Yahoo Movies 
James Corden: One Chance producers had to stop me singing
Actor says his vocal talents just weren’t good enough to play real-life Paul Potts.
James Corden has revealed how he tried to wow producers with his singing voice for Paul Potts biopic ‘One Chance’, only to have his efforts scuppered.
“There’s a big leap between singing… and singing opera,” the ‘Gavin & Stacey’ star told Yahoo Movies UK. “And I sort of thought I might be able to do it. So I had a load of lessons with a wonderful singing teacher in New York, which is where I was working at the time. And some of our producers came down to see me and to hear it.”
“They listened to about half a song and went ‘Yeah no. This isn’t going to work. We should probably get someone else…’”
Watch our full interview with James, above.
[James Corden stars as Paul Potts in One Chance trailer]
James, who in the end had real-life Paul Potts dub his singing voice, also admitted the inaugural ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ winner actually wanted to distance himself from the movie, but in “a nice way.”
“He didn’t want to distance himself in a sense of, you know ‘I want nothing to do with this,’” he said. “We were making the film of a man’s life that we never saw, you know. The moment that the film stops is the moment that we ever had any awareness of [Paul] existing. So I think the only thing that I know that [Paul] said to people is that he didn’t want it to be a tale of just woe and sadness… he wanted it to have a lightness of touch to it.
Despite an almost endless stream of unfortunate events in ‘One Chance’, 35-year-old Corden revealed none of the fictional Paul’s bad luck was made up. In fact there was too much misfortune to fit into the movie.
“The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. We did a Q&A afterwards, and Paul was there,” recalled James. “And someone actually asked ‘Did all those things happen to you?’ And he said ‘Yeah, they did,’ and he went on to list another six horrific things that didn’t make it to the film. You know, all that stuff, yeah it all happened.”
[New poster for Paul Potts biopic One Chance]
Watch our full interview with James above, including why he thinks ‘One Chance’ isn’t about ‘Britain’s got Talent’ at all, and what his particular skill would be if he ever appeared on the show.
‘One Chance’, co-starring Alexandra Roach, Mackenzie Crook, Colm Meaney and Julie Walters is out in the UK 25 October 2013. Watch the full trailer below.
