Harry potter brought him to Broadway, now he is amazingly viral

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Ana Cuba for The New York Times

LONDON — Jack Thorne has no shortage of ways to characterize his own eccentricity. “I’m a slightly deranged adult.” “I’m not very good with other people.” “I’m mental.”

He points out a Ralph Steadman poster on the wall of his book-lined home office, an image grotesque enough to prompt objections from his 3-year-old son. “I like it,” he smiles. “It expresses my self-hatred.”

Mr. Thorne, a 40-year-old English writer, describes much of his life as a succession of dark chapters, including a disabling skin condition that affected him for years.

But now he finds himself in a spot he could never have imagined: a happily married father with thriving stage and screen careers that have made him one of the most prodigious — and sought-after — storytellers of the moment.

He won a Tony Award last year for his first Broadway outing — writing the script for the global juggernaut “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” His movie credits include “The Aeronauts” (with Eddie Redmayne) and, next year, “The Secret Garden” (with Colin Firth).

And this summer he made his first appearance at Comic-Con, promoting “His Dark Materials,” the upcoming BBC/HBO series he adapted from Philip Pullman’s fantasy novels.

Mr. Thorne has been writing for television since he was 25, winning five BAFTA awards (the British equivalent of the Emmy). His mini-series “National Treasure,” about a comedian accused of rape, was widely praised; the first episodes of Damien Chazelle’s “The Eddy,” a musical series written by Mr. Thorne, are to be released next year by Netflix; and he was just commissioned to write a new family drama for the BBC.

In June, The Economist described him as the “bard of Britain,” writing, “He is becoming to modern British TV what Charles Dickens was to the Victorian novel — a chronicler of the country’s untold stories and social ills, and the domestic dramas that encapsulate them.”

This summer, “the end of history …,” a stage drama based on Mr. Thorne’s own upbringing, opened at London’s Royal Court Theater. And this fall, he will have two plays on the New York stage: “Sunday,” about New York 20-somethings navigating the shoals of early adulthood, is having its world premiere Off Broadway this month at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “A Christmas Carol,” his much-lauded stage adaptation of the Dickens classic, will open on Broadway in November.

“I’m working harder than I’ve ever done,” he said during an interview in the townhouse that he shares with his wife, Rachel Mason, and their son, Elliott, in the London borough of Islington. “I’m aware that I will be unfashionable very shortly, and so I want to tell as many stories as I can while I still am interesting to people.”

That kind of self-deprecation helps fuel his work, said Sonia Friedman, a lead producer of “Cursed Child.”

“He has no idea how gifted and how talented he is,” she said. “The amount of success he’s having, and will continue to have — I don’t think he will ever fully believe it, and I don’t think he’ll ever fully understand why it’s happening to him.”

Mr. Thorne’s office is the one room in the house where his career artifacts are displayed, and, although the awards are mostly in the basement, it is packed with other meaningful treasures.

There is the night light from his childhood bedroom and a Tony Blair placard with the now-ironic slogan, “Britain Deserves Better.” (“He was my hero,” Mr. Thorne said. “I still feel the betrayal to this day.”)

There is the drawing of customized wands created for the “Cursed Child” team by the play’s designers, and a framed onesie that reminds him of the birth of his son.

“I quite like being haunted by past things,” he said. “I find it quite useful.”

A jumble of compulsions

At 6 feet 5 inches tall, Mr. Thorne is a gangly bundle of nervous energy. He fidgets with his toes. He’s too distractible to ride a bike, and he dislikes the subway, so he walks long distances. “Sitting on a tube is just like the most upsetting thing you can do,” he said.

He also has a pronounced verbal tic — he calls it a speech impediment — that leads him, quite frequently, to punctuate his speech with the phrase “do you know what I mean like you know?” But it’s smushed together into one word, “doyouknowwhatimeanlikeyouknow.” He finds it exasperating. “It doesn’t even make sense,” he said. “I wish I spoke coherently.”

He notes that, in “His Dark Materials,” people have dæmons, which are animal-shaped manifestations of their inner selves. “I think mine would be a woodpecker,” he said, “because it’s always there, hammering away — ‘don’t say that, do say this.’”

Writing has become a sort of compulsion — a craft that brings him not only joy, but calm. “I find as soon as I start writing other people, I become better,” he said. “It’s that and the sea — those are the two things that sort me out.”

What do writing and ocean swimming have in common? “I think it’s being completely on your own,” he said. “When I’m swimming in the sea, I go way out. And I think writing is quite similar.”

He estimates that he has written about 40 plays, and is often creating three things simultaneously, switching from one to another whenever he gets stuck. “I can’t cope with doing only one thing at once,” he said. “As soon as I hit that block where you go, ‘This is awful! Why would you consider yourself a writer?,’ it’s really nice to be able to swap onto another project and go, ‘Well, this is all right.’”

Of course, not everything succeeds. He was dropped as the writer of the forthcoming film “Star Wars: Episode IX” when the director was replaced. And he wrote the book for the big-budget stage adaptation of “King Kong,” which was poorly reviewed and closed as a flop on Broadway, although the producers are hoping to revivify the musical in Shanghai.

“It was really, really hard,” he said. “I felt like there was a sort of presumption that we were commercial sellouts — you were aware that you were walking into a town that didn’t like you very much.”

