When Theo James first appeared on TV and film screens within the early 2010s, he wasn’t given many probabilities to be humorous. Together with his darkish eyes and chiseled cheekbones, he was slotted into principally boring love-interest roles. He romanced Woman Mary on “Downton Abbey” solely to promptly die. He entered the tasteless sci-fi YA world of the “Divergent” sequence to woo Shailene Woodley.
However sitting in a lodge room on the 4 Seasons Beverly Hills, James, 40, wearing a boxy ensemble of muted grays and browns, was eager to remind me that he actually enjoys being a kind of cheeky bastard.
“I quite like broad humor and s— humor, and I keep getting told off for it,” he says, erupting right into a devilish giggle. It’s fun that I’ll witness a few occasions all through our dialog. James’ eyes widen as soon as he is aware of he’s stated one thing naughty, delighting in his gentle transgression. (He’s nonetheless, for probably the most half, a really well mannered Englishman.)
This high quality in James makes his newest function — or ought to I say roles — an ideal match for the actor. He stars in “The Monkey,” the newest from “Longlegs” impresario Osgood Perkins. James performs each Hal and Invoice, twin brothers whose household is cursed by the presence of a murderous windup monkey their father brings again from a visit. Like many horror movies lately, it’s a couple of legacy of generational trauma, however, not like most of these, it’s additionally extraordinarily humorous. When the monkey begins beating its drum, folks die in grotesque and hilarious methods. (A throat is sliced at a hibachi dinner; a pool turns a diving girl right into a bathe of blood.)
Theo James in “The Monkey.”
(Neon)
However the humor additionally comes from James, who creates a particular weirdness for every brother. Hal is a glasses-wearing introvert attempting to maintain his estranged teenage son away from the phobia that haunts his household; Invoice is a theatrical douchebag with a mullet making an attempt to wreak havoc.
It’s a twin flip that caps a career-redefining final couple of years for James, who due to equally shocking work in “The White Lotus” and “The Gentlemen” is now proving himself to be an actor prepared to take dangers.
“I think early in my career, I felt a little boxed in after doing a kind of slight studio world — and you do have to wrestle your way out of that,” he says. “And then there’s the aesthetics of it, being seen as, you know, f— hunky or whatever it is. You have to kind of force yourself not to be defined by that.”
Not that James isn’t hunky. The truth is, his perfume-campaign-worthy seems — mixed with that sense of gleeful playfulness — are what satisfied Perkins he was the fitting man to play Hal and Invoice. That they had met earlier when James, as a producer, was attempting to develop a tv sequence known as “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?” in regards to the mysterious discovery of a skeleton within the English countryside. That by no means bought off the bottom, however their personalities aligned.
“I would like to do things that are unexpected and are a little subversive,” says James. “The Monkey,” his first horror-comedy, is a large leap in that course.
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
“He’s a movie star, right?” Perkins, 51, says, matter-of-factly. “I wanted to be reminded of the sensation that I had when I went to see ‘Gremlins’ with my parents. The idea that you could see a weird gross-out movie with your family.”
Perkins used Cary Grant as one other instance of the type of throwback efficiency that he was searching for: Grant may very well be an everyman saying humorous dialogue however nonetheless seemed like Cary Grant.
“It’s that sort of beautiful alchemy that Hollywood allows for,” Perkins says.
James himself was pondering of one other basic star when he entered the enterprise — extra of a brooding, critical sort.
“When you start out in your 20s, I think lots of young actors want to be James Dean or something,” he says. “What I realize now [is] what I would like to be is just known for being an actor who does a gamut of different work.”
His path to appearing primed him to be versatile. James grew up in Buckinghamshire exterior London, the youngest of 5 siblings. It was a “chaotic madhouse,” per the actor, during which the youngsters would carry out to face out, however he was the one one to finish up pursuing something professionally.
After learning philosophy on the College of Nottingham, he needed to be an indie rock star and had what he calls a “modicum” of success together with his band Shere Khan. “And some even other worse-named bands than that,” he quips, that self-deprecation as soon as once more coming by way of as he sinks right into a chair, taking part in with a fraying piece of material on the arm.
