Explanation, please. In the new issue of Rolling Stone, James Corden says he wants to know why Hollywood tends to portray only certain kinds of protagonists and heroines falling in love — specifically, those who are fit and good looking.
“I could never understand when I watch romantic comedies the notion that for some reason unattractive or heavy people don’t fall in love,” the Late Late Show host told the magazine. “If they do, it’s in some odd, kooky, roundabout way — and it’s not. It’s exactly the same. I met my wife; she barely owned a television and worked for Save the Children. We sat down one night and we fell in love and that was it.”
Corden, 38, also opened up about his own struggles with his weight, and how he’s learned to deal with those issues since childhood, primarily tackling them with humor.
“If you’re big at school, you’ve really got two choices,” he said. “You’re going to be a target. If you go to school and you’re me, you go, ‘Right, I’m just going to make myself a bigger target. My confidence, it will terrify them.’ That’s how I felt in school. Inside, you’re terrified. But if you’re a bit funny, if you’re quicker than them, they won’t circle back on you again.”
The former Broadway star, who is perhaps best known for his YouTube-friendly “Carpool Karaoke” segment on his late-night show, got his start playing token big boy roles on the small screen. One of his first big breaks was acting in British director Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing, a character that Rolling Stone characterized as a “violent, depressed, overweight bully.”
On the BBC drama Fat Friends, Corden played the opposite role, this time as a teen “mercilessly ridiculed and beaten up for being obese,” according to the magazine.
Now, however, his “Carpool Karaoke” series has allowed him to be himself and to sing with everyone from Stevie Wonder to Michelle Obama to Adele to, soon, Britney Spears.
“You’re getting in a car,” he said of the process. “The doors close. It’s the two of you. You’re going to put the music on. We’re going to sing our hearts out. What I say to everybody is, ‘This is a safe space. The more you go for it in the songs, like you’re playing Madison Square Garden, the better it is.’ I have to meet them halfway with that. If I am at all timid in those moments, then they’re going to be like, ‘Wait. Hang on. What am I doing?’”
Corden will next be crooning next to pop icon Spears on Thursday, August 25.
