Theo James Is Done Being Put in a Box

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 realize 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.” 

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 marveling 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.”

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 centers 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.”