Not Your Princess: Pounding Shots and Talking About Gender Equality With Lily James
As the living embodiment of the most famous Disney princess, Lily James knows how lucky she is to have that glittery fan base. But life isn’t all Cinderella stories, and three new roles, including Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, could make the fairy tale much more interesting.
It’s Wednesday at 3 p.m., and Lily James is handing me a shot of Patrón XO Cafe, a sticky coffee-infused tequila that goes down way easier than it should. “It’s good, isn’t it?” the actress asks after we toss them back. “I much prefer it to, like, tequila-tequila.” She licks her lips. “I find that really drinkable.”
We’re at a pub in Finsbury Park, a neighborhood of North London that isn’t known for being particularly posh, and since James has the luxury of an afternoon off, it feels appropriate to day-drink. It started with a few frames of bowling next door at Rowans Tenpin Bowl, then some pints, then talk of something called a “strawpedo,” where you reportedly suck Smirnoff Ice out of a bottle as quickly as possible. Thankfully, this pub, a typical British working-class spot called the Twelve Pins, doesn’t serve Smirnoff Ice. So instead, we’re slamming back shots of tequila.
Here’s what you’re probably thinking: Isn’t Lily James known as a good-girl actress? She’s doing shots on a Wednesday afternoon in a dingy pub? Didn’t she play Cinderella?
And yes, James is exceedingly nice and noticeably polite. The 29-year-old actress has cultivated a career playing kind protagonists in period pieces like Downton Abbey and the upcoming Netflix drama The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and she embodied one of the most iconic fairy-tale princesses in Disney’s live-action adaptation of Cinderella. Her characters always overcome the odds, get the guy, and live happily and sweetly ever after. There’s a reason no one writes anything negative about James — because how could you? But public perception, filtered through Instagram and TV and the press, isn’t always a representation of the truth. The reality is that James is like any person, complicated and layered. One minute she’s recounting her work as a patron of the North London branch of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, and the next she’s telling a story about being recognized in a bathroom line at the Glastonbury Festival at 5 a.m. You can be a good person and still do shots in the afternoon.
When James first started working as an actress, after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London in 2010, she didn’t feel quite as pigeonholed as she does now. Her work in theater was far edgier than the women she embodies these days onscreen, and ultimately it was being cast as Cinderella that tipped the scales toward always being seen as the good girl. She’s ventured off course, particularly in last year’s Baby Driver, but James always seems to come back (or be pulled back) to the amiable blonde heroine.
There’s a goodness to them that I want to get away from.
“I think every actor is typecast,” she says with a shrug. “You have to remind yourself, I can do this for a long, long time, and there’s so much time to reinvent yourself or move in a totally different direction.” Still, she’s ready, actually more than ready, for a next step. “I’ve just had this feeling that I can’t get rid of recently — and sometimes what you think is right for you is total nonsense anyway — that I’ve wanted to step away from playing characters that feel quite honest and open,” the actress says. “There’s a goodness to them that I want to get away from.”
James’s latest project, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, doesn’t totally veer in that direction, but she would have taken the role as the young Donna Sheridan no matter what. The film, a sequel to 2008’s hit Mamma Mia!, an adaptation of the ABBA-inspired stage musical, was an opportunity for James to embrace her theatrical beginnings. She sings and dances — well — and filming on the Croatian island of Vis was a remarkable experience she’ll never forget. The actress was cast soon after auditioning, while literally on her way to Glastonbury with her boyfriend, The Crown actor Matt Smith. “He pulled over and waited for me while I went in and sang a few Mamma Mia! songs and did a few scenes,” she says. “Then I was like, ‘Peace, I’m out,’ and we went to the festival and had the best weekend. My agents rang me on the Monday or Tuesday, and I had completely lost my voice. They were like, ‘You’re going to be doing ABBA in a few weeks.’ I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ ”
There’s a distinct sense of pressure that comes with playing the younger version of a character originated by Meryl Streep. But don’t ask James about that pressure. “I genuinely can’t think about it,” she says.
To prepare for the film, which reveals how Donna first met the three dads to her daughter, Sophie, James watched the original movie “hundreds of times.” She created an audio track of Streep’s scenes and listened to it daily. “I can do every line,” the actress says. “Every moment of that film I know by heart. I think I could mimic her pretty well, but then in the moment, when you’re there on set with the cameras rolling and you’ve got another actor in front of you...the thing I like about acting is fully surrendering to that moment and not trying to control what happens.” She laughs. “So I think I just forgot to do anything.”
