, had decided to cancel it. “Not that it involves a gun in any way, but still it felt insensitive,” Corden told me in his office. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do.” They quickly subbed in a game called Emoji News, in which audience members have to guess topical headlines spelled out in emojis.
At noon, two segment producers came in to prep Corden on that evening’s guests: the weathered heartthrob Don Johnson and the millennial Indian-Canadian YouTube star Lilly Singh, who also hosts a 1:35 a.m. show on NBC. The producers, who had conducted preliminary interviews, ran through a series of questions and the tidy anecdotes they would elicit. “Don, big month coming up,” Corden read from a packet. “You turn seventy. You look sensational. What’s the secret?”
“Cocaine!” a producer joked. The other producer said, “Um, he no longer eats carbs, sugars, or bread.”
Winston interrupted the meeting to announce that Rob Gronkowski, the former tight end for the New England Patriots, known as Gronk, would be in the audience. “Feel free to call him out or surprise him on air,” he said.
“Emoji News!” someone said. “He can be one of the contestants.”
Next, a gaggle of monologue writers filed in. The “mono,” as the British staffers called it, had already been whittled down from about a hundred jokes to seventeen, covering political headlines (Nancy Pelosi calling the impeachment hearings “prayerful”) and news of the weird (a man finding a half-smoked joint in his Popeyes chicken sandwich). Corden read through the script silently, jotting down notes, as the writers flipped the pages along with him. The Pelosi bit called for a mockup of her doing a keg stand, in contrast to her professed prayerfulness. The joke had been held over from the previous day, when Corden had asked his staff, “What’s a keg stand?” Other American concepts that have needed explaining include the electoral college and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
At three o’clock, Corden walked down a hallway to the set, for rehearsal. Onstage, he stood on his mark—a sticker for West Ham United, his Premier League football club—and ran through the monologue. Afterward, the writers huddled around his desk. Corden tapped his pen, frowning. “I didn’t enjoy a lot of this,” he said, more uncomfortable than annoyed. “That’s my overwhelming feeling.” Winston suggested that a joke about Pelosi’s accusing the President of bribery (“He offered her ten thousand dollars to take it back”) needed a better setup.
“And then I thought this photo of the keg stand is not good,” Corden continued. Winston agreed—besides, they had made a similar joke about Pelosi on a previous episode. The bit was scrapped.
“Now, what about the chicken sandwich?” Winston asked.
“I hated that one,” Corden said.
“So why don’t we lose that chicken story?” Winston said. They kept another drugs-in-strange-places anecdote, about a group of wild boars that had got into a stash of cocaine in Italy. (The graphics team had whipped up an image of a boar in a “Miami Vice” suit.) The writers, undaunted, returned to their stations. “I’m going to have a drink tonight,” Corden said. “Get real fucking loose!”
“God help us,” Winston muttered.
Back in his office, Corden and his staff planned upcoming sketches, including a “Masked Singer” parody with Josh Gad and Adam Lambert. At four-twenty, he changed into his suit and sat in a dressing room, where a stylist applied hair spray. The writers gathered around in a horseshoe, and Corden read the revised monologue. Seeming pleased, he asked the stylist to spritz all the writers with Japanese seawater. Before he got up, Crabbe handed him a sheet of paper and said, “There’s something we’d like to do in Act 6 from the desk.” It was a heartfelt statement about the Santa Clarita shooting, including a dig at “politicians without the moral courage to address gun laws.” Crabbe and Winston had distilled it from discussions they’d had with Corden throughout the day. Corden nodded and handed it back.
In the greenroom, outfitted with a Foosball table and a wall of prizes (including a gold YouTube Creator Award, for exceeding a million subscribers), Corden greeted Johnson, Singh, and the musical guest, the band Sleater-Kinney. Reggie Watts, his bandleader, had not yet arrived; he usually strolls in within ten minutes of showtime. While a warmup guy revved the crowd, Corden stood backstage and reviewed the monologue one last time, and the stylist brushed his lapel. Gronk appeared—all six and a half feet of him—and gave Corden an excited bro handshake. Then, at five o’clock, Corden walked onstage.
