Paul Potts interview: 'I didn't believe anybody could ever love me'

James Corden knew it wouldn’t be easy. How to portray the second-most famous winner of Britain’s Got Talent, the UK’s most popular opera star, and the biggest thing to come out of Port Talbot since Michael Sheen, Anthony Hopkins, or perhaps even Richard Burton?

“God, no, I’ve not done the singing!” splutters the actor who plays Paul Potts in One Chance. Named after the singer’s debut album – and after this against-the-odds hero’s credo – it’s the big-screen biopic of the unlikely winner of the first series of the reality show. That was a busy six years ago, two years before another unlikely singer from another Celtic corner of Britain – Susan Boyle – threatened to eclipse the triumph of the one-time Carphone Warehouse branch manager.

“I kind of sung, then Paul has gone in the studio and looped his vocals to my voice,” explains Corden of the comedy directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and overseen by two titans of global entertainment, Simon Cowell and Harvey Weinstein. It tells the life story of the now 43-year-old Potts, up to the point where he enters Britain’s Got Talent. “So every time Paul Potts sings in the film, Paul Potts’s singing comes through.”

That said, Corden did have “lots of lessons about breathing and stuff”. And he studied hours of performance footage of the light operatic titan who, since his victory in 2007, has sold some five million copies of his three albums. “And because Paul hasn’t had a mass of formal training, the way he stands when he sings – his posture – isn’t what you would say is that of a regular opera singer. He pushes quite hard when he hits those big notes.” Sounds tricky, no? Even for a performer of Corden’s Tony Award-winning versatility, doing justice to the life and times of the ill-starred-but-ultimately victorious Potts – big of voice (and girth), but even bigger of troubled backstory – was a tall order.

And then there were the teeth. “That was one of the hardest things, really,” admits Corden, acknowledging the dentally challenged smile that, underlaying Potts’s still-breathtaking BGT audition rendition of Nessun Dorma, has now been viewed 116 million times on YouTube. “I wore these false teeth, and wore them for about two months before we started shooting, just to get used to talking with them in. It was,” the actor clarifies, “a full set of bashed-up teeth.”

“What’s he complaining about?” tuts the man himself good-naturedly. “I had to live with those teeth for years!” Paul Potts flashes a smile that, if not quite Colgate, is certainly – courtesy of a post-BGT root-and-branch orthodontic makeover – all right-angles.

In a seafront café in Port Talbot, Potts is recounting his improbable life story – from relentless childhood bullying to shelf-filling in Tesco (frozen foods, and wines and spirits) to becoming an international opera star with a particularly rabid following in Asia. And now, to real-life hero of a crowd-pleasing, well-funded, well-made comedy-drama.

Between dentally efficient chews on a lunchtime chicken salad, Potts is, at my behest, clarifying which bits of One Chance are true and which are artistic licence.

So, yes, during his long years of struggle to make it as an opera singer, he did secure a one-off performance before Luciano Pavarotti, albeit not in scenic Venice. But no, he didn’t choke.

“It was in a different part of Italy. And the masterclass with Pavarotti went quite well – I was the only one that he asked to sing twice.” Yes, he did meet his wife Julie-Ann (played by Alexandra Roach) over the internet. But no, they didn’t spend six months texting before meeting at Swansea station. And no, he didn’t tell her he looked like Brad Pitt (and she didn’t claim to resemble Cameron Diaz).

“She had a picture of me, but I didn’t have a picture of her. So when I got off the train she didn’t just run away,” he says, ever-ready with a hearty laugh and smile of self-deprecation. Potts is a proud man, and clearly enjoys his success, but the shadows of his embattled former life seem to swirl and eddy around his (by his own admission) ample self.

In an accent that is part-Bristol, the city of his working-class childhood, and part Wales, Potts recounts how he had a couple of girlfriends before meeting the woman he married in 2003. But nothing serious?

“Well, I’ve always been serious in everything I’ve done,” Pott says quietly but jovially. Then, a beat of silence. “Perhaps a little too serious. I’d get committed a little easily, so I got hurt quite easily. Plus, I never believed that anybody could love me.” One Chance begins with a splash of mickey-taking – a nurse in hospital chortles at the name of her young patient. Is Paul Potts really named after the genocidal Cambodian dictator of Killing Fields ill-repute? And then it careers good-naturedly into slapstick bullying (if that sentence doesn’t contradict itself twice) – adolescent Paul, fleeing a pack of baying schoolboys, wallops face-first into scaffolding. Hence that collapsing graveyard of teeth.