As for meeting Streep for the first time? James wept. “She was singing this song, and it’s a beautiful song, and it made me cry,” she remembers, and she was also thinking, “ You’ve got to hold it together because she’s coming over. I just hugged her and said hi. She’s such a cool woman.”
James has two other film projects out this year, which couldn’t be more different. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, an adaptation of the best-selling novel, is arriving via Netflix, and Little Woods, an indie movie in which James stars opposite Tessa Thompson, is awaiting a release date. The latter, directed by Nia DaCosta, is exactly what James wants to be doing in her career right now. She plays a single mom living in a trailer in North Dakota, and her character spends much of the film struggling to get an abortion in an unsympathetic American health-care system. “There was something about that [subject] that made me love acting and trust that I could do it,” James notes. It was also the first time she had worked with a female director on a film. “I just felt like I could completely be, and I trusted there was someone that really had my back from my point of view, making sure we’re getting this right,” she says.
It’s not just actresses moaning for more money — it's the direct impact on our communities, and that extends to all things with diversity and women.
That, perhaps unsurprisingly, leads us into a discussion of the Time’s Up movement and gender disparity in Hollywood. James has been a supporter of both Time’s Up and ERA 50:50, a campaign for equal representation and equal pay in the entertainment industry launched by a group of women in the U.K. The actress recently attended a meeting for ERA 50:50 and was horrified by the statistics presented. “It’s not just actresses moaning for more money,” she says. “It’s about the direct impact on our communities, and that extends to all things with diversity and women. It’s got to be fixed.” She frowns and says adamantly, “I’ve got to get more involved.”
That involvement may mean adopting an inclusion rider on future projects, which James has spoken to her agents about. “I don’t know if people will laugh at me if I say I need to have it, because I guess you have to have a certain amount of status to actually enforce those things,” she says. “But actually, I think whatever point you’re at it’s something you can say, and we’ve all got that power. It’s certainly stuff I’ve talked to my agents about. When I did Little Woods, it was a really split crew. I guess because women were producing it and there was a female director and they were aware, like, ‘Let’s keep this as evenly split as we can.’ And it was great. It made such a difference.”
Although James doesn’t love using Instagram, she knows that she has a platform and that impressionable fans are listening to her. Whether it’s promoting Time’s Up, raising money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association (which James supports because she lost her uncle to the disease), or attempting to use less plastic after being traumatized by The Blue Planet (a British documentary series about ocean life), James is willing to publicly stand up for what she believes in.
“There’s one part of me that’s like, I’m an actor and I want to just do that,” she says. “A lot of the stuff that comes along with that isn’t stuff I would have ever thought I’d do. I want to be an actor and then have my own life be private. But then I also realize the importance of that platform. Why not use it and for the better? And why not really become passionate about something you think could make a difference? For me, I think a lot of the people who follow me might be young girls. That’s pretty important. If I feel like I could be some sort of useful voice to them, then that’s my responsibility and it’s worth taking on.”
I don’t think people expect to see Cinderella in jeans bowling at midday or in a pub having a pint.
Despite her social following, James, who arrived for the interview in jeans, a leather jacket, and black platform Burberry shoes, with her hair in a messy topknot, is convinced that no one ever recognizes her. “I can just hang out in bowling alleys with loads of kids,” she says, with an air of bemusement. “I don’t think people expect to see Cinderella in jeans bowling at midday or in a pub having a pint.”
That version of Cinderella is more relatable, though, and so is this version of James. She may have a famous boyfriend and a jet-setting career, but she just wants to enjoy life and not let work get in the way. “You could go home early and sleep and not drink beer and not have a club sandwich when you get in at 2 in the morning,” James says, taking a bite of one of the French fries we ordered at some point after pounding shots. “But that’s not as fun. I don’t want to look back and think, I wish I’d made more of my life and the people in it. I don’t want that to be the cost of being an actor. It’s not worth it.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the August 2018 issue of Allure. For fashion credits, see Shopping Guide. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.
Fashion stylist: Beth Fenton. Hair: Syd Hayes. Makeup: Georgina Graham. Manicure: Trish Lomax. Set design: Suzanne Beirne. Production: Calum Walsh.
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