The show went smoothly. The Pelosi jokes landed, including a new one about how “Prayerful” sounds like the third track on a Kanye West album. Gronk interpreted an emoji headline about a Malaysian man who had got his penis stuck in a drainpipe. Don Johnson told a story about meeting Mick Jagger at Live Aid. Finally, the lights dimmed, and Corden delivered his Santa Clarita speech to a hushed audience. Back in his office, as he changed into sneakers, I noted that he had just segued from impeachment jokes to a penis emoji headline to a sombre acknowledgment of a school shooting.
“And that’s just Thursday,” Corden said nonchalantly. “What a life, eh?”
Corden grew up just outside High Wycombe, England, which he describes as “a sort of shit bit between London and Oxford.” (Its main attraction is a collection of Windsor chairs.) One evening in December, his father, Malcolm, picked me up at the train station there. A sweet, cue-ball-headed man, he recently retired as a Christian-book salesman, but he still plays clarinet in a Royal Air Force Voluntary Band; that afternoon, he’d performed at a veterans’ home. His own father, Kim Corden, was a big-band leader. Kimberley, Malcolm explained, is a family name—his grandfather was christened just after the British victory in the Siege of Kimberley, during the Second Boer War, in 1900—and extends to his son, James Kimberley Corden.
In Hazlemere, the suburb that the family has lived in since James was six, Malcolm drove me past a supermarket where his son, as a teen-age employee, “tried to purloin some of the goods.” We pulled into the Cordens’ driveway, and Malcolm took his clarinet and music stand from the trunk. In the house, his wife, Margaret, a retired social worker, was resting in an armchair. “Marg’s just had a new left knee,” Malcolm explained. The cream-colored living room was adorned with a small Christmas tree and a miniature manger scene. Malcolm brought me a cup of tea with chocolate-ginger biscuits and mince pie.
Margaret was raised as a member of the Salvation Army, which Malcolm joined when they met. James, born in 1978, was the second of three children, and the church was central to his early life. “On Sundays, everyone you know puts on a uniform, marches through the town, and sings ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ ” Corden recalled. He later grew disillusioned: “The entire church that I went to, from what I can realize now, was full of some of the least Christian people I’ve ever come across in my life.” His parents have since left for the Church of England, despite Margaret’s rank, in the Army, of Young People’s Sergeant-Major.
As a child, Corden was “strong-willed” and “very mischievous,” his mother told me. At his younger sister’s christening, when he was four, he pulled faces while standing at the altar. “I remember turning around and looking back through my legs, and people giggling,” Corden said. “And then going back and sitting down and staring at the back of the person in front of me, thinking, Well, this is boring. Why are we all down here? We should be up there! That was it, really. Then it was just a quest to perform in any way, anywhere I could.”
His parents struggled with money—“Crumbs, we didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together!” Malcolm said—but they enrolled him in an after-school drama program. Malcolm dutifully drove him to professional auditions, but his son, who became chubby in adolescence, was never cast. After one unsuccessful audition, for “The Sound of Music,” Malcolm gently told Corden that he could give up auditioning if he wanted. “I can still hear him now in the car, as we were driving out on the Westway out of London,” Malcolm recalled. “He said, ‘Dad, I can’t. It’s what I’ve got to do.’ ”
When Corden was twelve, the Royal Air Force unexpectedly summoned Malcolm to Bahrain in the first Gulf War, as an auxiliary medic. Corden was distraught. “I just couldn’t fathom it, because my dad was a saxophone player in the R.A.F.,” he said. “He used to play big-band jazz on the QE2, and suddenly he was in army camouflage gear.” Malcolm called home every weekend, but the sound of his voice reduced Corden to tears. “I couldn’t talk to him when he was away. My sisters could.” His father returned after four months, having faced nothing more dangerous than practicing injections on an orange.
