Nora is the film of the love story between Nora Barnacle and James Joyce after they 'escape' Ireland, a place they are unable to fit into, and settle uneasily in Trieste. It's a long way from a Hollywood romance because Nora Barnacle, played by Susan Lynch and James Joyce, whom I play, had a very real, very intense relationship - very big ups and very big downs. They fought like a couple of bastards. From the beginning it was volatile, with constant emotional explosions.
I'd read some of the books - Dubliners and Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - and seen the letters and photographs, but I needed instinct to make Joyce my character. He was a complex man. Very vain, very aware of how he looked. Nora was not his intellectual equal but she was a strong person. She was a semi-literate Galway woman who was working as a chambermaid when they met. She accused him of stealing her life for his books and certainly he ransacked her exploits and imagination to create some of his female characters, like Molly Bloom in Ulysses. His wife was undoubtedly his copy.
The film is made by Natural Nylon, the production company I set up with acting mates Jude Law, Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee and Sadie Frost, because we wanted to make movies our way. We were working all over the place and it was a New York/London thing, hence the name NY from New York and LON from London. Nylon sounded too synthetic so we called it Natural Nylon. Nora is the first Natural Nylon film I've starred in and I also worked as co-producer.
