After endless hours on film and TV sets, acting in such acclaimed productions as Sally Wainwright’s BAFTA-winning hit Happy Valley or ITV‘s detective drama Grantchester, James Norton decided he wanted more.
“I started as an actor to realize that there’s a disconnect between the way actors are treated [and] their actual contribution, and I really started to hanker after more creative contribution,” said Norton, speaking at a masterclass at TV festival Series Mania on Tuesday. “As an actor, you have a lot of contribution, but a lot of is kind of nonsense: You’re told where to stand, what to wear, the tone of the thing. All of it is decided for you. I really hankered after a bit more of that creative contribution.”
In 2019, together with veteran producer Katie Kaletsky, formerly of Black Bear, Norton founded Rabbit Track, a London-based production outfit, to craft independent film and TV projects from the ground up. In 2023, Banijay UK, the British division of the global indie giant, took a stake a Rabbit Track, turbo-charging their ambitions. The group’s output so far has been impressive, ranging from the Netflix thriller Rouge Agent, to the eight-episode period epic King & Conqueror, to Playing Nice, an adaptation of the JP Delaney novel.
To date, Norton has starred in all of Rabbit Track’s productions, “but we’re not a vanity project,” insists Norton. “This was never meant to be a company to build stuff for me to be in. It was because I was interested and excited about the prospect of producing.”
Banijay UK’s Executive Chairman Patrick Holland said the company’s decision to buy into Rabbit Track was an investment in Norton and Kaletsky, betting they would be the kind of people “who could attract writers, who could gain traction, who could cut through get that green light.”
While the current market for high-end drama “is undoubtedly bleak,” said Kaletsky, with commission fees declining as prodution costs rise, she sees opportunities in new production models, like that used for King and Conqueror, which sees the BBC and CBS partner to bankroll the show, which was shot in Iceland to beneift from regional tax incentives. The period epic stars Norton alongside Game of Thrones alum Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
Norton and Kaletsky teased one upcoming project, an adaptation of Suzanne Heywood’s bestselling memoir Wavewalker, which will see Norton play a father who takes his family on a trecherous, ten year sailing journey over more than fifty thousand miles, in an effort to retrace the historical voyage of Captain Cook.
“It’s about a young girl who, against the odds, fights for the right to an education and to life, and the struggle between this very charismatic father, who loves his daughter dearly, and the cruelty that he’s putting on her and her brothers,” says Kaletsky, who said she is currently shopping the project to broadcasters.
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