At school, Corden became a bawdy class clown. “As soon as I got big, I just thought, Well, I’ll be the biggest target in the room. I’ll be the loudest voice. I will have so much confidence that it will almost be unnerving,” he said. As a teen-ager, he was obsessed with the boy band Take That and formed a series of knockoff groups, with names like Insatiable and Twice Shy (“so we could call our album ‘Once Bitten’ ”). Determined to be an actor, he blew off school, except for drama and English; his last two years, he rarely brought pens to class. When a career counsellor advised him to have a backup plan, he pointed to classmates who were planning to study leisure and tourism and asked, “What are they falling back on?”
At seventeen, he was finally cast in a West End musical, “Martin Guerre,” by the writers of “Les Misérables.” His one line was “Roast the meats!” The show was an “abject disaster,” he said. After a few months, he was offered a spot on the barricade in “Les Mis,” but he remembers thinking, “I’m going to get stuck in the company of big musicals, and that’s not the plan.” Instead, he took a job at a pizza restaurant. Television gigs came, including one on “Boyz Unlimited,” a short-lived series about a fictitious boy band, and a few episodes of “Hollyoaks,” the soap opera. When the show offered him seventy thousand pounds a year to stay—more than anyone in his family had ever earned—he agonized. His father advised him not to accept the offer, since he clearly didn’t want to do it. “I swear to God, if I had done that show I’d have been there for five years, and I’d probably be on ‘Dancing with the Stars’ right now,” Corden said.
In 2000, he was cast on “Fat Friends,” an ITV show about a slimming club, filmed in Leeds. One weekend, his girlfriend, Shelley, invited him to a wedding in Barry, a resort town in South Wales. At the party, he overheard two middle-aged men comparing themselves to cars. “I’m not a Porsche,” one man argued, in a deep Welsh accent. “Of course, I’d love to be an Audi, but I’m not. I’m a Mondeo, and that’s fine.” Corden burst out laughing. As he watched the two families (one Welsh, one English) on the dance floor, he thought about how weddings bring together not just two people but their separate worlds: “I just felt like I was watching all of life happen.”
Back in Leeds, he told a Welsh co-star named Ruth Jones about what he’d seen. “He said, ‘It would be lovely to write something about a wedding where nothing really happens,’ ” Jones told me. At their hotel bar, they riffed on the idea as strangers came and went. “We would sort of people-watch and go, ‘Oh, she would be the drunken auntie. He would be the geeky uncle,’ ” she said. “All we came up with was a series of vignettes, really, little bits of conversation.”
They dropped the idea, and Corden auditioned for the National Theatre’s production of “The History Boys,” Alan Bennett’s comedy set at an English grammar school. “The door flew open, and in barrelled this big guy who never stopped talking,” the director, Nicholas Hytner, told me. “He later claimed he was terrified, which I’m sure was true, but he seemed to brim with confidence.” Corden was cast as Boy 3, a role that Bennett promised to make more prominent in order to lure him away from a television offer. The young men in the cast, including Dominic Cooper and Russell Tovey, formed an instant camaraderie, but they were intimidated by the play’s breezy references to Auden and Wittgenstein. Hytner swore the cast to a “vow of stupidity,” meaning that they would all learn together.
The play was a smash, and it travelled to Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and Broadway, where it won the 2006 Tony Award for Best Play. Cooper recalled, “We’d literally roll up to the stage door, throw a tie on, and run onstage, often missing the entrance.” It was all a gas, but Corden was disappointed to see his thinner castmates booking major movie auditions, while he grasped for bit parts. “I was good for playing a bubbly judge in a courtroom, or I’d be the guy who drops off a TV to Hugh Grant in a movie,” Corden told me. He added, “If someone came from another planet and put on the television, you would think that people who are big or overweight don’t have sex. They don’t fall in love. They’re friends of people who fall in love. They’re probably not that bright, but they’re a good time, and they’re not as valuable as people who are really good-looking.”
