BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Actor Theo James made a big mistake in college. He majored in philosophy, accumulating a whopping student debt in the process. After graduation he had no idea what he was going to do.
"It was a degree that was fairly interesting but fairly useless after university," he says.
"I was debating what to do with my life _ as lots of people do and still do every day. I had a few options. I had a dream of becoming a musician. And, thank God I didn't do that because I would've failed miserably," he says.
"At the time I had a girlfriend who was thinking of auditioning for the old Vic _ which is kind of an old-school drama school which does a lot of classical stuff _ and it kind of went from there," he shrugs.
What "went from there" was an acting career, though James never really decided to become an actor. We know him from the "Divergent" series trilogy, two "Underworld" films and his brief (but memorable) role as Lady Mary's Turkish lover who inconveniently drops dead in her boudoir in "Downton Abbey."
He did spend two years studying at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, massaging the student debt even more.
"I ran out of money many, many times and have had some strange jobs to help my income," he says. "One of the strangest jobs I've ever had was I worked for the National Health Service, where you had to go and pick up the furniture of people who were on death's door. And I had to pick up the (medical) equipment and take it back. It was quite a sad job because often these people were bereaved only a couple days after, and I'm there to pick up this equipment," he says.
"I did laboring for quite a few summers, which I was really terrible at because I was instantly complaining and would get really tired. I worked in bars. I was not good at any of those jobs."
He was sharing a flat with three friends, none of whom where actors. "We scraped money together and hustled and tried to survive. I had five or six years of student debt so the first chance I had to make money on screen _ I like theater but as a newbie it doesn't pay _ so I started doing bits of film to help pay off this debt and it kind of went from there."
James thought he was in luck when he snagged his very first part in a movie with none other than Bryan Cranston. "I was in about two scenes and it was really fascinating because I was extremely nervous," he recalls.
"It was the first time I'd been on a film set _ it was in Prague or something. They call 'action' and on sets, and they have a buzzer. And I had this walking shot with a Steadicam where I was giving information to Bryan Cranston. It never made it to the movie.
"We were walking and I was waiting for someone to say 'action.' But they never said 'action,' it was this industrial buzzer, and I kept forgetting my lines."
His big chance was cut from the movie, but James kept on plugging, managing a stint as the brand rep in print ads and commercials for Hugo Boss.
On Sunday he stars in "Masterpiece"'s adaptation of Jane Austen's final but unfinished novel, "Sanditon." Austen died before she could complete the novel about a seaside resort and the collection of characters that collide there. The miniseries has been adapted by Andrew Davies ("Pride and Prejudice," "Little Dorrit") and features James as the charming but unpredictable Sidney Parker. "I play a very closed, complicated, judgmental, short-tempered male lead," he says. "I see myself in him every day," he laughs.
The youngest of five, James, 35, grudgingly admits he may have been slightly spoiled as a child. "Having a big family, everyone's grabbing for what they can get, but I was probably spoiled. I had it the easiest."
He landed in trouble often as a kid and was suspended from school. At 18 he and his two brothers found themselves in a scrape in East Africa, but he won't say what it was. A few years later, while traveling in India, he was stricken with a water-borne virus and spent two weeks in the hospital. It marked a turning point for him, he says.
"I didn't have anyone around to help. I'd been fairly blessed with very supportive parents and stuff, coupled with the fact that understanding hyper-poverty was illuminating for me."
Marrying Irish actress Ruth Kearney a year and a half ago also changed him, he says. "It made me a better person. Diving into another chapter in your life _ a period of adulthood which distinguishes yourself from the selfishness of the life you've led before, and accepting that youth and hedonism may be in the past."
'PLANET EARTH' THROWS A LUCKY 'SEVEN'
The magicians who've taken us to the wildest places on Earth before with the "Planet Earth" series are buckling up for an astounding seven-part series that visits all seven of Earth's continents with "Seven Worlds, One Planet." This has already appeared on the BBC, so Americans are in for a treat. It's such a big deal that the show will premiere simultaneously on BBC America, AMC, Sundance TV and IFC Jan. 18. Sir David Attenborough will, once again, serve as the wonderstruck narrator.
With super new photo technology, the intrepid souls who brave the worst of nature's wrath to film the shows are able to capture scenes we've never seen before, like the largest aggregation of great whites ever filmed in Antarctica.
BRODY TO STAR IN STEPHEN KING SERIES
Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody will star in an adaptation of Stephen King's spooky short story "Jerusalem's Lot" for Epix, with filming to begin in May in Nova Scotia. Brody will play a captain who returns to land with his children after his wife dies at sea. He settles in a sleepy town in Maine (of course) but soon his past begins to haunt him.
It's a perfect role for the versatile performer, who tells me he's wanted to be an actor since he was 14. His mother is professional photographer Sylvia Plachy, and she had an assignment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.(
"They had a program for kids and it dawned on her that I should just _ not as a career at all _ but it would be a good outlet for me because I was very imaginative and rambunctious and wild. I got into trouble," he admits.
"I wasn't terrible at school, but I grew up in Queens so I had a number of troublemaking friends in the neighborhood and kids I'd met in school. When I went to the High School of Performing Arts, I went to an art school and it was full of troublemakers ... I was very passionate about it early on and knew I loved acting and connected to it early on and got to grow without it being a burden."
GOLDBLUM'S EXPLORATORY MIND
Jeff Goldblum's curious mind continues to roam into familiar places egged on by Disney+ with "The World According to Jeff Goldblum." On Jan. 17 he explores the nature of pools, from an L.A. water park to NASA's neutral buoyancy lab.
Goldblum tells me the death of his older brother cemented his attitude about life. "I had a brother named Rick. There were four of us, he was four years older than I was ... He died when he was 23 and I was 19. That made a mark on my psychic emotional landscape," he says.
"He was a writer, was traveling _ he was very adventurous and kind of romantic. He loved Hemingway and he was near Casablanca and got a quick kind of disease and died in 24 hours. It starts to ask you: What can change about you? And even when things change and even when you lose things that you thought were a part of you _ as we all do _ we lose our youthfulness, our abilities, our relationships seem to be fleeting finally. Everything goes finally. Everything's going to go. We finally lose our lives. Everything is constantly changing but who are YOU? Are you all the arrangement of things, the element of your life that keeps changing? Or are you something deeper beyond all that that never gets changed no matter what is collapsing around you? That interests me."
