Graham Norton recalls Harvey Weinstein forcing himself onto his talk show
The host of The Graham Norton Show now calls Harvey Weinstein his "least favorite guest" after a 2015 appearance on the BBC series
Aux News Graham Norton
Hindsight is 20/20—and that perfect vision has given Graham Norton a perfect answer to the question, “Who is your least favorite guest?” The host of popular BBC talk show The Graham Norton Show has welcomed a wide variety of celebrities in his 15 years on the air, but at a recent event in Dublin to promote his novel Forever Home, he singled out one notorious Hollywood figure as being the absolute worst.
“I often talk around who my least favorite guest was, but now, someone reminded me, I have a really good answer to this now. It’s Harvey Weinstein,” Norton said (according to Joe Magazine, in attendance at the event). “He’s in jail, so he gets the prize for the worst guest ever.”
Weinstein, a convicted sex offender, wasn’t just a default pick based on his legal troubles; Norton offered an anecdote to support the choice: “And actually, it was weird, because he asked for my email. And he emailed me something very nice, a complimentary thing. And then he decided he wanted to be on the show, because he was going to promote something,” he explained. “And it was a show that was fully booked, so I replied saying ‘Oh, thank you so much, but the show is fully booked.’ He emailed back: ‘What if I blah de blah de blah.’ [I replied] ‘No, the show is fully booked, blah de blah.’”
“And he emailed back again, ‘But I think…,’ and I just had to turn to my booker and say ‘Can you please deal with this?’ And at the time, I thought that sort of attitude, that kind of ‘Oh no, I’m going on,’ that is what makes you a very good producer,” Norton said of the infamous bully bullying his way onto the show (a 2015 episode that also featured David Tennant, Olivia Colman, and Jessie J).
“But of course, now that we know what we know, that is what makes him a predator,” Norton concluded. “It was that kind of weird, tunnel-vision thing. And it was sort of chilling in retrospect, because I was just laughing at those emails. But you realize ‘Oh my God, that is an insight into how that man is.’”
67 Comments
Was Weinstein known for craving the spotlight? He wasn’t especially famous until 5 years ago.
Yes.
If you watched the episode in question, you’d realize it wasn’t for lack of trying. He would pop on talk shows all the time, but he’d be so blandly awkward, needy and sweaty that you’d forget him out of pity instead of remembering him for anything else. Like your brain was like “Yeesh, glad that’s over with, let’s put some random facts about brine shrimp or something in here to replace that with”.
Notably, you can see how the other folks on the couch seem to be giving Weinstein a pretty wide berth, and Norton (or at least the editor) is fairly eager to move past his segment.
I wonder if this was meant to be some sort of preemptive PR to make Weinstein seem more palatable to people in the years preceding MeToo. Why would he go on any show to promote his stuff? Isn’t that why he employed handsome leading men, and one of the reasons he employed attractive ladies? So that people would see them on The Graham Norton Show and think “I want to see that.” I barely knew who Weinstein was in 2015, but if I saw him talking about The Hateful Eight or something, it certainly wouldn’t have the same impact as seeing Samuel L Jackson talking about it.
He used to show up on a lot of talk shows especially from about 1999 – 2015. I think he saw himself as being like Scorsese or Spielberg where his name was part of the draw. He made a good amount of late night appearances and a lot on CNN and similar networks. I think this was more his ego than considering what anyone else wanted. Keep in mind it wasn’t the press people talking to the bookers. It was Weinstein talking directly to Norton because he likely felt entitled to be on the show.
Huh, I didn’t know that. I’ve never been a huge fan of talk shows or CNN, though, so it’s not surprising I never saw him. But yeah, I can definitely get how the more someone like him sees their name on things, the more they start to believe in their own press.
In fairness, he had an outrageous amount of success. The period where Miramax was operating at its height he basically had the Oscars sewn up every year. His press was definitely legit press – it would have been a wonderful success story if he didn’t turn out to be an absolute fucking monster.
