NET-A-PORTER – From how her grandmother inspired her to become an actor to reading the script for Pam & Tommy, Lily James talks through some of the most memorable firsts in her career and personal life

Lily is featured on Net-a-Porter to promote her upcoming show Pam & Tommy! This is her first interview talking about the show, and we get to learn how she prepared for the role, the misogyny in Hollywood during the 90s and her similarities with Pamela. Our gallery has been updated with her gorgeous cover photoshoot, and you can read the full interview below.

NET-A-PORTER — Best known for playing Disney princess Cinderella, the effervescent Lady Rose in Downton Abbey and a free-spirited Donna in Mamma Mia 2, LILY JAMES was not the obvious choice to play Pamela Anderson in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy – as the British actor herself would agree. Here, she talks to EVA WISEMAN about misogyny, privacy and why playing the ’90s Baywatch star has been her most challenging – and refreshingly transformative – role to date

After watching eight episodes of Lily James as Pamela Anderson back to back, it takes me a minute to reaccustom myself with her when we meet. “Hello, hi – how are you?” she asks politely, and suddenly there she is, with all her gentle English rose-ness. Her latest project, Hulu’s Pam &Tommy, follows the fall-out after Anderson and Tommy Lee’s electrician stole their safe and released the private home video locked inside – and ideas of sex, celebrity and privacy were altered forever. Now, almost 25 years later, James has climbed into a prosthetic body suit to tell the story.

The transformation was extreme. This is the actor, of course, best known for playing princesses and the girl next door, always with a certain naive mischief. “I remember once going to the Berlin Film Festival in this amazing pink dress with all these diamonds, but I had an awful urine infection so had to leave the convoy of cars to run over to a petrol-station toilet,” she groans. “That’s my glamorous reality.” When the casting for Pam & Tommy was announced, James’s ability to not just embody the role of a ’90s ‘sex bomb’ but embody her body as well led to outrage in certain areas of the internet. But nobody was more doubting than James herself. “I just had no idea if I could do it,” she considers. And then the photos leaked – and, overnight, the outrage dissolved into disbelief. James, it seemed, had shed Surrey (the English county where she was born), shed her sweetness, slipped into a red swimsuit and become Anderson. For eight episodes at least. Continue Reading

Lily is back with a new photoshoot and a new interview for Shape magazine (October issue)!

SHAPE — For the first time in years, Lily James isn’t hitting the road for a film project or spending her nights making glamorous red-carpet appearances. There’s a pandemic happening, and the actor, whom you likely know as the rebellious Lady Rose MacClare in Downton Abbey and the defiant heroine in Disney’s Cinderella remake, is quietly quarantining at her London home. To her surprise, she’s actually enjoying being still.

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Lily graces the cover and appears in AnOther Magazine S/S 2020 (on sale internationaly tomorrow!). If you want to read the (really interesting) interview, you cand find it below and if you want to enjoy the new photoshoot in high quality, you can head over to your gallery.

ANOTHER — Speaking to Sophie Bew, Lily James talks filming Ben Wheatley’s remake of Rebecca, her dream roles and securing the rights to a book she’s just read – which she plans to produce and star in Lily James is much more than an English rose. The actor, most famous for a litany of leading roles in period dramas, straddles generational appeal: she is as at ease as a teen pin-up as she is playing a beribboned, bonnet-clad aristocrat, a mobster’s love interest or Cinderella. Her forthcoming turn as the second Mrs de Winter in Ben Wheatley’s remake of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic tale Rebecca promises more accolades – adding to those from directors including Danny Boyle and Edgar Wright. Having made bold and fresh acting choices spanning eras and genres, James is a talent intriguing an audience who wish to know more.

It is endearing how openly the actor Lily James bears her insecurities – with an assured self-acceptance nonetheless. “When I’m a bit nervous and don’t know what to say, I go very jolly hockey sticks,” she says. We’re driving across London, from Walthamstow to her dinner date in Soho; she talks animatedly, waving her hands and darting off on tangents as we’re jostled about on the back seat. “I sound like a boarding-school girl who’s 15 years old and has midnight feasts. It’s like a security blanket – I just become some sort of caricature. Sometimes I think, ‘Lily, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?’”

I’m reminded of a scene from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the romantic psycho-thriller famously translated for cinema in 1940 by Alfred Hitchcock. James stars in director Ben Wheatley’s new adaptation of the novel that hits screens later this year and there’s an uncanny resemblance between the actress at this point and her character, the second Mrs de Winter. In the book, the unnamed narrator rehearses a farewell with Maxim de Winter, her soon-to-be husband whom she fears she may never see again, after they fall in love in Monte Carlo.

“‘Well,’ my dreadful smile stretching across my face, ‘thanks most awfully once again, it’s been so ripping … ’ using words I had never used before. Ripping: what did it mean? – God knows, I did not care; it was the sort of word that schoolgirls had for hockey, wildly inappropriate to those past weeks of misery and exultation.”

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Lily is featured in a new photoshoot for The Telegraph. You can read the full interview below!

THE TELEGRAPH – She’s known for playing warm, fizzy characters, from Cinderella to Donna in Mamma Mia!, but are we about to see a different, deeper Lily James?

Lily James and I are on our knees in her dressing room in the basement of the Noël Coward Theatre, packing away her belongings. It is her last day playing duplicitous, ambitious Eve Harrington (opposite Gillian Anderson in the Bette Davis role as Margo Channing) in the celebrated, sell-out 14-week run of All About Eve directed by Ivo Van Hove. James has two shows remaining – a matinee and an evening performance – followed by a celebratory dinner at J Sheekey.

