Page 550 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

But the book itself had really dragged her in: “I think I got a bit sucked into the vortex. I
didn’t know which way to turn at times. It was the mindset of the character: it really got
under my skin – the insecurities, the questioning herself and the paranoia. I think I let
that overtake me a bit sometimes.”

I ask if she went home at night feeling nervy. “I did,” she admits. “And I didn’t know
who to trust. It was creepy but it was also… I don’t know what was coinciding at the
time.”

She won’t be drawn on her love life, but it does seem that her long-term relationship
with the actor Matt Smith (the Doctor, and Prince Philip in The Crown) came to an end
somewhere around this period. There are rumours that she had a fling with the
actor Chris Evans (Captain America) but she’s far too sensible to tell me, and claims to
have spent the summer on her own, at home in London, reading poetry aloud and
watching films. What, all of it, entirely alone? Really? She laughs, a somewhat
suggestive smile passing over her lips. “No comment,” she says. Then she mutters, “I
couldn’t confess to breaking laws, you know.”

Lily James grew up in Surrey, with an actor mother and musician father, neither
particularly well-known, and attended the independent Tring Park School for the
Performing Arts. (She remains best friends with the gang of eight kids she met there,
aged 11.) When she was 18, her father died of cancer; when she went on to attend
the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, she took his first name, James, to
replace her real surname, Thomson, in his memory.

After drama school, she says, “there was a period of time where I was doing auditions
and I wasn’t ever quite sealing the deal. I would get so nervous I had to wear a polo neck
because I’d come up in this huge rash on my neck. I get it when I’m excited, or turned
on, or anything, it’s ridiculous. But instead of trying to pick me apart, my agent just
gave me a pile of books and a list of movies, and told me these were the women I should
be reading about, or the stories I could tell – the fuel. Rather than bog me down in the