James Norton has disclosed that he was bullied ‘pretty badly’ at school, calling those years as ‘difficult.’
The 37-year-old, who characterised his boyhood as “idyllic,” grew up on the outskirts of North Yorkshire’s Howardian Hills before attending a monastic boarding school in Ampleforth.
After studying at Cambridge and RADA, the actor, who is a frontrunner to replace Daniel Craig as James Bond, rose to prominence in shows such as War & Peace and McMafia.
He is presently playing as psychotic criminal Tommy Lee Royce in Sally Wainwright’s hit BBC drama, Happy Valley, in its third and final season.
The Grantchester actor, who is engaged to fellow actress Imogen Poots, reflected on his formative years on the podcast Comfort Eating, presented by journalist Grace Dent.
‘My school years were complicated, to be honest,’ he remembered of his time as a student. “I didn’t have the greatest time.”
‘I was quite badly bullied for five years and I was also at boarding school so I couldn’t leave.’
James continued: ‘I’ve had a great therapist for the last four years, and it’s not from a place of drama.
‘And I’m luckily not suffering from depression or anything like that but it’s been really, really helpful to understanding what [happened to me at school].’

Opening up further about boarding schools, James described them as ‘really weird places’ noting that the UK was the ‘only country who still sends our kids away voluntarily.’
‘You’re stuck with these people, and all these young kids are just deeply, deeply homesick and they’re just lost,’ he added.
‘Some of them, that pain manifests itself in being needy or rebellious or maybe the class clown. But some of them get angry and rather than crying out for their mum they just bully someone.’
In addition to Happy Valley, the actress will appear in A Little Life, a play based on the 2015 novel by American author Hanya Yanagihara.
He recently chatted with Graham Norton about how, despite having type 1 diabetes, he continues to perform on stage.
‘It is three and a half hours long. In the Dutch production, which went from Amsterdam to Edinburgh, and had a little run in New York, that was four hours, but the amazing producers made this only three and a half,’ he began.
‘I have one interval, but the book is 800 pages, so there’s a lot to get through.’
‘For you, you’re diabetic, so is that difficult to be on stage for that length of time?’, chat show host Graham quizzed.
‘The added component is that I don’t leave the stage for a couple of hours and I am a type 1 diabetic, so I have juice, and I can’t bring it up because it’s got branding on it!
‘But I have sweet things which I’ll have to have scattered around the stage just in case I go hypoglycaemic.’
Happy Valley continues on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday at 9pm.