He had performed comedy at college, taking a sketch present known as “The Slippery Soapbox” to the Edinburgh Fringe Pageant each summer time, however solely thought of auditioning at drama colleges as soon as his girlfriend on the time determined to take action. He bought into the Previous Vic, the place he was skilled in Jacobean Shakespeare. The method didn’t serve him notably nicely when he began auditioning for the display.
“I got out of drama school with a s—load of debt,” he says, erupting in one other cackle. “And plays don’t pay, to be honest, unfortunately. Screen was the place you needed to go to pay off your debt, but I remember having some pretty bad early auditions where they were like, ‘Please stop shouting in my face.’”
“There’s the aesthetics of it, being seen as, you know, f— hunky or whatever it is,” says James. “You have to kind of force yourself not to be defined by that.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
Alternatives did begin to come, together with the “Divergent” movies, primarily based on a bestselling younger grownup sequence and designed to be the subsequent “Hunger Games,” the place he co-starred reverse Woodley because the love curiosity named 4 in a dystopian society. The trilogy was a box-office success however by no means grew to become a cultural phenomenon. A fourth movie was in the end scrapped.
His early ups and downs gave James a wholesome sense of skepticism. “One thing that you learn is, anything you do, everyone around you wants it to be a success, so the voices around you are, like, ‘Hey, this is the best thing ever f—ing made,’” he says. “And even if you are sanguine enough, subconsciously that leaks into you.”
James discovered to take every thing with a grain of salt. “Some people think I’m a little bit — not pessimistic, but not joyful enough,” he says. “But I guess I’ve been doing it long enough that you never know until the thing’s out. And even when it’s out, you don’t really know.”
The trajectory of his skilled life modified when he was forged within the second season of “The White Lotus” as Cameron, a finance dude on trip together with his spouse who likes to celebration and always neg his supposed pal. James was grateful for the chance to do comedy once more, however he additionally felt he knew the character intimately.
“There was a piece of me in there,” he says. I point out that it’s amusing of him to say there’s a chunk of himself in a personality most individuals discover fairly loathsome.
“The nice bits of Cameron are in me,” he says, laughing. Not the components of him which might be an unprintable phrase generally utilized in Britain. He elaborates, this time with out the slang. “What I wanted to bring was a kind of affability,” he says “You want to bring people together. You want to drink and have fun, take the piss out of yourself and others around you, never take yourself too seriously, which I think are the positives of him.”
A seal of approval from “White Lotus” writer-director Mike White additionally turns out to be useful in terms of convincing different administrators of an actor’s expertise.
“What Mike White does is so insanely strong that when he ratifies an actor — or gives someone their moment — it’s just so deeply impressive,” Perkins says. “In a way, you almost draft off of that. You’re like, ‘Oh, Mike White saw in Theo this amazing thing. If Mike White validates it, I’m probably going to try it too.’”
“I wanted to be reminded of the sensation that I had when I went to see ‘Gremlins’ with my parents,” says Osgood Perkins, director of “The Monkey,” pictured on set with James.
(Asterios Moutsokapas / Neon)
Perkins explains he has a considerably hands-off strategy to the performances in his movies, principally leaving the actors free to interpret the script as they need. However James says he and Perkins did focus on Eighties Tom Hanks as a touchstone for Hal — “the everyday Joe,” the actor says. “The world had beaten him down a bit, but he had a twinkle in his eye and a slight irreverence to the things that happened around him.”
For Invoice, then again, James imagined him as a petulant baby in a person’s physique, an concept complemented by the costume, which finds him rocking a too-tight go well with jacket that makes him appear to be a glam rocker.
As Invoice, James totally indulged his goofy facet in deleted sequences that he describes as “incredibly weird.”
“There was one scene where I was crawling around on my hands and knees yelping like a dog, there’s another one of me crying, there’s another one of me licking the microphone when a character appears at the house,” he says. “We went pretty hard on it, and I’m lucky some of that didn’t end up in the movie.”