He was a celebrity for certain from about ‘96 – his brother too. Indisputably a less interesting draw than an actor or director, but a very famous figure nonetheless. But objectively, he was a draw, for better or worse (100% worse of course in hindsight).
I remember watching that episode and the vibe was just intensely bizarre. Olivia Colman and Jessie J are physically leaning away from him the whole time. Norton talks to Weinstein first, and he’s sort of bumbling and unpolished and just doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the couch, before Norton mercifully pivots to the others. It’s bizarre. Weinstein clearly thinks he belongs there, and nobody else really seems to feel that way.
Now am imagining Olivia Colman berating Weinstein like she did David Tennant’s character on Broadchurch
“Harvey, what is the point of you?!”
Miller!
Sounds like you’re describing most of his relationships.
TBH…many of the American guests fit that mould when mixed with the Brits. They seem genuinely ill-at-ease because they don’t get some of the jokes, aren’t sure if they’re being mocked and unable to think on their feet.
Sort of unrelated, but Graham Norton is one of the best talk show hosts on TV, period, and it’s nice to see him get some coverage here… even if it is about his interaction with Weinstein.
His novels are lovely, too.
He was great in Father Ted (he started as an actor )playing Father Noel Furlong
All of a sudden, all comment videos started showing up as just gray rectangles for me.Anybody else?
Don’t want to waste a lot of time if it’s just a new kinja feature.
No, it’s happening to me as well. Haven’t changed browsers or settings or anything like that.Shame. The comments are literally the best thing about this site.
Yuuuup. Seems every few months Kinja breaks in new and interesting ways!
He’s been featured before and we’ve had a great time talking about his show.https://www.avclub.com/in-an-era-of-gimmicks-the-graham-norton-show-keeps-the-1798256529#replieshttps://www.avclub.com/graham-norton-on-larry-flynt-and-the-joy-of-a-simple-ro-1848134614
True, but they’ve been few and far between. Nowhere near the amount of coverage directed at US talk show hosts.
…it’s a U.S. site. They just made the writers move from one U.S. city, to another.
I’m aware, but Norton regularly features (nearly every episode) American guests that get covered here.
Conan and Letterman are my two favorites (and, I know, Carson is great too; my parents had his VHS box set when I was a kid and I watched it a ton growing up) but honestly, Graham and Craig Ferguson are right up on that top tier for me, as well.
I’ve been rewatching a lot of Craigy Ferg, and while there’s definitely stuff that’s aged poorly, it’s still a remarkable refreshing show and so different from all the other late night garbage.I long for a world with more Secretariat and Awkward Pauses, and less Carpool Karaoke.
He was on Adam Buxton’s podcast last week and although I haven’t watched his show in years I was happy to find he’s still a delightful man.
He’s just such a pro. The conversations on his show just feel that bit more natural than any of the big US chat shows. And the fawning over how amazing his guest’s latest project is feels a bit less annoying for some reason.
Alcohol.
He’s just a natural and people seem to genuinely like him. It also feels like he doesn’t heavily focus on the guests latest projects like US talk shows, or try to force the conversation in that general direction. Also, PF77 is probably right about that, booze.
Yes, he is! I once said so on Twitter and he liked and retweeted. I ‘bout died.
he’s the biggest talk show on youtube views so the whole world watches him.
You know, it’s weird. I tend to think there isn’t such thing as a bad person. It’s all down to free will not existing. We’re all just lumps of flesh and synapses and if one person is capable of doing something atrocious, given the right circumstances, everyone is. There but for fortune, etc. I also tend to think we all have good qualities and bad. A person capable of doing horrible things is also capable of profound goodness and vice versa. So it’s always interesting to see someone, particularly someone whose life hasn’t been obviously traumatic, whose choices and way of thinking are so consistently bad. How does a person become so horrifically, dangerously disabled? I mean, I know why, it’s just a wonder to contemplate. “He was horny so he dropped him! Man is evil!”
