Page 548 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

everything hit your nerves, so you can perform. So it feels as if you’re constantly trying
to guard yourself or let people in, put walls up or break them down. Your roots are often
being ripped out and put somewhere else, so it’s sometimes harder to feel that stability
in life which… yeah.”

She trails off, taking a sip of her tea as we sit in the drizzly garden of the Somerset hotel
where she’s staying, having decided she can keep her mask off as we are outside, at
opposite ends of a table. She’s dressed in civvies: baggy dark green trousers that would
vanish you in a forest, her hair its natural brown, a star who could hide in plain sight.
Far enough into fame, after a decade in the business, to know how to hold some of
herself back, but young enough (at only 31) to still want to give it all away.

Yet even this level of socialising is a stretch, as she’s currently shooting The Pursuit Of
Love, an adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s 1945 comic novel, for the BBC and living in a
bubble with the rest of the crew, who are all regularly tested for Covid. She seems as if
she’s trying not to say anything too bleak; perhaps it would come as too much of a
surprise from the sunny face with the megawatt smile who played the younger, carefree
version of Meryl Streep’s Donna Sheridan in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, as well
as Lady Rose in Downton Abbey. There is a quiet confidence to her roles; a youthful
lightness that belies a certain precision – from Cinderella in Kenneth Branagh’s
highest-grossing directorial hit, to Churchill’s secretary in Darkest Hour, and Natasha
in the BBC’s epic War And Peace.

Lily James with Kristin Scott Thomas in Rebecca. Photograph: Kerry Brown/Netflix

The thing is, though, we’re here to discuss Rebecca, which James finished shooting
“before the world fell apart”. It’s the new film of the Daphne du Maurier gothic thriller,
in which James plays Mrs de Winter, the naive new bride of a wealthy man whose first
wife died in mysterious circumstances. First made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, and
now by the cult British director Ben Wheatley, it reveals that things lost at sea can come
back to haunt you – and it appears to have soaked her thin skin right through.