It is a brave soul who questions Harvey Weinstein's judgement. But James Corden claims that when the redoubtable Hollywood mogul asked him to star in a film about Paul Potts – the timid, opera-singing Carphone Warehouse salesman who became the first winner of Simon Cowell's Britain's Got Talent – he did just that.
“I think I felt the same as everybody else did when they heard the film was being made,” Corden tells me. “You go: ‘Really? Are you sure? This sounds like a terrible idea.’ That’s genuinely what I said.”
He nonetheless met the director David Frankel, who explained that the film wouldn’t just be about Potts’s BGT victory, but the obstacles that he overcame – years of confidence-sapping bullying, illnesses, accidents – to win the nation’s hearts.
No one watching the BGT auditions in 2007 expected the sounds that rose from Potts. Coming before Susan Boyle, he "was the first of those guys where we're sat at home with our dinners on our laps, going: 'Oh, here we go. This will be funny,'" says Corden. Today, his backstory would be exploited by the show. Then, we learnt very little.
“There was a sort of purity about him. He says: ‘By day I sell mobile phones. But my real dream is to be an opera singer.’ And there is a lovely moment where he says: ‘Confidence has never come easy to me,’ and that was all you got.”
Himself bullied growing up, Corden identified with Potts's lack of confidence, but also the feeling of being underestimated. During work on the stage production of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, he says he would see Dominic Cooper come in with a pile of scripts to read while he would have to audition for small walk-on parts in uncool movies. This was tough for someone who'd always thought that he would "get the chance to be front and centre". Corden believed that he had more to offer than people were giving him credit for and proved it by co-writing and appearing in the hit comedy series Gavin & Stacey.
“I do think that is a similar thing, in a sense, to Paul going: ‘Hang on, I can do all this and everyone is telling me that I shouldn’t and I should be happy with what I’ve got,’” he says.
Corden recently had another TV hit with the comedy-thriller series The Wrong Mans, co-written with Mathew Baynton, and will soon be seen in an all-star adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. Acting is what he's always wanted to do. However, he can't explain why.
"It's so silly," he says, before recounting shooting an earthquake scene with Emily Blunt for Into the Woods a few days earlier. "We were just looking at each other, thinking: 'Look at what we're doing with our lives. We're dressed up and we're falling over when someone shouts "Boom!"' So I don't really know where the desire comes from. But I'm aware what an odd thing it is."
• One Chance is out in UAE cinemas today
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