Page 553 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

She recalls making Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again in what feels like a different world.
“It was one of the happiest times in my life, living on an island and singing and dancing
with the most wonderful group of people.” The experience was not without
awkwardness, though, due to the slight issue of being cast as the junior incarnation of
an actor with 21 Oscar nominations (and three wins) to her name. “Trying to say in a
sentence: ‘I’m playing the young version of Meryl Streep’? That bit, I sort of winced at.”

We talk about the state of the world now, in particular the QAnon conspiracy theory,
which has people believing that Hillary Clinton and Oprah and Obama “are all part of
the thing where they drink babies’ blood. All on Epstein’s jet. I mean, if I read it for long
enough – and also I’m horribly gullible and horribly easy to convince, so if someone
talked to me passionately about it – I’d probably go, OK, yeah, absolutely.”

I find this hard to believe – surely she couldn’t? – but the more she explains her life, the
more she turns out to be rather astonishingly available to strangers. There’s not just the
shamanic healing that she does “over Zoom, with music and drumming and a healer
who has led me through all these different rooms in my brain where I had all these
messages: I met my grandmother’s dog Dylan, who taught me to laugh.” Or the time she
walked past a fortune-teller on Venice Beach in Los Angeles, “and she came up to me
and” – James almost shrieks at the memory – “she said some shit to me that was so
right, it was terrifying. But immediately the person I was with said, ‘Come on, Lily, she
knows who you are’ which was true, maybe.”

Does she think she absorbs the energy given off by other people, and does that help as
an actor? She says yes, but that it can be a hindrance, too. “I think great actors take it
and transform it into something new and, I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m too…
almost submissive in that way.” Because she’s so influenced by the characters she plays,
she says, “it’s weird to wonder if I’d be a different person if I hadn’t played them. That’s
quite a depressing thought, actually. You have to have a greater sense of self, which I
suppose I’m working on.”

At this point an unexpected pile of cakes appears, which it transpires James has secretly
ordered, knowing I had a horrible journey to the interview and might need perking up.
It reminds me of the way her characters can sometimes subtly and crisply deliver a
whole new angle you didn’t see coming – pivoting, for instance, from dismissable
secretary to Churchill’s secret weapon in Darkest Hour. She says she’s gullible, and
perhaps she is. But I think Lily James knows exactly what she’s doing.

• Rebecca is out now on Netflix.