“There’s some truth in that,” nods Potts. “I was running for a bus, and I ran into a scaffolding pole. It actually pushed my front teeth behind my nose. This is in the book,” he says, mentioning for the first time (there will be three other mentions) the imminent autobiography he splurged out over “four or five weekends. I was contracted for 60,000 words. I wrote 130,000”. It, too, is called One Chance.

“And I was warned it would be very painful when the teeth came [back] down,” he continues. “And their warning was correct. It was absolutely agony – and I had to allow them to come down by their own accord.” Still, “there were compensations – I spent every Wednesday afternoon in a dentist’s chair with the prettiest University of Bristol dental students treating me,” Potts beams, winningly.

“One of them was bashed to bits,” he says, meaning his front teeth, “and the one that wasn’t was the one that killed itself off. That’s really painful when that happens. No painkillers ever touched that. At the time, I’d not known pain like it.”

“At the time” being the key phrase. After winning Britain’s Got Talent, Potts received an unsolicited offer from a dentist to fix his calamitously chaotic bridgework. It had broken once when it dropped out of his mouth while on a night shift in Tesco, then broke again “eating ice cream in Italy. Really solid ice cream,” Potts clarifies. He gladly took up the offer of free, full-frontal cosmetic dental care, even though it was only three days before his BGT prize: a slot at the Royal Variety Show in Liverpool. It was a risky procedure for anyone, far less a man expected to showcase his preternatural vocal gifts for the Queen 72 hours later.

“My mouth just doesn’t numb up,” he shrugs. “I had 17 injections.” None of them worked. “I could feel everything he was doing. And in the end I said, ‘No, it’s fine’, and I just gripped quite hard on the chair!”

^{Paul Potts, James Corden and the cast of One Chance with singer Taylor Swift, who contrubutes a song to the soundtrack}

What about the Pol Pot joke – did he get that a lot? “Eh, I was repeatedly bullied by it,” he says quietly. “Repeatedly,” he repeats. “It was one of the reasons I was bullied in school. Again, it’s something I cover in the book. I always shake my head when I see somebody tweet that as if it’s a brand new joke. It’s been going since the late Seventies.” Was he called Dictator at school? Taunted with cries of “how many people have you killed today?”

“That kind of thing. ’Cause he was at his prime when I was at school in ’77, ’78. I remember a Blue Peter Christmas collection for milk-bottle tops, and they did one for Cambodia – I couldn’t believe it,” he sighs.

“And it got quite oppressive,” Potts adds, which sounds like the understatement of the year. He says he was bullied from the moment he started school, aged six. It didn’t stop until he left school, when he was 18. Twelve years of extreme hurt.

“You just question your own existence, and why things happen to you. At the time bullying wasn’t taken very seriously. If you told teachers, it got worse. And all they would say was: ‘Ignore it. It’ll go away.’ The trouble is, it never goes away. The bullying I had was repeated and sustained.”

Aside from his name, Paul Potts’s love of singing and opera marked him out. “That was a teacher’s pet-type thing. And also, I wore school uniform at junior school when I didn’t have to.” His parents weren’t “well-blessed” with money, so it was easier to wear the same thing every day. “But that singles you out, as did free school meals, which I had. And I wasn’t very good at just taking it. ’Cause I was just taking it all the time, and there would come a time when I’d respond – ’cause I didn’t have the outlet of friends that I could talk to about it. So I’d take it for ages, then I’d lose my rag. And of course they loved seeing that. But how do you ignore it?”

Despite his constant torment and isolation, Potts insists he never entertained suicidal thoughts. He didn’t have “the courage” for that. “But I thought about throwing myself down stairs,” he admits, “and tripping over things to make myself injured enough for me to end up in hospital, and for people to feel something other than hatred. Even if it was sympathy. But I soon learnt that sympathy is short-lived, and doesn’t really change people’s real view of you. So in the end I just accepted the bullying and took it.”

In senior school, Potts did ask his tormentors why he was their target. “They just laughed and said, ‘because you’re you’. So I took that and had very little self-esteem as a result.” Through this barrage of abuse, Potts maintained his love of opera and of singing.

As Corden puts it, “One Chance is about a boy from an industrial steel town in Wales who is bullied his whole life, and throughout endless adversity never really gives up his dream of wanting to be an opera singer. And this is in a town where people didn’t even listen to opera, let alone dream of being an opera singer.” In fact, Potts didn’t move to Port Talbot until 2002 – it was the only place he and Jules could afford to buy a house within their budget of £35,000 – but the point remains the same.

