Yahoo Lifestyle Lily James On Fashion, Fairytales and Navigating Hollywood
Lily James talks to marie claire about living out her real-life fantasy. Photo: Getty Images
It’s almost a wrap on the set of marie claire’s photoshoot with Lily James. It’s been a long day. The racks of gowns (Gucci, Valentino, Erdem) are waiting to be packed away, and the British actress has slipped into her last look and is gamely doing an impression of the “Staying Alive” dance. In one shot, she flips her head too quickly, sending her mop of mussed-up, chocolate-pudding-hued hair all over her face. The starlet bursts into a raucous, body-shaking laugh – she’s famous for it: less polite peals and more traffic-stopping honks – and throws her head back in glee.
I know what you’re thinking: Cinderella would never do that. She would never dance like a dag or accidentally slap herself across the face with an unruly tendril of hair. But, despite playing the heroine in last year’s blockbuster Disney film alongside Cate Blanchett, and despite show-stopping turns on the red carpet in more than $625,000 worth of extravagant couture dresses fit for a princess on the film’s whirlwind global press tour, and despite the fact that her own career trajectory is starting to look eerily like a fairytale, the 26-year-old is not, actually, Cinderella.
RELATED: 5 Celebrities Who Are Loyal To Their Favourite Designer
Lily on the set of her new film: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Image: Getty.
In fact, she is Lily Chloe Ninette Thomson (the James was adopted as a memorial to her beloved father, who died of cancer when the actress was at drama school), a relatively normal, refreshingly unpretentious Londoner… who just happens to be the actress all of Hollywood is clamouring to work with.
Claims of normality are rampant when it comes to rising stars, but in the case of James it’s certifable. Exhibit A: that clumsy dancing, that supremely unselfconscious laugh. (“Somebody said something funny [on the set of Cinderella],” director Kenneth Branagh has recalled. “She laughed and then she suddenly did a big snort! She didn’t seem remotely embarrassed – and why should she be?”) Also, she loves to travel, and celebrated the end of filming Cinderella by backpacking through Southeast Asia.
Then, there’s the fact that despite growing up in a thespian family – her grandmother was the voice of the supercomputer Mother in 1979’s Alien – she talks of an idyllic childhood growing up just outside London. When her father (an actor, musician and businessman) died in 2008, the then-19-year-old had just started classes at a prestigious acting college in London. “I had a scene [in Cinderella] where I was told my dad had died … it was really hard,” she has recalled. “I think [processing his death] will take the whole of my life.”
Today, James lives in a trendy innercity suburb in a fat she struggles to keep clean, like most 20-somethings. “I love making where I live feel really homey. It’s a new thing for me,” she admits. “I used to live in chaos, and now I’m entering a phase in taking real pride in where I live.”
And although she is considered one of the best-dressed women in London – thanks no doubt to her stylist and close friend Rebecca Corbin-Murray – she’s more comfortable in a pair of overalls, or drainpipe Acne jeans and biker boots. “You have to pretend to be cool, which I never am,” she has said of dressing for parties and events. “I always feel like, ‘Oh God, I shouldn’t have worn trainers.’”
Her Cinderella co-star Blanchett can attest to that normality. “She is totally unaffected. She is like a glass of water,” Blanchett has said of the woman she tormented on screen in her role as the evil stepmother. “As soon as Lily came on set, it was like a breath of fresh air.”
The rest of Hollywood agrees. James got her big break by ruffling a few well-bred feathers in the third season of Channel Seven’s Downton Abbey as the charmingly misbehaved Lady Rose. James dyed her hair blonde for the role, a decision that came in handy when she arrived at an audition for an ugly stepsister in Cinderella. Director Kenneth Branagh asked her to try out for the aforementioned princess instead, and after six punishing auditions (she beat out Margot Robbie and Alicia Vikander for the role), the job was James’s.
RELATED: Lily James' Fairytale Red Carpet Style
The cast of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Image: Getty.
But it’s 2016 that will send James stratospheric. In the frst two months of this year alone she is starring in two major period productions: tongue-very-firmly-in-cheek action flick Pride And Prejudice And Zombies (yes, you read that right) and the Harvey Weinstein produced War And Peace miniseries. Next up will be a World War II epic and a thriller alongside Jamie Foxx. Phew. “It’s been crazy busy,” smiles James. “It’s ‘pinch-me’ the whole time.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that most people who fiddle with Jane Austen come spectacularly undone. Not so with Seth Grahame-Smith, the parody author who has released a brace of novels splicing the world of horror with Hertfordshire. Pride And Prejudice And Zombies (PPZ) entered the world in 2009 to immediate bestseller status, and this month’s film adaptation stays true to the novel’s core premise: re-imagining iconic subject material … as if the rural setting has become overrun with zombies after a devastating bout of bubonic plague.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Bennet patriarch (Charles Dance) takes it upon himself to train his five daughters – Aussie Bella Heathcote is Jane and Suki Waterhouse plays Kitty; James is Lizzy Bennet, Austen’s beloved plucky heroine – in armed combat. Cue nunchucks and daggers being secreted in garters and corsets. It’s a little bit silly, yes. But it also looks like the most fun anyone has had on the set of a period film in a very long time.
“I don’t think I’d [want to] just do Pride And Prejudice,” agrees James. “It’s been done so brilliantly, so many times.” When the parody script first dropped into her inbox, the actress wasn’t convinced that the concept could work. “I was like, ‘This sounds terrible!’ Then within 20 pages [of reading] I thought, ‘This is so cool!’ Somehow these two worlds join together, and it’s a riot.”
James trained in martial arts for four months: everything from how to do kung-fu in a petticoat to how to correctly hold a long-sword. Before each take, she would blast FKA twigs in her trailer: “I wanted to get the blood pumping and feel the heartbeat.”
Along with this bank of handy skills (for the of-chance a bloodthirsty army of undead does descend upon the world), James also left the set of PPZ in love. No, not with co-star Sam Riley’s Mr Darcy. Rather, with the film’s Mr Collins, the bumbling, hapless priest who vies for Lizzy’s hand, played in PPZ by former Doctor Who Matt Smith. “He just made me laugh all the time,” James recalls of working with her now-boyfriend. The actress relished being able to spurn his advances on screen: “It was great that he had to propose to me!” When asked if a real-life marriage might be on the cards, James laughs quickly. “No, no, no, no!”
It’s just as well, because 2016 is going to be a big year for James. Before PPZ hits cinemas in February, she stars in War And Peace, a sumptuous adaptation of Tolstoy’s Russian epic. James plays Natasha Rostova, one of literature’s iconic proto-feminists: a complex cocktail of sexual liberation and stubbornness. “I was joking with my agent that I really want to play a character that’s not already defined, with expectations so high,” says the actress, who committed herself to the 1440-page tome once she booked the job. “I [had] it around during the dining-room scenes [on Downton Abbey] that take 10 years to film. Just before they’d say ‘Rolling’, I’d drop it under the table and it would go thud!”
The cover of Marie Claire March ft. Lily James.
The production is outrageously grand, with lavish costumes and original Russian set-pieces. That – combined with the fact that Natasha’s most famous on-screen incarnation comes from Audrey Hepburn – is enough to send a girl into a head-spin. Luckily for James, she came armed with a piece of wisdom direct from Helena Bonham Carter, her fairy godmother in Cinderella. “I was having a bit of a meltdown ... and she said ‘Oh, have one breakdown a week, it lets people know you’re not a robot,’” she remembers, letting loose that fantastic laugh again. That’s Lily James: a thoroughly un-robotic movie star.
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies opens on February 25. War And Peace is screening on Foxtel’s BBC First now.