Perkins, nevertheless, was most impressed by the smaller emotional beats that James delivered to Hal, particularly one during which he utters the title of his mom for the primary time since she died.
“When he does that moment, it’s really gorgeous,” Perkins says. “You see it choke him and you see it be this thing that’s too precious to even give out to this horrible world. The precious name of his mom was not something that he even exposed to the elements.”
Though “The Monkey” relies on a Stephen King brief story, it’s additionally a deeply private film for Perkins, the son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins and mannequin Berry Berenson, who each died in tragic circumstances. (Anthony saved his AIDS analysis a secret earlier than dying in 1992; Berenson was killed in one of many hijacked planes on 9/11.)
Nonetheless, the film’s legacy of household trauma additionally rang true for James, the daddy of two younger kids.
“I am constantly terrified that I am impressing something upon them, which they don’t want in their later lives,” he says. “You try to be as good as you can as a parent, but you’re going to make mistakes.”
Certainly one of his fears is about not being current sufficient. The character of being a working actor means typically being known as away for months at a time. After he leaves Los Angeles following the premiere, James will head to Korea to shoot “The Hole,” co-starring “Squid Game” actor Hoyeon, a mission he describes as “‘Misery’ meets ‘Parasite.’” He’ll then return to London, certainly one of his house bases, to shoot the second season of “The Gentlemen,” the Netflix Man Ritchie crime drama that has additionally considerably raised his profile.
James wasn’t fairly positive how the hyperviolent-yet-jokey “The Gentlemen” could be obtained.
“It was a complex shoot where I didn’t know what the outcome necessarily was going to be,” he says. “But it’s actually been very satisfying in a way because what Guy does connects with quite a broad audience.”
Individuals of all ages have been stopping him on the road to go with him on his work as Eddie Horniman, the U.N. peacekeeper turned crime lord.
“There’s something quite glamorous, sexy, when you go to parties and tap people on the shoulder and you hug each other,” James says about fame, of which he’s cautious. “Do that occasionally but mainly keep your old friends that you’ve known since you were a kid.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
James and his spouse, actor Ruth Kearney, at the moment break up their time between London and Venice Seashore. Now that their daughter is almost 5, they’re attempting to resolve whether or not they need their kids to go to high school in California or England.
“I like London — it’s good to be close to Europe and some cultural sensibilities,” he says. “But I do love California as a state with young kids. It’s the great outdoors. You don’t have to wrestle a coat on a 4-year-old every morning. The gray of London is pretty monotonous.” (On the day we communicate, Beverly Hills feels extra like Bloomsbury: overcast with a perpetual drizzle.)
Not that James looks like a Hollywood sort. Regardless of modeling for Hugo Boss, he asks me to examine the tag of his pants once I ask him what model they’re. (Studio Nicholson, for these questioning.) He started working with the U.N. refugee company on account of the Syrian civil conflict. His grandfather was a Greek refugee from World Battle II who ended up in Damascus, and he needed to honor that historical past.
“The beginning of it was just trying to remind myself and others and members of my friends and family that things like that can happen all the time,” he says. James continued his volunteer work partly as a result of he was uncomfortable with the “murky world between doing your job” after which “this idea of a celebrity.” He’s now a goodwill ambassador.
As for the celebrity recreation, he’s effective with it, carefully.
“I realized dipping a toe in is fine, but be careful of the elixir of it,” he says. “There’s something quite glamorous, sexy, when you go to parties and tap people on the shoulder and you hug each other. Do that occasionally but mainly keep your old friends that you’ve known since you were a kid. That will ground your identity.”
Now that he’s turned 40 — an “old dog” in his parlance — the roles he takes need to be value it, he says: odd, humorous and difficult. Identical to “The Monkey.”
“I would like to do things that are unexpected and are a little subversive because I think that will be more interesting for me as an actor,” James says. “I think when you have to be away from your family, for example, you don’t want to be away and you’re there thinking, ‘Why did I do this crock of s—?”
There’s that not-quite-pessimism, the proverbial monkey on his shoulder. It’s serving him nicely.