Lily James admits impatience after Cinderella success

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.

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.”