Lily is back with a new photoshoot and a new interview for Shape magazine (October issue)!
Magazine Scans > 2020 > Shape (October)
Studio Photoshoots > Outtakes & Sessions > 2020 > Session 002
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.
Lily, 31, has definitely earned the downtime. Since her graduation from drama school in 2010, she has been working nonstop, appearing in several hit TV shows and movies and racking up accolades from critics for her extraordinary depth and range on-screen.
Next up, Lily stars as Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, the highly anticipated Netflix remake of Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic novel, which hits screens on October 21. The psychological thriller centers on the doomed relationship between Mrs. de Winter and her dashing husband, Maxim, played by costar Armie Hammer. To fully dive into the emotional intensity of their roles, she and Hammer studied the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” by Sylvia Plath, which details a heartbroken woman on the brink of madness. “We read that poem so many times, and we found this twisted love story that came out of it. That helped us navigate our relationship in the film,” she says. “Playing our roles became organic and took a life of its own.”
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.
Studio Photoshoots > Outtakes & Sessions > 2020 > Session 001
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.”
Yesterday, Lily attended the Burberry Spring/Summer 2020 Show during the London Fashion Week. I love her look and you see it for yourself with high quality pictures now added in our gallery!
Public Appearances > 2019 > London Fashion Week – Burberry S/S20 Show
Lily was spotted at the Bvlgari Serpenti Seduttori Launch Event in London on September 15. A few pictures have been added to the gallery, make sure to check them out!
Public Appearances > 2019 > Bvlgari Serpenti Seduttori Launch Event
On september 10, Lily did a live readings from Margaret Atwood’s anticipated new novel The Testaments, a sequel to the 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale during the ‘In Conversation With Margaret Atwood’ at the National Theatre in London.
Lily is featured in a new photoshoot for The Telegraph. You can read the full interview below!
Studio Photoshoots > Outtakes & Sessions > 2019 > Session 005
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.
On June 13, Lily was on “The Graham Norton Show” to promote ‘Yesterday’ with her co-star Himesh Patel. High quality pictures from have been added to the gallery!
Public Appearances > 2019 > Visits “The Graham Norton Show”
