Lady Rose makes her getaway...
LILY JAMES, star of Downton Abbey and Disney’s blockbuster Cinderella film, is in the final stages of negotiations for a ‘corker of a part’ in the new movie by the cult film-maker behind Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz.
Director Edgar Wright and producers at Working Title Films want Lily (left) — who plays Lady Rose in Downton — to appear in Baby Driver opposite Ansel Elgort, the up-and-coming American leading man who was in the weepie The Fault In Our Stars and the Divergent films with Shailene Woodley and Kate Winslet.
If minor points of her contract can be sealed, Lily will join Wright and Elgort on locations in New Orleans in October.
Elgort’s character is called Baby and he’s regarded, according to one executive working on the film, as ‘the greatest getaway driver in America’, adding that the film is ‘an action car chase movie fuelled by a lot of music’.
Lily will play Deborah, the young American who Baby is madly in love with. ‘She’s his muse and his conscience,’ I was told.
The worldwide success of Kenneth Branagh’s film Cinderella, which has made more than $500 million, has catapulted 26-year-old James into the A-list.
In short order she will star in War And Peace for the BBC, and be seen as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride And Prejudice And Zombies on the big screen. She has also been part of an ensemble with Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller in the chef drama Adam Jones.
In May, she’ll play Juliet opposite her Cinderella leading men, Richard Madden and Derek Jacobi, directed by Branagh for his new theatre company at the Garrick Theatre.
Wright will direct Baby Driver from a script he has been re-tuning over several years.