Realizing that he would need to create his own material, he revisited the wedding idea with Jones, and they wrote up a treatment for a one-hour TV special. A BBC 3 executive told them that it might work better as a series, and they turned it into one, called “Gavin & Stacey.” The title couple—she’s from Barry, he’s from Essex—would be played by skinny, telegenic actors. Corden and Jones cast themselves as the couple’s wacky best friends: Smithy, a beer-swilling handyman, and Nessa, a fabulously trashy arcade attendant. “We were being realistic that neither of us is romantic-lead material,” Jones told me. Yet the two characters shared a raunchy sexual bond and, eventually, a child. In one scene, they flirt over takeout from KFC:
“Gavin & Stacey” premièred in May, 2007, with half a million viewers, and ran for three seasons. The last episode, which aired on New Year’s Day, 2010, was watched by ten million people, a sixth of the British population. Its regional humor may be lost on Americans, but the show has the soothing familiarity of Sunday dinner at the in-laws’, and it made Corden a household name. Nevertheless, he felt lost. He had broken up with Shelley after nine years and begun a volatile on-and-off relationship with Sheridan Smith, who played Smithy’s sister. Feeling cool for the first time in his life, he’d go out drinking every night. The British tabloids delighted in printing photographs of him stumbling out of pubs. For a time, he lived out of his Mercedes hatchback, crashing with Cooper or drifting among one-night stands. “He thought he was Jack the Lad,” his mother told me.
At the 2008 British Academy Television Awards, Corden won for best comedy performance, and “Gavin & Stacey” received the Audience Award. Accepting the latter, Corden bemoaned the fact that the show hadn’t also been nominated for best comedy. The audience recoiled at his ungraciousness. The British press, which never needs an excuse to go into attack mode, painted him as an arrogant jerk, which, he admits, he was. “I started to behave like a brat that I just don’t think I am,” he told me. “It’s so intoxicating, that first flush of fame. And I think it’s even more intoxicating if you’re not bred for it.” Back in Hazlemere, his parents prayed for him. “You can try and say, ‘Look, James, you’re making a prat of yourself,’ but you can only do so much,” Margaret said.
At the beginning of 2009, Corden and Mathew Horne, the actor who played Gavin, launched a sketch show, “Horne & Corden,” and co-starred in a comedy-horror film called “Lesbian Vampire Killers.” Both were flops. Corden blames his dwindling work ethic for the failure of “Horne & Corden,” which inspired the Sun to call him “that fat git, with a laugh like a neutered howler monkey.” The entire country seemed to delight in his humbling. “Because of the characters he plays, he’s like a man of the people, so people feel like they’re his mates,” Cooper reasoned. “So he gets horrible things written about him compared to anyone else I know, and if he doesn’t respond the way Smithy would, for example, then they immediately turn on him.”
At one point, Rob Brydon, who played Stacey’s lovable Uncle Bryn, confronted Corden over lunch. “I said, ‘Look, this is a bit awkward to say, but I’m just hearing these things about you, and you’ve got to know that the way you behave has an effect on people,’ ” Brydon recalled. Corden’s sisters also intervened, according to his mother: “They would come in and say to James, ‘Don’t be a dickhead.’ ” Chastened, Corden began seeing a therapist. At his first session, he said, “I used to be a better person than this.” He tried to figure out why he felt so empty. He began forcing himself to stay home at night and eat TV dinners. “The absolute biggest thing I had to learn to do,” he said, “was just stay in and be comfortable on my own.”
On the morning of December 23rd, Corden stepped out of a car in London and headed into a BBC building. A paparazzo snapped his picture and wished him a happy Christmas. “And you,” Corden replied merrily. “See you, mate!”
Inside, he greeted the cast of “Gavin & Stacey,” with whom he had filmed a reunion special after a decade-long hiatus, to air on Christmas Day. It would be comforting fare for a Britain riven by politics; in the home-for-the-holidays plot, Brexit and Boris Johnson were conspicuously absent. As the cast waited to do a radio interview, Corden hummed “Sleigh Ride” and chatted with Brydon by the coffee machine. The day before, he had taken his nine-year-old son, Max McCartney Kimberley Corden, to a soccer match, then strolled around shops in London, listening to holiday music. “Have you heard the Kacey Musgraves song ‘Christmas Makes Me Cry’?” he asked Brydon.“I’m fifty-four,” Brydon deadpanned.