Hold up, are you saying Harvey Weinstein ISN’T A BAD PERSON? Because that would be the bad take to end all bad takes.
Finish reading the comment?
Cool, now let’s work on Hitler I guess, since we’re just randomly opining on bad people.
”Harvey Weinstein is a lump of flesh,” is an accurate description of his appearance, though.
I sort of get the bad faith argument it seems like is being made here. “Not every bad person is bad all the time, and sometimes they may even do some good stuff.” Sure, okay, I can agree with that. But it doesn’t make them not a bad person. I mean, Hitler really loved dogs. Doesn’t redeem him as a fascist who killed millions of people. Andrew Jackson, through sheer force of will, managed to keep Civil War from breaking out in the United States 30 years earlier than it eventually did. Doesn’t redeem the fact that he personally decided to overrule the Supreme Court and force thousands of Native Americans to relocate halfway across the continent (a trip many didn’t survive) simply so that a bunch of White people could take their land. Terrible people can sometimes accomplish great things. Doesn’t make them not terrible people.
I’m saying I don’t believe in inherently bad people. For that matter, I don’t particularly believe in redemption. If you do a bad thing you generally can’t undo the damage by doing good things. Bad behavior is just bad behavior, there isn’t some magic cosmic scale we need to tip. But we do need to recognize the malleability of human beings. We can be motivated to do wrong or right at various times in our lives. No one is truly consistent about either one. That goes for the traumatized, homeless drug addict who thinks God is speaking to them through the color red who kills someone over a few fentanyl pills. We have trouble grasping that it also goes for a powerful person whose decisions have the capacity to harm substantial portions of the world population. You can shake your fist at those people all you like. What made them the way they are is always systemic. It’s all slippery. Life is slippery and we shouldn’t judge people. We’ve all been assholes at one time or another. My differentiation is between inherently bad people and people who are dangerous depending on circumstances. Hitler, Jackson, and Weinstein were (are?) dangerous people. They’re also extreme cases. We’re to a point in our public rhetoric where we think of people who say the wrong thing in a comments section as subhuman or evil. Like, it’s pretty amazing that people here are taking my original comment as a defense of Harvey Weinstein. That’s fucking absurd. I mean, I don’t care what people think of me (Or do I? I’m spending way too much time on this.), but the mentality of categorizing people isn’t good. It’s not a healthy or valid way of viewing the world. No atrocity committed by Hitler or Jackson or Trump or Putin or Mao or your former roommate’s abusive uncle will ever make it so.
Okay man, so you don’t believe in morality, only a kind of realpolitik determinism, cool cool cool. In that case, there’s people who are inherently dangerous, and people who are dangerous depending on circumstances, as you say. There are also people who believe in labels such as “evil” and people who don’t. There are people who will judge people, and there are people like you.You definitely care what people think about you. If you really cared about this philosophy of yours, you’d be doing something about it instead of trolling a comment section with all the conviction of a wet fart.
“What made them the way they are is always systemic.” Respectfully, I think this is the problem with your argument/worldview. Are a lot of things/human behaviors systemic? Sure. Are all of them? Most people would say no, and to allege they are all are would require some kind of perfect knowledge (i.e. citation needed and all that). The universe tends towards entropy (chaos) and this appears true of human behavior as well.
I think fundamentally, and again I don’t want to demean you here or presume your life experiences, when you say you don’t believe in inherently bad people, you just haven’t met one yet. I promise you, truly evil people exist, and when you meet one your blood will run cold because you can immediately tell. I have met many. It is inherent to their very being, you can see it in their eyes and their voices and behaviors and actions. Pure malevolence and desire to inflict pain, even to their own expense/detriment. For these people, it isn’t due to environmental factors etc, nurture. Its pure nature.
I am a forensic social worker in public defense. My clients’
charges range from failures to appear in court to extremely brutal homicides.
One thing I find interesting about my work is how often my capacity to
empathize with someone doesn’t line up with the seriousness of their charge.
