In his mid-20s, he told fans that while he wouldn’t take a photo with them, he’d be more than happy to chat. “But the reality is, no one really wants to fucking chat,” he drawls. A good-natured, full-chested cackle. “No one cares!”
And James loves to chat. Out of curiosity that feels sincere, he asks many questions and listens intently, leaning in to hear over the restaurant din. But he does admit a deep-seated aversion to talking about himself, too – a dislike of the acting profession’s “portentousness” and its tendency to navel-gaze. “I think I had a fantasy of the old English greats, the American greats,” he says. “We knew very little about them.” Our food arrives: on James’ plate are golden ribbons of tagliatelle and snowy flakes of crab; the comforting perfume of tomatoes and fresh basil swirls up from mine. “But any industry that takes itself too seriously, I find a bit cringe – sorry, I’m spitting on your bloody food,” he interrupts himself. “I’m sure if I were to do a Jungian analysis, there would be deeper reasons in my psyche.”
He digs into his pasta. “This is nice. Crab, lemon, chili, butter,” he lists appreciatively. Over the course of the evening, he seems politely cautious about meriting an interview, wondering on my behalf what he – or others in his industry – haven’t already said. “The Englishman in me is like, you know, people will get bored,” he says. He’s familiar with the dance: “In this world of soundbites, actors become good at saying things in small doses.”
So while James has a habit of dodging conversations about himself and his acting, get him talking about the ideas behind his work and he’s hard to stop. When I bring up The Gentlemen, he readily dives into the class politics that are dialled up in season two. “We don’t think [it does], but class defines Britain,” he says. Ritchie and James had agreed that while the first season was fun, the show needed to go deeper, darker.
At first, the duke takes to the business handily. We’re lulled by textbook Ritchie imagery: wads of cash in luxury duffel bags; fetishistic shots of guns and silencers laid out on a table; a blatant but enjoyable Godfather pastiche. But Eddie becomes more and more intoxicated by the promise of his own ancestry: Giancarlo Esposito’s drug baron Stanley Johnston feeds him the narrative that his bloodline traces back to the ancient Greeks, and it just so happens that the duke intends on taking his weed operation to the Italian market.
It’s this idea of lineage and bloodline, James suggests, that begins to corrupt such men. Once someone starts believing they were “put here for a fucking reason” – that they’re somehow destined to hold power – “people start thinking that they should be there for a reason,” he says. “Then they might do anything in the name of staying there… which is the most toxic thing.”
Eddie’s ambition grows, but he also begins to fracture: a little too much collateral damage; a little too much rage under his calm veneer. “The idea of the soul being blackened to a point where you can’t return,” says James. “That’s an interesting conceit, especially in the world that we live in – because what I find at the moment is the erosion of morality. Whether that’s Trumpism, whether it’s Farage.”
James’ mother is Scottish, his dad was raised in New Zealand, and his grandfather was a Greek doctor who sought refuge in Syria during the Second World War. He is proud to be British, but also understands himself as a “child of the Commonwealth” and a product of migration. His wife and her mother are Irish. “In some ways, the crimes of the British Empire are big in my head,” he says. “There’s revulsion for the history of one of the largest empires and slavery machines on the planet. And there’s pride in a country I hope can do better in many ways and grow.”