The actors filed into a studio, where Corden and Jones sat side by side. “James Corden, he’s gone off to Hollywood—has he changed?” the host asked. There was an uncertain pause, and then everyone laughed.
“I think that silence was filled with love,” Jones said.
After 2009, Corden’s public image didn’t rebound overnight. His bad reputation was compounded by another awards-show incident, in which he sparred onstage with Patrick Stewart. (They’ve since reconciled.) In 2011, a Guardian profile summed up the “consensus” view: that Corden was “arrogant and loud, his humour laddish and dated, that he has an unappealing, thespy air of entitlement.” Corden and Cooper had moved into a sparsely furnished bachelor pad in Primrose Hill, where they subsisted on junk food. Cooper recalled, “I remember him coming home one night, and I was just eating baked beans with a ladle out of the can.” One evening, Cooper lured him out to a Bulgari charity event and introduced him to a friend, Julia Carey, who worked for Save the Children. Corden was thrilled to learn that she had never watched “Gavin & Stacey.” Now his wife of eight years, she still hasn’t watched an episode.
Although his personal life was becoming more stable, it was unclear how much patience England had left for Corden. He continued to make appearances as Smithy, his gregarious alter ego, including in the George Michael sketch that spawned “Carpool Karaoke.” A boost finally came from Nicholas Hytner, at the National Theatre, who devised “One Man, Two Guvnors” as a vehicle for Corden. “So he went to a few parties, got hammered a couple of times, shot his mouth off, and made a terrible movie,” Hytner told me. “Serial killers get an easier ride than he did for ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers.’ But he was still the guy who made ‘Gavin & Stacey,’ and I needed something purely enjoyable for a season that was otherwise wall-to-wall Ibsen and Jacobean tragedy.”
“One Man, Two Guvnors,” which reset Goldoni’s 1746 comedy in nineteen-sixties Brighton, provided Corden with a slapstick tour de force. Within moments of his entrance, he throws a peanut in the air, tumbles backward on an armchair, leaps up, and reveals the peanut on his tongue, proclaiming, “I got it!” Later, after his character becomes frazzled by his split allegiances to his two bosses, he gets into a one-man schizoid brawl—slapping, sucker punching, and choking himself, before finally slamming his face with a garbage-can lid. There was no way not to root for him. The Telegraph called the show “absolute bliss.” A year later, it went to Broadway, where Corden had none of the baggage that weighed him down in England. In the Times, Ben Brantley called him “a comic star in Britain who seems poised to become one here in short order.” For Corden, it was a new lease on comedy, a chance for a do-over. “My God, I’ve never been so aware of the great time I’m having as I was when I was doing that show,” he told me. One night, he pulled Donald Trump onstage from the audience, to assist with a heavy trunk. “I fired him,” Corden recalled proudly. “At one point, I spanked him.”
Corden was recounting the incident at his house in London’s Belsize Park, as he packed for a Christmas vacation with his wife and three children. That morning, at the BBC interview, he had inadvertently made headlines when he revealed that he had not yet seen “Cats” and joked, “I’ve heard it’s terrible.” The film had been out for three days and was being ridiculed as an epic fiasco—a new generation’s “Xanadu.” “I can’t imagine I’ll see it,” Corden told me, shoving a hoodie into a suitcase. But he was good-humored. “It’s important to say I had the best time making it,” he added. “At some point, you have to go, How am I going to judge my own experience? Am I only going to have enjoyed something if it was successful?”
Last summer, Corden extended his contract at “The Late Late Show” for two more years, but he will not stay forever. He wants his children to know London better, and he dreams of reprising “One Man, Two Guvnors.” At his L.A. office one afternoon, he had shown me a new book of Garry Shandling’s diaries, edited by Judd Apatow. On one page, from 1990, Shandling, whose hit sitcom “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” had not brought him contentment, had scrawled a note to himself: “Don’t identify yourself with your career. You are you. You are not your job. Also, this summer, work on your stand-up.”
“It’s weird, innit?” Corden said, looking up. “That’s why the jury’s out for me on how healthy it is to do these shows for that long. I’m not sure it’s healthy to have a standing ovation every day.” ♦