But he is also self-critical. “There were things about the show that didn’t work,” he said. “I think that I panicked, because the first previews didn’t work at all, and I didn’t stay true to what I was trying to do. Probably I should have done something more radical and clever.”

‘I was quite seriously ill’

He grew up in Bristol and Newbury, England; his father was a town planner, and his mother worked with adults who had learning disabilities. His parents were politically active Laborites. “We were always going on marches,” he said.

“The end of history …” is about an argumentative family with zealously left-leaning parents who are not happy with their children’s lack of political engagement. Mr. Thorne, who as a younger man was active in the Labor Party but is now disenchanted and uninvolved, called the play “a complicated love note.”

He was, by his own description, an unhappy child, but he was a voracious, and precocious, reader, who tore through so many books that at 8, after reading all the age-appropriate material his mother brought for him on a family vacation, he read her copy of “The Color Purple.”

His parents were also heavily into what the British call amateur dramatics — both of them performed in community theater, and his father wrote pantomimes and directed. Young Jack dreamed of being an actor, before concluding that he was not good at it. (Among his last appearances: in the mini-series “This Is England,” which he wrote with Shane Meadows, “I played a part called Carrotbum, so-called because he once had a carrot stuffed up his bum, and Shane said he couldn’t find anyone else lonely or weird enough to do it.”)

He describes writing as an accidental discovery. While a student at Cambridge, he had wanted to direct, but couldn’t afford the stage rights to plays, so he decided to write his own material. “It was drivel,” he said. “I was quite seriously ill, and I was very self-absorbed in my self-pity.”

The illness was diagnosed as chronic cholinergic urticaria, a skin ailment triggered by heat, and at first it was debilitating and defining. “It became an allergy to body movement, basically, because every time I moved, I generated heat, and so I would get a reaction, and it was very, very painful,” he said.

He spent about six months flat on his back until medication enabled him to function; the condition remained with him for about another decade. He identified as a disabled person, and wrote for a theater company that champions people with disabilities. “They taught me a lot of things about how to make drama,” he said. “It’s informed every aspect of my work.”

Ms. Friedman said Mr. Thorne’s work is populated with “strange outsider characters” who “are quirky, and gawky, and get through life with humor, and that’s been Jack.”

“His best work is when he puts himself into it,” she said. “Because he had complicated and challenging experiences growing up, he floods his work with those feelings, and therefore the work feels authentic and real and truthful and often beautiful and sad.”

For years he was a committed loner, working in coffee shops and libraries. “I lived on my own in Luton in a place where I knew like three people and spent six and a half days of the week on my own, very happily writing and watching TV and occasionally going to the theater,” he said. “That was my life. I didn’t think I’d have kids, and I certainly didn’t think I’d get married.”

He was introduced to Ms. Mason, who is a talent agent, on a train to Cornwall, and his life changed. Having a child was frightening, but life-changing. “I was enormously scared because I wasn’t a particularly happy child, and I’m a slightly deranged adult, and I didn’t want my stuff to sit heavy on my kid.”

Elliott is named for the boy in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” For his 40th birthday Mr. Thorne had “be good,” E.T.’s parting words to Elliott’s sister, tattooed on his right wrist. “I remember seeing ‘E.T.’ as a sort of slightly lonely kid and going, ‘Brilliant, there’s an extraterrestrial out there that’s going to make it all O.K.,’ ” he said.

Fatherhood has prompted Mr. Thorne to write at home, “because I want to be near him, and we see each other all the time.” Inspired by a radio interview in which Zadie Smith described how she balances writing and parenting, he established an open-door policy — Elliott comes into the work space whenever he wants to, and is free to scrawl in Mr. Thorne’s writing notebooks, which he often does.

“I’m silly Daddy most of the time,” he said. “We’re just normal father and son who build sand castles — but I’ve also got a writing life, and he’s part of that writing life, and I hope that works.”

Five friends and a book

Mr. Thorne has often written perceptively about young people — children, adolescents, and early adults — and his latest project, “Sunday,” is set among a group of New Yorkers just starting their grown-up lives.

The play, which is now in previews, is set during the meeting of a boozy book club at which a group of five friends discuss Anne Tyler’s “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” The gathering turns into an increasingly revealing conversation about ethical choices, toxic masculinity, and what is now sometimes called adulting.

“He’s got an incredible ear for the small ways that old friends talk to each other — his ability to capture the different layers of history that are present between this group of friends is astounding,” said the play’s director, Lee Sunday Evans. Ms. Evans was paired with Mr. Thorne by the Atlantic, which had commissioned the play, and in June she flew to London to oversee a workshop with British actors before further developing the show in New York with an American cast.

“I was struck by the small changes that he made based on what he heard the actors doing,” she said. “Little moments of people asking questions translated back into these really smart, very subtle but palpable changes in the script.”

Mr. Thorne said the play emerged from his fascination with the Aziz Ansari situation — a much-debated instance in which a woman accused a comedian of inappropriate behavior on a date — but that it had changed as it grew.

“I hope what it is now is about something simpler,” he said, “a group of young people looking at a future which they don’t quite understand anymore — morally, sexually, professionally.”

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