Masterpiece adapts Jane Austen novel Sanditon
BEVERLY HILLS, California — Actor Theo James made a big mistake in college. He majored in philosophy, accumulating a whopping student debt in the process. After graduation, he had no idea what he was going to do.
“It was a degree that was fairly interesting, but fairly useless after university,” he says.
“I was debating what to do with my life — as lots of people do. I had had a dream of becoming a musician. And, thank God I didn’t do that because I would’ve failed miserably,” he says.
“At the time, I had a girlfriend who was thinking of auditioning for the old Vic — which is kind of an old-school drama school which does a lot of classical stuff — and it kind of went from there.”
James never really decided to become an actor. We know him from the Divergent series trilogy, two Underworld films and his brief (but memorable) role as Lady Mary’s Turkish lover, who inconveniently drops dead in her boudoir in Downton Abbey.
He spent two years studying at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, massaging the student debt even more.
“I ran out of money many, many times and have had some strange jobs to help my income,” he says. “One of the strangest jobs I’ve ever had was I worked for the National Health Service, where you had to go and pick up the [medical] equipment of people who were on death’s door. It was quite a sad job,” he says.
“I did labouring for quite a few summers, which I was really terrible at because I was instantly complaining and would get really tired. I worked in bars. I was not good at any of those jobs.”
He was sharing a flat with three friends, none of whom were actors. “We scraped money together and hustled and tried to survive. I had five or six years of student debt so the first chance I had to make money on screen — I like theatre, but as a newbie it doesn’t pay — so I started doing bits of film to help pay off this debt and it kind of went from there.”
James thought he was in luck when he snagged his first part in a movie with Bryan Cranston. “I was in about two scenes and it was really fascinating because I was extremely nervous,” he recalls.
“It was the first time I’d been on a film set — it was in Prague or something. They call ‘action’ and on sets, and they have a buzzer. And I had this walking shot with a Steadicam where I was giving information to Bryan Cranston. It never made it to the movie.”
On Sunday, he stars in Masterpiece’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s final but unfinished novel, Sanditon. Austen died before she could complete the novel about a seaside resort and the collection of characters that collide there. The miniseries has been adapted by Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, Little Dorrit) and features James as the charming but unpredictable Sidney Parker. “I play a very closed, complicated, judgmental, short-tempered male lead,” he says. “I see myself in him every day,” he laughs.
The youngest of five, James, 35, grudgingly admits he might have been slightly spoiled as a child. “Having a big family, everyone’s grabbing for what they can get, but I was probably spoiled. I had it the easiest.”
Marrying Irish actor Ruth Kearney a year and a half ago also changed him, he says. “It made me a better person. Diving into another chapter in your life — a period of adulthood which distinguishes yourself from the selfishness of the life you’ve led before, and accepting that youth and hedonism may be in the past.”