I’ve had DUIs I find hard to work with given very little capacity for
self-effacement. On the other hand, my favorite client ever is someone who,
decades before I met them, committed a particularly horrific series of homicides
(on the scale where we acknowledge there’s no other kind) just to see what it
was like to kill. No abuse growing up, no gang involvement, just someone who
wanted to try out murder. I imagine if I’d looked into their eyes at the time,
I would have seen what you describe: pure malevolence. Their family would have,
and did, see something different. It was a combination of severe consequences
and their family’s continuing support that enabled them to shift to a different
way of thinking and become a person who, while not perfect, is categorically no
longer a killer. I’ve worked with others
who have committed murder, rapists, child molesters, caregivers who defrauded or
abused the highly vulnerable, lots of interesting folks. After a decade of doing this, I’ve never met
anyone I considered inherently evil. No
one who, given something different in their lives or the functioning of their
brains, might not act differently. My job
definitely doesn’t make me incapable of bias or bad logic, but I do think it
puts me in decent position to evaluate people society would reasonably assume
to be inherently evil. For what it’s
worth, I’ve come up empty.I think the distinction between nature and nurture is arbitrary. Nature nurtures, nurturing is a function of
nature, yadda yadda. If were talking
about what is and is not systemic, what’s nature but a system? And, of course, nature is all about change. I’ve seen some very impressive positive change
from people who, before medication or access to resources or systems of
accountability or just age, acted quite monstrously on a consistent basis. On the other hand, if one of the people I would
normally help defend attacked me on the street with a lead pipe, giving me PTSD
and causing a traumatic brain injury that diminished my capacity to control my
impulses and regulate my emotions, I might become capable of malevolence unimaginable
if my life before that injury. That
would be a change for the negative, not the positive. Both are always possible.To be clear, I do think there are people who will never be
able to function within acceptable social norms. Like, giving Harvey Weinstein power over anyone,
in any circumstance, ever again, would be analogous to giving someone with a severe
intellectual disability the Presidency. Technically
it’s possible for some learning to take place, but realistically it’s a bad
idea and always will be. The internal machinery just doesn’t have the capacity to
change that much. This doesn’t mean
those people are inherently evil, it just means they will always be incapable of
functioning in anything but a very limited (often forcibly confined) swath of society. That’s some people, not everyone who does
wrong, even great and repeated wrong. It’s
case-by-case, complicated, and the answers tend to exist on a spectrum. I don’t think our tendency to deny that variability
and complexity carries any particular social benefit or comes from a place of moral
superiority. I think it’s more about
othering. If we grant ourselves the ability
to label some people as inherently evil, the baseline assumption is that we ourselves
are incapable of evil. And I’m terribly,
terribly sorry, but that’s just not true.
Fascinating hearing about your work! I too work in an environment where I see a lot of the different folks and human variability you describe (on the same relative scale too, judging by what you have described here), so its interesting to me how the two of us can have this conversation from a pretty similar knowledge/experience base and come up with different conclusions. ‘reasonable minds can disagree’ and all that.
i think your conclusion statement “It’s case-by-case, complicated, and the answers tend to exist on a spectrum.” is absolutely correct and I would never deny that. I would probably disagree with the statement “I think it’s more about othering” in the sense that for some people (whomever is doing the labeling/judging) its definitely othering, specifically for social or political advantage, but for others its just the most accurate statement they have about the person’s characteristics. e.g. someone truly bad who can never functionally be allowed to have power or live in society due to just how messed up they are, are basically functionally ‘evil’ in the way most people use the term (this would be different than someone who doesn’t have the malevolence, but due to say mental illness or whatever just cannot be allowed to function in society outside of confinement etc). so in many ways we could be merely disagreeing/discussing a semantic difference!“If we grant ourselves the ability to label some people as inherently
evil, the baseline assumption is that we ourselves are incapable of
evil.” – totally agree that this is not true, but I also disagree that its the baseline assumption. describing someone as inherently evil doesn’t mean the rest of us are incapable of evil, it just describes the degree to which the person being described is beyond saving. it doesn’t preclude the rest of us from any particular range of behaviors or internal personality traits.But again, reasonable minds can disagree! and I appreciate hearing your perspective and your expertise/experiences that lead you to that perspective.
