By her own admission, Lily James wanted her life to hurry up. “After Cinderella, I longed for parts that weren’t ‘the ingénue’, that weren’t ‘the young heroine’, that weren’t always in historical films,” she explains, casually running through the cliches that tend to engulf the young, white actresses who at one point or another are deemed to be Britain’s next big thing. She told Kenneth Branagh, her director on that live-action Disney revival, all about it. “He just said, ‘Lily – you don’t need to rush, it’s all gonna happen.’ But I was so impatient.”
Looking back now, at the age of 36 and exactly 10 years after Cinderella made her a star, James knows that Branagh was correct. “As a woman, it happens inevitably – as you grow older, the roles are going to be different. But I also just didn’t need to run away from those young ingénues. Honestly, I’d love to go back!” She lets out a massive, enveloping hoot.
She might regret it now, but the chances are that James’s career wouldn’t have been half as interesting if she’d kept the corsets on. Now, years removed from princess-dom, and from the early series of Downton Abbey – she was the rebellious Lady Rose – and the inexplicably titled Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, James has quietly carved out one of the most all-over-the-shop careers of her generation. Edgar Wright’s frenetic actioner Baby Driver led to her role as a young Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, then as Zac Efron’s saintly wife in the weepie The Iron Claw. She most recently played the Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in Disney’s Swiped.
And things are going to get even wackier. When I connect with James over video call, she’s in Australia, shooting a submarine thriller with Chris Hemsworth. Before that she was filming a drama about cults with The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey. And before that she was playing an “absolutely wild character” in the new film from Japanese maestro of shock Takashi Miike, and the lead in a gender-flipped remake of the 1993 Sylvester Stallone movie Cliffhanger. Oh, and she’s a voice in Angry Birds 3. 2026 will clearly be the year of Lily James: Endearingly Unplaceable Movie Star.
“I crave 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 really imagine me doing.” The part she plays in the Miike film, she teases, was something she couldn’t believe she was actually offered. She compares it to getting the chance to play Pamela Anderson (James starred in the vaguely contentious limited seriesPam & Tommy back in 2022). She knows your first thought is... Her? Really? Then, smack! You end up feeling bad for ever doubting her.
There’s so much to this job that isn’t about acting. Sometimes that overwhelms me
James admits that signing up to Relay, which is out in cinemas today, initially gave her pause, too. It’s a chilly conspiracy thriller, in which Riz Ahmed plays a “fixer” who helps corporate whistleblowers detangle themselves from potentially dire outcomes. James was eager to work with Ahmed, and the film’s director David Mackenzie – the confusingly underrated Scotsman behind movies such as the neo-western Hell or High Water and the prison drama Starred Up – but was also terrified about performing so many solo scenes. Ahmed’s character talks with his clients via a message relay service intended for the deaf community, meaning huge swathes of James’s role in the film involve her sitting nervously in her apartment on the phone. “I hate acting on my own,” she says. “You’ve got no one to bounce off, no one’s eyes to look into. Acting is at its best when it’s like a dance between two actors and you forget yourself. It was really hard.”
There are moments in conversation with James when she becomes a bit of a ham – she leans in close to her Zoom camera whenever I ask a question, bobs her head enthusiastically, flexes her arms around herself in a hug, shimmies her shoulders. She trained in musical theatre as a teenager – at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in Hertfordshire – and while she’s only been able to properly utilise her dance skills in Mamma Mia, it’s obviously still there in her bones; she’s a big mover. Naturally, Relay felt a little static – at least until the film sent her speeding out into the world, tied up in the backs of vans, or wielding pistols.
Her character in Relay is being closely monitored by representatives of a vaguely nefarious corporate entity, and James spends much of the film peering nervously out of her window. “I wanted to explore that part of myself that’s always looking over my shoulder,” she says. It’s no surprise that it’s a bit of a default mode for her. There was a period of time, around five or six years ago, when she never seemed to be out of the gossip pages, blurrily photographed with actors she may or may not have been dating – and there was that strange period during the pandemic, when everyone was talking about pictures of her and Dominic West riding an electric scooter together in Rome (“It was a lot,” she once said; “An absurd situation,” he once said.) “I definitely haven’t evaded being surveilled,” 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 just paranoia in the slightest.”
But she thinks that’s true for everyone today, even if you’re not a celebrity. A few days ago, she was telling a friend about a song she loves, and then that song was suddenly plastered all over his Instagram For You page. “Our phones are listening to us, it’s just our reality,” she says, sadly. “Nothing is private now. I think it’s a very frightening time.”
She’s a little nostalgic in general. She says she misses the ubiquity of radio plays, which formed some of her earliest work after she graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2010. And she pines for the glamour of stardom as it used to be. Her grandmother was an American actor named Helen Horton, who moved to Britain to find work in the Fifties. “Her voice was magic,” James remembers. “She had one of those beautiful, rich, almost-British voices that all of those iconic movie stars of that time had.” It’ll also be recognisable to fans of Ridley Scott’s Alien, as Horton gave voice to 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 do just stop in my tracks every time, like, ‘My God, this is crazy, that’s my grandma!’” James is hardly a nepo granddaughter, but she admits to having fully exploited this bit of trivia while auditioning for Baby Driver. “The only time I’ve really played that card was to impress Edgar Wright,” she laughs. “Like, ‘I don’t know if you know, but my grandmother...’ And being the biggest film obsessive, and having seen everything, he just thought it was so cool!”
I tell James that I still think her best work – in its sense of transformation and its ingrained empathy – was in Pam & Tommy, despite the controversy that surrounded it. The show recounted the very high-profile courtship between Baywatch-era Pamela Anderson and the rock star Tommy Lee (played here by Sebastian Stan), which was followed by their stolen sex tape scandal, Lee’s addiction struggles, and Anderson’s ill treatment by the press. Upon its release, rumours swirled that Anderson – who was not involved in the show’s production – was privately upset by its existence, which was later confirmed by Anderson herself in a documentary about her life released in 2023. She insisted, though, that she bore no ill will towards James herself.
“There’s always a sensitivity around playing someone real, and rightly so, because that’s a huge responsibility,” James says. “And then you have to navigate that in terms of how you put it out in the world...” She trails off. “I reached out to Pamela, and we were never told not to make it, and if there were certain things that could have been different...” She pauses. “I knew we were championing and honouring her story, and I know it was made with such love and integrity and a commitment to truth. I’m proud of the story that we put out, and I’m so in awe of Pamela Anderson and the woman that she is.”
She apologises. “I’m probably not talking about this with much eloquence, but only because it still feels very fresh,” she explains. “The thing about my characters, whether they’re real people or not, is that they really live inside of me. I don’t just rock up and say my lines; there’s a feeling of heaviness, and protectiveness, and at times fear around these roles that I’ve played. It’s not always easy for me to talk about them.”
She adds that she knows it was “crazy casting” for her to play Anderson, but that it feeds into her ethos overall. “I’ve tried to always be brave in the choices I’ve made,” she says. “And I’ve come to learn that when you’re lucky enough to be doing this for as long as I’ve been doing it, there’s so much to this job that isn’t about acting. Sometimes that overwhelms me. I’ve definitely felt at times like, ‘My God, this is all too much – all this other stuff.’” She punctuates the word with force. “But then you get in a rehearsal room, or you act opposite a brilliant actor like Riz or Sebastian Stan, and everything else falls away. I’m so lucky that I get to show up and do this.”
It seems that Lily James, reformed speeder-upper, is finally sitting down and taking it all in.
‘Relay’ is in cinemas
