But it comes from an impenetrable confidence and an enormous kind of fatalism – that the world is so dark and life is so lacking in value – until he meets Ryan. I did a lot of work on that: I listened to choral chant music and tried to slow my inner tempo down because I am naturally a more frenetic person. “I’m the opposite: I’m constantly worrying about what people will think of me, but Tommy is so centred. “I gave a very still, quiet, quite soft performance,” James Norton remembers of his audition tape for the role of Tommy Lee Royce. He sees the world as an inherently hostile place: it’s dog eat dog and if he doesn’t hit first, he’ll get hit.” When he’s older, he finds control and he clings to that control. The way I found the soul and the heart of him was to understand that, with most of these people, it comes from trauma and abuse, and he was a victim of that as a child. “Sally and the BBC sent me to criminal psychologists who’d had direct contact with these types of people. So you’re suddenly seeing this humanity, even though he’s a horrible man who does despicable things. I could’ve been something and I wasn’t given the opportunity and I really regret it’. Then in the fifth episode, after he’s found out about his son and he’s been stabbed, potentially fatally, he’s sitting on the floor in the kitchen sobbing, saying, ‘I was dealt a really bad hand. In the first season, he’s a kidnapper, a raping, murdering psychopath. “She also loves to give you a sense of a character and allow you to make assumptions based on tropes and stereotypes and then pull the rug from under your feet. She sees human beings, she sees the matrix. With very few words, Sally somehow manages to capture it every single time. Writers so seldom are actually able to capture dialogue in its truest form, to capture on a bigger scale what it is to be human, but also the essence of a moment between two people. “And she writes how people speak, which sounds obvious, but it’s not. Sally can write Catherine, and make every decision of hers and every line as grounded and embodied as Clare’s (Siobhan Finneran), as Tommy’s, as Ryan’s. “Lots of writers are able to write the protagonist because they feel an affinity for that character. ![]() “Sally’s somehow able to write every character, and not only their decisions but also their dialogue, as if she’s totally embodied that person,” Norton says. “It’s a show about Catherine, who happens to be a police officer,” she’s said, explaining that her influences were Juliet Bravo, a favourite when she was an adolescent, and Nurse Jackie. He meditated on those two opposing things, very quietly, in a very Tommy-like way, while also taking control in prison.” I had two binary things that he’d had been obsessing over: one was his love for his son, Ryan (Rhys Connah), and the other was the hatred for Catherine (Sarah Lancashire). Norton adds, “It was really interesting, working out what Tommy had been doing over those years. ![]() Something has shifted and the manifestation of that is that he looks like Christ.” This time she wanted it to feel like something happened over the years, not as obvious as that Tommy’s found God, but that there is a groundedness to him. ![]() ![]() “She writes stage directions like no one else, very specific and quite funny stage directions. “Sally loves giving Tommy mad haircuts,” the former theology student notes appreciatively of the series’ creator, writer and co-director. The new season finds Tommy serving time in prison, sporting an ugly scar and a surprising hairstyle. The new season of Happy Valley sees Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) serving time in prison and sporting an ugly scar.
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