James Norton, the Happy Valley star who has been heavily linked to James Bond, thinks men should be proactive when confronting the MeToo movement.
Norton told the Radio Times magazine that the “modern man” was living in a time where there was an “attempt to rebalance the patriarchal crimes of the past.”
He argued that some men wrongly think they should be “passive” about misconduct when they should actually step up in a post-MeToo world.
Norton made the comments in an interview to promote Playing Nice, the new ITV series that follows two couples who discover that their toddlers were switched at birth in a hospital mix-up.
“What interested me was the question of what it is to be a modern man, post-MeToo, with the attempt to rebalance the patriarchal crimes of the past,” he said.
“With a lot of men, there’s a misconception that what we should be doing is making space, stepping back and almost becoming passive.”
Norton said this is a realization that dawns on his character Pete, who decides he must confront the bullying and controlling character of Miles (James McArdle). He added: “You have to be proactive and, sometimes, confrontational.”
Norton has done little to dismiss the Bond rumors, but said last year that there was nothing concrete in the speculation. “It’s lots of quite fun and bemusing media coverage,” he told Variety.