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bBy her own admission, Lily James wanted her life to go faster. “after cinderellaI was yearning for parts that weren’t ‘simple’, that weren’t ‘young heroines’, that weren’t always in historical films,” she explains, casually running through the clichés that tend to beset young, white actresses at one point or another and are supposed to be Britain’s next big thing. He told his director Kenneth Branagh That live-action Disney revivaleverything about. “He just said, ‘Lily – you don’t need to rush, it’s all going to happen.’ But I was too impatient.”
Looking back now, at the age of 36 and exactly 10 years later cinderella Made him a star, James knows Branagh was right. “As a woman, that’s inevitably what happens – as you grow up, the roles become different. But I also don’t need to shy away from those young talents. Honestly, I’d love to go back!” She lets out a huge, enveloping scream.
She may regret it now, but chances are James’ career wouldn’t have been half as interesting had she been wearing a corset. Now years removed from princess-dom, or initial series of Downton Abbey – She was the rebellious Lady Rose – and was inexplicably titled Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie SocietyJames has quietly carved out one of the most storied careers of his generation. Edgar Wright’s frantic action baby driver She got the role of young Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia 2Then as Zac Efron’s chaste wife in Weepie iron clawHe Recently played Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd at disney swiped,
And things are getting even stranger. When I joined her on video call she was in Australia shooting a submarine thriller with Chris Hemsworth. Before this she was filming a drama about cults the last of us Star Bella Ramsey. and before He She was playing an “absolutely wild character” in the new film from Japanese maestro Takashi Miike, and was set to play the lead role in Sylvester Stallone’s gender-flipped remake. cliffhangerOh, and she’s vocal angry birds 32026 will clearly be the year of Lily James: Endearingly Unplaceable Movie Star.
“I love challenges,” she explains. “I want my life to be an adventure and my work to be an adventure. I want to do things that on paper people can’t actually imagine me doing.” The role she plays in the Miike film, she teases, was something she couldn’t believe she was actually offered. She compared it to getting the chance to play Pamela Anderson (in which James starred) vaguely controversial limited series Pam and Tommy Back in 2022). She knows your first thought is… His? In fact? Then, smack! Always doubting him ultimately makes you feel bad.
There’s a lot about this job that isn’t about acting. sometimes it overwhelms me
James admits that signing up RileyWhich is in theaters today, initially gave him pause too. It is a chilling conspiracy thriller, in which Riz Ahmed plays a “fixer” who helps corporate whistleblowers insulate themselves from potentially serious consequences. James was keen to work with Ahmed and the film’s director David McKenzie – the deceptively underrated Scotsman behind films such as neo-Western hell or high water and prison drama starred up But she was also afraid of doing the work herself on a large scale. Ahmed’s character talks to her clients through a message relay service for the deaf community, meaning that the bulk of James’s role in the film consists of her sitting nervously in her apartment on the phone. “I hate acting alone,” she says. “You have no one to bounce off of, no one to look into. Acting is best when it’s like a dance between two actors and you forget yourself. That was really hard.”
There are moments in conversation with James when she becomes a bit of a ham – whenever I ask a question she leans close to her Zoom camera, nods her head enthusiastically, wraps her arms around herself in a hug, shakes her shoulders. She trained in musical theater as a teenager – at Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in Hertfordshire – and while she was only able to make proper use of her dancing skills oh momIt’s clearly still in his bones; She’s a big mover. Naturally, Riley Felt a bit stagnant – at least until the movie sends him out into the world faster, strapped to the back of a van, or brandishing a pistol.
his character in Riley He is being closely monitored by representatives of a vaguely nefarious corporate entity, and James spends most of it nervously peering out his windows. “I wanted to explore that part of me that’s always looking over my shoulder,” she says. It’s no surprise that this is a default mode for her — there was a period of time, about five or six years ago, when she never looked out of the gossip pages, James snapped blurry photos with actors she was or wasn’t dating, or that awkward period in the pandemic when everyone was talking about her and Dominic West riding electric scooters in Rome. Talking about the photos while riding together (“It was a lot,” she once said; “an absurd situation,” she once said.) “I certainly didn’t survive being monitored,” James says now. “I’m a person in the public eye and it’s a very real fear – you’re being watched and photographed so often that it’s not the slightest bit paranoid.”
But she thinks this is true for everyone today, even if you’re not a celebrity. A few days ago she was telling a friend about her favorite song, and then that song suddenly popped up on her Instagram For You page. “Our phones are listening to us, it’s just our reality,” she says sadly. “Nothing is private anymore. I think it’s a very scary time.”
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She’s a bit indifferent in general. She says she misses the ubiquity of radio plays, which were part of her early work after graduating from the Guildhall School of Drama in 2010. And she craves the glamor of stardom like never before. Her grandmother was an American actress named Helen Horton, who moved to Britain in the fifties in search of work. “Her voice was magical,” recalls James. “She had one of those beautiful, rich, almost-British voices that all the iconic movie stars of that time had.” It will be recognizable even to Ridley Scott fans ForeignerAs Horton voiced the spaceship in the film.
“I was watching it recently because I was thinking of Sigourney Weaver as an inspiration for a role I was hoping to play,” she says. “And I stop in my tracks every time, like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy, that’s my grandma!'” James is hardly a Nepo granddaughter, but she admits she totally took advantage of this little trivia when auditioning. baby driver“I actually played that card just to impress Edgar Wright,” she says, laughing. “Like, ‘I don’t know if you know, but my grandma…’ and being the biggest movie obsessive and watching everything, she just thought it was So cold!,
I tell James that I still think his best work – in its sense of change and its underlying empathy – was Pam and TommyDespite the controversy that surrounded it. The show featured an extremely high-profile courtship between the two. baywatch-era Pamela Anderson and rock star Tommy Lee (here played by Sebastian Stan), followed by their stolen sex tape scandal, Lee’s struggle with addiction, and Anderson’s abuse by the press. Upon its release, rumors arose that Anderson – who was not involved in the show’s production – was privately upset by its existence, which was later confirmed by Anderson in a documentary about his life, released in 2023. He insisted that he bore no ill will toward James.
“There’s always a sensitivity to playing a real person, and rightly so, because it’s a huge responsibility,” says James. “And then you have to navigate it in terms of how you present it to the world…” she continues. “I contacted Pamela, and we were never told No To make it, and if there were certain things that could have been different…” She pauses. “I knew we were supporting and respecting her story and I know it was made with so much love and honesty and commitment to the truth. I’m proud of the story we told and I’m in awe of Pamela Anderson and the woman she is.”
She apologizes. “I probably don’t talk about it very eloquently, but only because it still feels so fresh,” she explains. “The thing about my characters, whether they’re real people or not, is that they really live inside me. I don’t just rock up and say my lines, there’s a feeling of heaviness and security, and sometimes even fear, around these roles I play. It’s not always easy for me to talk about them.”
She further adds that she knows it was “crazy casting” for her to play Anderson, but it affects her ethos overall. “I’ve always tried to be brave in the choices I make,” she says. “And I’ve had to learn that when you’re fortunate enough to have been doing this for so long, as I have, there’s so much to this job that isn’t about acting. Sometimes it overwhelms me. I’ve definitely had times where I’ve felt like, ‘Oh my God, it’s all too much — it’s everything else. Material” She puts a forceful pause on the word. “But then you get in the rehearsal room, or you’re acting opposite a great actor like Rhys or Sebastian Stan, and everything else falls away. I’m so lucky to get to do that and show that.”
It seems Lily James, improving rapidly, is finally sitting down and taking it all in.
‘Relay’ is in theaters