JAMES IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT
Darkest Hour actress inspired by grandmother’s flight from Nazis
In the forthcoming Mamma Mia! sequel — called Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again — Lily James plays the youthful flashback version of Meryl Streep’s ABBA-singing, wonder-mom Donna.
“Yeah, like, who’d be crazy enough to do that?” says the 28-year-old star of Downton Abbey and Disney’s live-action Cinderella. To prepare, she watched the films Streep made in her 20s. “What Meryl does is unlearnable,” she says. “So I still haven’t got my thoughts in order about it. But we’ve finished filming now. I have dug my grave.”
In conversation she’s earnest but also drolly self-critical, with a kind of free-spraying star quality that hasn’t been pinned down securely.
Darkest Hour, the Winston Churchill biopic starring Gary Oldman, was one of her more recent preoccupations.
James plays Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s plain-spoken receptionist in the film, out on Blu-ray and DVD Tuesday. The character is based on the real Layton, whose 1958 memoir, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, was among the reading material director Joe Wright handed James. For her, the book was a gold mine: “Because it’s made up of letters written at the time, not recollections, all these moments are minutely and intimately described.”
Closer to home lay another seam of insight. James pored over the wartime recollections of her French maternal grandmother, Marinette, now in her late 80s, who fled her home village near Paris at the age of 11 when the Nazis invaded, as the events depicted in Darkest Hour were playing out. Her grandfather William, a minister in the RAF, persuaded his wife to commit her memories to paper. The result was a harrowing child’s-eye-view of a Europe in ruins.
“She talked about listening to bombs fall, then going outside to find a truck driver she had befriended lying dead in the driver’s seat,” James says.
After the war, by the time her family returned home, the place had been looted. The impressions from this time that most stuck with James were almost cinematic: memories of a fur coat swirling like seaweed in the flooded cellar, and ransacked cutlery glinting in the garden stream.
“And of course after I read all this I had to talk to her about it, which was really emotional,” she says. “Because it’s a part of all our families’ recent history, yet it feels so distant.”
James’s real surname is Thomson: She took her stage name in memory of her late father James Thomson, a sometime singer and actor who died of cancer when she was 19. She’s also dating within the profession: Her boyfriend of three years is the actor Matt Smith, whom she met on the set of the 2016 horror spoof Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Knowing at least one good man in the industry may have been a comfort in recent times, as widespread allegations of sexual harassment in Hollywood kept surfacing — not least around the producer Harvey Weinstein and the actor Kevin Spacey, both of whom James has worked with.
Weinstein was one of the forces behind the BBC’s acclaimed 2016 adaptation of War and Peace, in which she played Countess Natasha Rostova. Even though her own interactions with Weinstein were limited, she says the thought of him now “makes me feel really sick to my stomach, actually. I find it really horrifying. And I completely stand in solidarity with every woman and man who has spoken out, because it has to stop.” As for Spacey, he was her co-star on last year’s Baby Driver, a film she believes would have been pulled from release had the allegations surfaced a few months earlier than they did.
“And you just think, ‘God, all of the other cast and crew who were innocent would have all been affected,’” she says. “Like, Edgar Wright, the director, started planning that film 21 years ago.”