James Norton

The Happy Valley star's dark charisma – and his daring prison escape – proves he could be the most brutally charming 007 since Sean Connery.

And in McMafia, in which he played the bland, hunky son of an oligarch. Privately educated, he went on to Cambridge, where he was a big cheese in the Marlowe Society, followed by a stint in Rada. Norton's well-to-do family includes in its ranks not only MBEs and colonial officers but one Archdeacon, a member of the Royal Engineers and the offspring of a line of Irish landed gentry. In that way, he perhaps harks back to Sean Connery’s original Bond – a brutal charmer who killed without conscience. He's a predator and a deviant but one fuelled by a combination of psychosis and twinkling charm. He grouched his way through his career as Bond only to then demonstrate hidden comic talents as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out. More accurately, is he back in the frame? Norton, the hunky scion of a posh family (his grandfather was a colonial administrator in what was then Tangaikya), has been part of the 007 discourse for some time now. And, in the context of Happy Valley’s brooding ambience and ceiling-to-floor misery, it feels a bit cartoonish and overcooked. “They are thinking about what direction they want to take and they haven’t called me to be part of that conversation.” First, he rid himself of the mangy man-bun with which the character has been saddled during his incarceration for unspeakable crimes (just for the excess hair he deserved six months in solitary). Secondly, he demonstrated action-movie chops in a daring escape from a high-security courthouse as he was about to go on trial.