If there were such a thing as bad people, of course he would be. I’m saying there’s no such thing as bad people. Dangerous people, absolutely. Harvey Weinstein is an incredibly dangerous person who needed to be removed from having power over anyone, ever. But it’s important to differentiate between bad behavior, which unequivocally exists and shapes the world, and bad people, which is an erroneous construct. The difference doesn’t feel important when someone acts so monstrously so consistently, particularly when that person has been afforded all the privileges in the world. But it is important as a broad way of looking at humanity, public policy, ourselves, and our capacity to do wrong. That it applies to Weinstein may seem academic, but it still applies. My worldview, take it or leave it.
Oh, fuck off already.
There’s a difference between being horny and being a sexual predator. Like he wasn’t arrested on charges of having an erection bro, you do know that right? Like everyone’s horny at least once in their lives but we don’t all go around molesting people like we’re Manchester City y’know?
It’s a quote from a Community episode where there’s a debate about human nature. Seemed apropos.
I can’t recall the Community episode wherein a rapist infiltrates the campus.
The odds that Dean Pelton doesn’t have a long list of people that he sexually harassed is pretty slim.
Might be time for a rewatch!
You’re weird.
Kind of connected – there’s a show on the BBC at the moment, Inside Man with David Tennant, Stanley Tucci and Lydia West, which was plugged on Norton’s show last week. So far I’m deeply unconvinced that a lot of the decisions made by the characters are in any way realistic, but the performances (as you’d expect) are excellent. Anyway, Tucci’s character says at one point: “Everybody is a murderer. It’s just a matter of meeting the right person.” Which I thought was an interesting take,
I mean, when you say shit like that you can’t help but sound like Kevin Spacey in Seven, but it’s more or less true. Please understand none of this is to defend Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey in Seven, or Kevin Spacey in life.
Likewise.
“I mean, when you say shit like that you can’t help but sound like Kevin Spacey in Seven, but it’s more or less true.”
Wow. The complete and utter lack of self-awareness you have is….well, it’s deeply disturbing.
It would be okay if you didn’t give leeway to Harvey fucking Weinstein.
Surely there was a better way to phrase that headline.
When reading the headline, I thought it was going to end with “into his mouth.”
Don’t you get the joke? Weinstein forced himself onto women, and Mary Kate is saying he also forced himself onto the show. It’s hilarious, because he committed assault.Adding /s because I have no faith in society.
I don’t think it was meant as a joke or even a pun so much as a statement of fact.
I know it’s popular to declare you were never a fan of a celebrity after they get outed for Bad Things, but I have never heard a single story about Weinstein making a positive contribution to a movie. If he’s mentioned at all it’s in the context of directors fighting against him.
One might mention in passing that The Graham Norton Show is (finally) returning to BBCA tomorrow, Oct. 7th.
Norton was just on a very lovely episode of the Adam Buxton podcast, well worth checking out and more interesting than this story.
I hope Norton will at some point have a similar revelation about inviting JK Rowling onto his radio show last month because “she has a right” to promote her novels.
Bravo on the headline!
If you looked at his appearance, it was obviously objectively very unpleasant for nearly all involved, so there is no smug snide subtext needed here.Also I often need to deal with such people somehow… They always get away with everything, and I seem to be the only one to notice or care (though I’m also accidentally trapped in a web of them). That’s my psychopathic older brother (near 40) in symbiosis with my mother (also an egocentric, narcissist), and my former landlord and neighbour (a horrid chain smoking witch over 50 who together with the landlord bullied me out). The described behaviour reminded me very directly of my former landlord’s way of operating or talking, and “predatory” (though more generally) or maybe thug/criminal often came to mind. Not so uncommon. Anyway.