By 
Pennsylvania rap rock band the Bloodhound Gang, whose popular albums of the 1990s included One Fierce Beer Coaster and Hooray For Boobies, have few champions in 2022. But they do have one, and he just so happens to be Britain’s most celebrated playwright.
“Love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket,” recites Jez Butterworth, 53, the writer of some of our most critically and commercially successful recent plays, including Jerusalem and The Ferryman, to James Corden, 44, actor, writer of the BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey and, latterly, host of the US chat show The Late Late Show with James Corden. He’s giving the lyrics of the band’s 1999 single “The Bad Touch” all the portent of Larry Olivier doing Hamlet. “It’s beautiful,” he sighs.
It’s early August, and the pair are sitting in low-backed chairs in a smart London hotel talking about the Bloodhound Gang — or in Butterworth’s case, quoting them directly — because the sentiments of their biggest hit are, to the purposes of our meeting, surprisingly pertinent. “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,” frontman Jimmy Pop sang in the song’s chorus (while dressed in a monkey suit in the music video). Which, as Butterworth explains, is not a bad précis of Mammals, the new six-part comedy-drama he has written for Amazon Prime Video, in which Corden will star.
“I find it really, really funny that we are calling it Mammals,” says Butterworth, who has a dramatic salt-and-pepper beard and fiery eyes, of the earnest and funny series, which revels in the nitty-gritty of human desire. “Dignity isn’t incredibly important to parrots or to cats, as far as I can tell, so why is it important to us? We’ve got all these highfalutin ideas about how we should behave when we’re just these beasts. Not just mammals, any animals: the mayfly doesn’t have any digestive tract, because it’s not going to need to eat. It’s got one day! It’s born and it’s like, ‘Let’s fuck! Let’s go!’ And so I just find all of that really funny that we take it all so personally. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t, I just think it’s beautiful that we do.”
In Mammals, Corden — who alternates between laughing loudly and readily, and leaning forward to talk more seriously, turning his head to look back at Butterworth — takes on the lead role of chef Jamie Buckingham, who’s just about to open his first restaurant and is ensconced in the warm glow of expectant fatherhood with his libertine wife, Amandine (Melia Kreiling), while the ever-delightful Sally Hawkins plays Jamie’s kind, daydreaming sister. Everything’s sunny and beautiful for about five minutes; then a cataclysm topples his house of cards, the specifics of which are probably best left unspoilt.
“In the way that life does for all of us, things take a turn,” says Corden, who recently caused an upset of his own when he announced that he will be leaving The Late Late Show, which he has hosted since 2015, next year. “I really, really thought about ending at the end of my first contract,” he says, of the decision, “and then it sort of felt right to sign for two more years. So it’s less of a shock to me than it is to other people.” (When we talk, he’s still got 200 more shows to do, and by the time he finishes his run he will have made, he says, 1,250 hours of original television. “And that feels like enough.”)
Butterworth says he wanted Mammals to be “about the difficulty of monogamy”. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the show features betrayals, shouting matches, twists, and — bizarrely, but not unwelcome — a cameo from frizzle-chested love-hound Sir Tom Jones, whom Butterworth describes as “the patron saint of the away game”. “He famously has done both,” Butterworth explains. “He spent his entire life with the same woman and slept with 10,000 other people. It’s almost like a holy visitation.”
But if this enquiry into the state of modern marriage feels bleak, Butterworth doesn’t see it that way. “I disagree that it’s a jaundiced view,” he says. “I think that it is a freewheeling and very sympathetic view of the Human Comedy, and our attempts down here to live vestigially in a religious hierarchical system which no longer applies. I’ve always felt that marriage per se is about the controlling of women’s desires and the distribution of land rights. And I just don’t think that any of those have much to do with the heart. And so here we are, and everything’s changing: the number of people that are choosing to get married is [decreasing] by big digits every single year. It’s all on the slide. It’s all on the move.”
“I don't think you can deny that people’s attitudes are changing. I can remember knowing why I chose to get married,” says Corden, who has three children with his wife Julia Carey (Butterworth’s partner is the actress Laura Donnelly, with whom he has two). “It was because I’d had two longish relationships — one long relationship and one less long relationship — before I met my wife, and I knew that she was different, and I knew that it was different. So I wanted it to be different. I love the magic of all of it. But when you start opening it up with Jez, it’s a fascinating look at life and the way that we’re living it.”
Corden got the script while shooting the last Gavin & Stacey Christmas special in 2019, and said yes immediately. “I’m Jez’s biggest fan really,” he says demurely, though Corden himself is no slouch in the theatre department, having played both London and New York in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, and Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors. After Mammals, Butterworth has James Mangold’s as-yet-untitled Indiana Jones film out next year, for which he and Mangold co-wrote the script with Butterworth’s brother, John-Henry: “I watched [Mammals] about five days ago and it’s brilliant,” he says. But as for post-Mammals, post-chat-show life for Corden, he’s playing down his plans. He’ll take a break, see what happens, he says. “And then I'll just wait outside Jez’s house and see what falls out of his bag.”
‘Mammals’ is available now on Prime.