His idiosyncratic passion is, without question, admirable and remarkable, but also, perhaps, foolhardy; he was handing the bullies another stick with which to beat him. He gives an easy-going shrug.

“I couldn’t see an end to the bullying. So when I went singing there were comments about me that weren’t about how much they hated me or how smelly I was. And at the time I was quite a good runner,” he says, seemingly randomly. “I was skinny – those were the days,” he smiles, “and singing gave me an area where I could be myself. And that was something that didn’t happen very often. No area of my life was free from bullying apart from that.”

Did any of his nemeses try and crawl back into his life after his success? “I had a few messages come through Facebook, and they apologised. I’ve been asked whether I had revenge – but revenge is never, ever sweet. It’s always bitter. And I’ve turned to them and said: ‘there’s nothing to forgive’. This is 30 years ago – that makes me feel old! – and you can’t allow things that happened to you then to control your future. ’Cause that allows the dark side to win.”

Paul Potts, brilliantly, is having the last laugh. Alongside the film and book of his life, this month sees the release of the album of his life: a Greatest Hits. It includes all the classics – “Nessun Dorma”, Cavatina, operatic takes on the themes from Titanic and Gladiator, Italian language versions of A Whiter Shade of Pale and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, a reboot of that number Simon Bates co-opted for Our Tune.

His next album – featuring light operatic covers of modern pop and rock standards (Foo Fighters’ Home, The Best of Me by Richard Marx) – is already “in the can”.

And Potts is not long back from performing in South Korea (along with Japan and Germany, it’s one of his biggest markets), where he was up at dawn dealing with jet lag and emails, and using the opportunity to indulge another passion – photography – to shoot Seoul’s early-morning traffic.

^{'Revenge is never sweet': Paul Potts (JOHN WELLINGS)}

Meanwhile, parked outside the café is a new E-class Mercedes. Well, a second-hand one. “Nothing fancy. But it’s a top trim, so it’s nice and comfortable. It’s got lots of toys.” In 2009 his net worth was said to be £5m; it must be much more today. Yet Potts is careful, to say the least. “When you buy a brand-new car,” he begins. “That was 35-grand worth of car, and [if you buy new] basically you’re chucking five grand into the drain immediately. What’s the point in that? There are so many more things you can do with five grand. I just don’t see the point in spending money if you don’t need to.” He and Jules have stayed in Port Talbot, albeit in a bigger house. And they’ve bought a place in the Lake District. But again, prudence is the order of the day.

“It’s there to be sold if necessary. And in the short-to-medium term it’s cheaper than staying in a hotel, which is what I was doing if I had a bit of a break. You’d spend a grand in five days. And if you go there four times a year, that’s four grand a year.” Still, if he wanted to expand his property portfolio, there’s one sure-fire, cash-in-the-bank winner: a joint album with his fellow BGT alumnus Susan Boyle. Surely Cowell’s Syco masterminds are plotting a Subo/PaulPo duets album as I type?

Potts smiles. “I’ve been asked by fans about that. But it’s not come up yet. I wouldn’t be opposed to it.” How’s his relationship with the father-to-be? “I’ve met Simon a few times since [I won], and we have a good relationship. I pop into [Syco parent record label] Sony in London a lot if I’m in the area and have a coffee – they do good coffee! – but I’m not sure what his exact involvement in the movie was. It was all behind-the-scenes stuff so I didn’t get to see it.”

In the early days of Potts’s music industry career, he acknowledges, Cowell offered good advice.“He was very clear on a few things,” he says somewhat gravely. “You’ve got to be yourself. People will see through other versions of you. And never believe the hype. It’s important not to get sucked in.”

What, I wonder, is Harvey Weinstein like?

“Very driven. I’m glad he’s behind this film. I’m not sure he’d see it as a compliment, but he’s the Simon Cowell of the film industry. Very committed to what he does and goes after things that he believes in.”

Is Weinstein scary? “A little. Just like Simon Cowell.”

Paul Potts – a man used to hiding his smile, and his feelings, for most of his life – grins. A full-frontal, toothy grin. What did he think of One Chance in the end?

“Well,” he replies, all philosophical, “they say reality’s stranger than fiction sometimes.”

Paul Potts: The Greatest Hits (Sony/Syco) is released on October 28. One Chance is in cinemas on October 25