When Theo James started trending on Twitter, shortly after The White Lotus’s season two premiere in late October, the actor says he received a text from creator Mike White: “My thesis was right.”
The HBO anthology series’ newest instalment has put sex at the forefront, with infidelities and flirtations and desires spinning around the show’s satirical centre. James’s character, a hotshot financier named Cameron, can’t get past the first episode before teasing his friend’s mercurial wife, Harper (Aubrey Plaza)—and accordingly, viewers—with a hotel-room strip. It’s brief but revealing, titillating if mysterious. When news outlets asked James about the scene, he said the initial plan was to film something more blatantly full-frontal before they scaled it back. Cue the articles, and of course the thirst tweets.
Since the end of The Sopranos the crown prince of prestige television has been on a trippy ride that's involved making music, award-winning podcasts and the world's best Instagram feed. Now he's back at the centre of TV culture with a role in buzzy drama The White Lotus
“We’re all animals interested in the carnal and fascinated by desire—that scene was very specifically written and then talked about with Mike and I and Aubrey,” James tells me over Zoom from his North London home. Of the media coverage that followed, he adds, “To simplify it like that is to simplify the work of the show. When it’s reduced to the banality of single-headline clickbait, it is a bit frustrating.”
James, you sense, is being polite there—he stops himself a few times over our conversation as we go deep on what marks something of a career turning point. The British actor has toiled through abandoned franchises (Divergent) and action flops (Underworld: Blood Wars; How It Ends), finding room in between for lower-profile but richer work on TV (Sanditon) and in indies (Mr. Malcolm’s List). By the time a script for season two of The White Lotus came his way, he didn’t expect to nab the role merely because the previous season “was the toast of the town,” and he didn’t feel in that circle, or of that company. “The older you get and the more work you do, you realise that no one is owed anything,” James says. “But trying to find opportunities that will evolve you as an actor—of course that was constantly on my mind and it still will remain on my mind forever.”
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So he wasn’t waiting around for Mike White’s phone call, exactly. When he got it, though, he allowed himself to go for it. He put all of that hunger into Cameron, delivering what might be his most dynamic screen performance ever. He’s charming and repulsive and sexy, unsettling and brilliant and horrifically stupid, all in one highly familiar package—that of the millennial tech bro, riding high on ego but with a persistent insecurity that leans toward menace. James found White amenable to real collaboration. The actor pitched Cameron as “physically dominating,” taking up the most space in any conversation, grabbing his friends’ shoulders like he might rip them off, only with an affectionate smile. He wanted him always eating or drinking something, to visualise a voracious appetite that extended to his sexuality. These ideas proved intrinsic to the final characterisation.
“Playing Cameron reminded me of stuff from when I was very young, how I began in theatre,” James says. “It was very freeing.”
James trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and before he skyrocketed to fame a little less than a decade ago, he made his mark onscreen doing the kind of work that’d thrill any young actor: a bit part in a starry Woody Allen movie (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), a memorably nasty guest appearance on the first season of Downton Abbey. “Careers are funny. They take you in directions that you try to control, but life is uncontrollable, as we know,” he says. Enter Divergent: the dystopian YA blockbuster that made Shailene Woodley a star and, for a time, ruled the box office. As her primary love interest, Tobias, or “Four,” James emerged as Hollywood’s newest heartthrob. Lots of attention duly followed.
“All the Americans in the cast. Mike White, the Italians. No one really knew what I was saying"
Yet while the Divergent series quickly flamed out after its 2014 debut, James was locked in until its backers finally called it quits. (Following the third movie’s box-office collapse in 2016, a planned fourth film and spin-off series were preemptively canceled.) “You do a certain type of film and you sign contracts where you are beholden to those roles for a certain period of time and people see you in a certain light that you have to wrestle your way out of,” he says. “That is a hundred percent the case with actors—and it was definitely the case with me.” He rejected the spotlight, opting to go hyper-private and becoming increasingly disillusioned with what he calls “those types of films,” as well as the press. “I felt I didn’t have the fluidity to move in the directions that I wanted. You’re very much in a certain type of role—and those roles can be pretty fucking boring.”
Indeed James’s trajectory didn’t quite change with the end of Divergent; browse his IMDb and you won’t see him in any Oscar winners’ movies or on many Emmy-winning TV shows, the way things started out. “We are reliant on the whims of others,” he tells me at one point—but one reason why he launched his own production company, Untapped, in 2019. (His partner in the company is Andrew D. Corkin, who backed acclaimed indies including Martha Marcy May Marlene and We Are What We Are.) So far the banner has helped realise an eclectic batch of projects, including James’s well-received sci-fi vehicle Archive and Netflix’s new docuseries Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? In all this, James says he’s found a new way to look at an industry that he hasn’t always had the easiest time navigating. “You’re like, how will we make this? How will we package this? How does this work?” he says. “You start understanding everyone around you.”
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Whether you’ve seen it or not, James is in the midst of a period of varied, interesting work. The White Lotus being the most popular piece of the batch means more people are catching on right now, but the actor has appeared quite determined to break beyond the Hollywood hunk bubble for years. The effort materialized in fits and starts—the nature of the business—and has been largely facilitated by the small screen. In 2019, James starred in and executive-produced an acclaimed take on Jane Austen’s unfinished romantic manuscript, Sanditon, starring as the fiery male lead Sidney Parker (at least, in the first season—James departed after the series was renewed, telling me that “ending in a way which was uncomfortable and unsatisfactory felt very right for him as a character”).
He then moved to The Time Traveler’s Wife, the rare HBO drama to be savaged by critics and fail to score a second season. The melodramatic adaptation, which costarred Game of Thrones alum Rose Leslie, intrigued James for the simple challenge of playing a character from “very young to pretty old,” and found opportunities within that for a juicy challenge. The negative reception surprised him. “It was disappointing in many ways,” he says. “I thought the show definitely wasn't perfect, but that there were some interesting through lines there for a story.”
I ask if, unlike with Sanditon, this was a case where he would’ve jumped at the chance to do another season. “You learn to forget pretty quickly,” he replies flatly. “You numb yourself, or at least train yourself to forget, pretty quickly, because it's problematic to not do that.”
That tide may be finally turning. The sheer size of his White Lotus performance, salacious takeaways and headlines aside, leaves a lasting impression on both the viewer and, maybe, the actor himself. A hard one to shake off, you could say. On set some takes could run nearly 10 minutes long as James experimented before the camera with Plaza, Meghann Fahy (who plays Cameron’s wife, Daphne), and the rest of the cast. He got to be funny, which Hollywood hasn’t allowed for quite some time, even though James started out doing Edinburgh Fringe Festival comedy. He’s only seen three episodes as we chat, and is marvelling at the bolder acting choices that have made it into White’s final cut. Again, there’s some acquired wisdom there: “You feel a freedom to take big stabs, and if it doesn’t land, it doesn’t land—but you see that the good stuff can land.”
Episode five sure was a hell of a trip
James is now two weeks into filming The Gentlemen, producing and playing the lead in the new take on Guy Richie’s 2019 hit, reimagined as a Netflix series. This version centres on a soldier who returns home following the death of his father, and becomes part of a kind of landed gentry with his inheritance—albeit with a criminal empire bubbling underneath. James describes the show as a comedy and an action thriller and a social drama rolled into one—a messy, vibrant coalescence of everything the actor has been bringing to the table of late.
Is he nervous, then, about how it will be received—either another step forward, or another setback? Certainly he knows that back-and-forth all too well. James responds simply, and like a true industry veteran: “No, no, definitely not. I mean, if you did that, you’d be fucked.”