‘And tomorrow I’m meant to be flying to Croatia to spend a week on a boat, sharing a cabin with [friend and fellow actor] Freddie Fox,’ she explains as we stuff a holdall with teabags, biscuits, sunglasses and a framed picture of her actor grandmother, Helen Horton, who was the voice of ‘Mother’, the computer in Alien. ‘She was so glamorous, like a woman from a 1950s movie, so I had her with me for the run,’ says James. She can’t decide whether or not to go to Croatia. She doesn’t want to let her friends down, but life has been hectic and she yearns for a break.

After the trip she will go straight into two weeks of rehearsals and then filming for Rebecca. She will play Daphne du Maurier’s enigmatic ingénue, the second Mrs de Winter, opposite Armie Hammer, in the film by British director Ben Wheatley, who also made Kill List and High-Rise. And in a couple of weeks there will be the premiere of her new film, Yesterday, a modern-day fable about fame written by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle.

The film depicts a parallel world in which the music of the Beatles has somehow been erased from the collective memory, except for one down-on-his-luck musician, Jack Malik, played by newcomer Himesh Patel, whose unique knowledge of the Beatles back catalogue enables him to become a singer-songwriter sensation, leapfrogging a bemused Ed Sheeran – playing himself for laughs – and leaving Suffolk for Los Angeles.

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Back on Tuesday, July 17 – Lily was guest at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where she talked about Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! and played the Singing Whisper Challenge with Jimmy Fallon.

She looked great in Emilia Wickstead Autumn/Winter2018 Collection. Some photos from her interview have been added to the gallery, together with a couple of videos from the episode. Enjoy!

PEOPLE – When the Downton Abbey cast returns for the upcoming big screen movie adaption, it will be without one of the series’ beloved stars: Lily James.

The actress, who starred as Lady Rose MacClare on the PBS drama, confirmed to PEOPLE that she will not appear in the Downton Abbey movie, which has officially been greenlit.

“I’m sadly not, but I’m so excited for it — I’m going to be front row,” James, 29, tells PEOPLE of not being part of the film.

“I spoke to Laura [Carmichael] not long ago and was texting Michelle [Dockery] about Love Island and it’s going to be really exciting. And the whole gang is coming back,” shares James, who stars in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, in theaters Friday.

As for why James’ character will not be featured in the film, the British star confirms that “it wasn’t schedules.”

She explains: “My character Rose moved off to New York, so it would be farfetched to bring her back.”

“I would have loved to have come back for a scene, but for a movie it can’t be like a Christmas special and it needs to be a focused storyline,” James adds, noting, “There was no space for Rose.”

James might surprise Downton Abbey fans in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which finds the actress portraying a young Donna (Meryl Streep’s character) and singing along with her group The Dynamos.

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NET-A-PORTER – If Lily James could play any role from cinematic history, what would it be? “That’s a tough question,” says the actress, who you’ll probably recognize as Rose in Downton Abbey and Disney’s princess Cinderella. She wrinkles her nose in concentration. “I was watching The People vs. Larry Flynt last night,” she offers finally, referring to the ’90s biopic of the American porn baron, starring Woody Harrelson as Flynt and Courtney Love as his stripper girlfriend, Althea Leasure. “Courtney Love in that,” she drops her voice to a whisper. “Oh, God, incredible. It would be good to go that far, to go into a space and be with a director and a group of people and just let everything go. That would be cool.”

This is an interesting moment for James. After a deftly timed flirtation with darker, edgier subject matter in last year’s Baby Driver, plus an eye-catching appearance as Churchill’s secretary in Darkest Hour, the 29-year-old actress is raising her game with three female-led features that promise to position her as a British leading lady with international clout. First up is the long-awaited film adaptation of beloved historical novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, directed by Mike Newell. Later this month there’s Little Woods, an indie gem developed by its 28-year-old director Nia DaCosta in a Sundance incubator; and finally July’s sun-drenched, all-singing, all-dancing sequel Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again, in which James plays Donna (aka Meryl Streep’s younger self).

It is the morning after the Oscars, and James and I are meeting at a north London cafe close to the actress’s home. Ever-so-slightly disheveled, she could be any cute London girl – dressed in reworked vintage jeans (“From Austin”), a huge overcoat, Burberry plaid scarf and sloppy sweater sourced from a local boutique – if it weren’t for the Julia Roberts-level mega-wattage of her beauty, which she only really switches on once we’re ensconced at our table and sipping coffee. After months of Mamma Mia!-ing (“So intense, because I had to sing, I had to dance… and I felt kind of like I was going to screw it up”), she is recovering. “Seeing friends that I haven’t seen in so long and just not feeling guilty about being able to drink wine every day. I can eat what I want and not go to the gym and just be really lazy.” Ergo, she spent Oscars night in bed (asleep), waking to excited text messages from her actor beau Matt Smith (currently out in Los Angeles) about Gary Oldman’s Darkest Hour win. Since then, she’s mostly been watching Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech: “So many times. Like on repeat! I met her at the BAFTAs and she is just a complete rock star. She’s just so completely herself.”

On The Record
With her all-singing, all-dancing role in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Lily James is clearly well-versed in ABBA. But which other artists does she listen to when she’s at home? Press play to watch her wax lyrical about her favorite musical memories in an exclusive behind-the-scenes video