![los angeles, california october 20 theo james attends the los angeles season 2 premiere of hbo original series the white lotus at goya studios on october 20, 2022 in los angeles, california photo by matt winkelmeyergathe hollywood reporter via getty images](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/gettyimages-1671192339.jpg?crop=1.00xw:0.866xh;0,0.0238xh&resize=980:* "Los Angeles Season 2 Premiere Of HBO Original Series "The White Lotus" - Red Carpet")
It’s a rare performance that makes you warm to a character and want to throttle them at the same time. But it’s what Theo James achieved as Cameron on Season 2 of The White Lotus, Mike White’s sensationally popular chronicle of the lives of the various guests at a five star luxury hotel on HBO. He plays a hedge funder, whose purpose at the resort seems to be to consume as much as possible, be that food, drink, drugs or sex, while flaunting his excess in front of his wife and his best friend, all the while trying to sleep with the best friend’s wife. Despite all this, James’s Cameron has a dangerously magnetic quality: a charisma that allows him a free pass to behave diabolically and have people smile and roll their eyes as he does so. “He's a devious and morally loose person, but I wanted to make sure that he was - within the prism of a villainous character - as likeable as possible, the type of person that you want to be around a lot,” James tells me over the phone.
It wouldn’t be quite right to call The White Lotus James’s big break. At 38, the Buckinghamshire-born actor has been around Hollywood for well over a decade, rising to fame when he landed the role of the heartthrob Tobias in the Divergent series opposite Shailene Woodley, just a couple of years after completing his training at Bristol Old Vic. But this feels like the moment when the world wakes up to James as a mature actor, in a comedic role that allows him to use his good looks for loveable rogueishness rather than to be a poster boy, a box he was stuck in for a long time. He was locked into the Divergent franchise for three films over four years, before the series was eventually cancelled ahead of its projected fourth film.
“Yeah, I mean, fuck, that was two years after I graduated or something like that. I had swollen debt from five years of university. I think those kinds of films can also get pushed out without enough creative thought about content. It was an experience that I didn't enjoy one part of, really,” he says. But he doesn’t like to dwell on the negatives. “You can't enjoy every job you do in life, and it's naive to think you’re going to. But also it was a great opportunity at the time."
After Divergent, James went on to star in the Underworld series, as well as the Netflix film How It Ends, and the first series of a TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon. In some ways, though, James is glad that he didn’t skyrocket to A-list megafame and success earlier in life, but has enjoyed a steadier rise instead. “I wouldn't have been able to handle it at 21, I would have become a crack addict I'm sure”.
There’s something of James in Cameron. Not the political views: Cameron is a classic tech bro, divorced from questions of ethics in his pursuit of success, who proudly admits to not voting. “You can kind of trick yourself while you're playing a scene, that you're like, they're not that fucking bad! And then you hear it back and you're like, Oh my god, Jesus fucking Christ, he's an animal,” he says. But the gregariousness and affability seem close to who James is as a person. He is quick to joke and disinclined to take himself too seriously; the kind of person it’s easy to warm to. “The cajoling, good time, the boisterousness, there's definitely a side of me to that,” he admits, “to the point where friends texted me after the episode with the wild night of drinking where he's forcing people to do shots saying, ‘I think we've been on nights out together like that, haha’.”
He first knew of The White Lotus as a fan of the series. “The brilliance of what Mike does is that he loves the richness of comedic mundanity. And by that, I mean, he loves the idea of seeming vapidity in conversations, but underneath that is a torrent of complex issues about society.”
James’s appearance in the first episode of the new series made predictable waves online when his character was shown fully naked in the background of a scene with Cameron’s friend’s wife, played by Aubrey Plaza (a prosthetic penis was used, I’m told). But although sex is unquestionably a major concern of The White Lotus, there’s much more to it for James. “It's definitely reductive to think it's just a romp. To say it's about sex, yes, definitely. Sex and sexuality is part of it, carnality is part of it, but what does sex mean other than fucking? Sex is about gender and sex is about how we see ourselves as people in society and how we've evolved as a species and how we use sex and interpersonal play every day,” he says.
It’s a characteristic answer, both in its thoughtfulness and easy way with swearing. Really, the appeal of the part to James was how Cameron represents a certain kind of struggle for power, and a “dinosaur” species of masculinity that he hopes is now waning. “As all the characters are in different ways, he's searching to understand himself: outside wealth, he fears that he doesn't exist. He works in a very male dominated industry, so testosterone is king for him, chest puffing, lack of self reflection. All these things are, in a funny way, revered as masculinity, as manhood”.
A couple of times during our conversation, James hedged his answers in case they sounded “pretentious”, such as his reflections on Cameron as representative of capitalism. “He's all about growth, more, eating more, fucking more, being more. And those things come with huge problems on a larger existential level.” But James does not come across as a pretentious person. He treats acting not as a higher calling, but as a job first and foremost. “It's a way of making money and I am satisfied by it, but beyond work it doesn't hold value for me. Because, for me, family and friends, those things are timeless, whereas work? Just a piece of your life. And life is very short.”
He’s not a man much given to rigid career goals or five-year-planning. “People talk about plans don’t they, but you can't plan most things in life. I think post coming out of the Old Vic, perhaps I was too self-serious, I'm not sure why. I think initially, I was attracted to sombreness, but part of it is just how the cookie crumbles.”
In fact, despite having played almost exclusively dramatic roles until now, comedy is where he first flexed his acting muscles. He didn’t go straight to drama school, instead undertaking a philosophy degree at the University of Nottingham, and spending his free time doing sketch comedy. He took shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every year as an undergraduate. “I'm sure they were terrible – but we’d have improvisation-offs, stuff like that,” he says, “and I’ve always wanted to do more comedy, because I love it.” His next project, he tells me, is “funny and chaotic,” a Netflix series called The Gentleman directed by Guy Ritchie and loosely based on Ritchie’s film by the same name, in which James plays the son of an aristocrat who inherits his family estate, which turns out to contain the largest weed farm in Europe. “But your career takes you on different paths, and some of it you control and some of it you don't,” he adds.
James admits that he likes to be in charge of a situation, something that is not often afforded in a profession where you are bouncing between projects at the whim of casting directors and what opportunities come your way at any given time. In 2019, he co-founded his own film and TV production company, Untapped. “I think it's a natural reaction that probably lots of actors have in a space where you don't have a lot of control,” he says, “and perhaps, if we're talking about the franchise that I was on, you felt unsatisfied with the creative aspect of it, so you try and wrestle a piece of it back yourself.”
Post The White Lotus, James will surely be busy. He’d like to take it all on: big parts, small parts, roles on camera and behind it. “Before my time, people would do rep theatre, travel around the country and do shitloads of different parts. I'd love to do a kind of a better paid version of that,” he tells me. Just as Cameron has an insatiable appetite for all life’s pleasures, James intends to go into this next phase of his career guns blazing, soaking up as much experience as he can. “We’ve only got one life,” Cameron says as he raises a glass one night at dinner on the show. But it could just as well have been James.
