Theo James wants to help share the stories of Syrian refugees who have been displaced from their homes.

The British actor, known for his work on The Divergent Series and the Underworld movies and currently starring in the London play Sex With Strangers, says he is driven by a personal connection to their plight: his Greek grandfather Nicholas Taptiklis fled Athens during World War II, eventually making it to Damascus, Syria. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, Taptiklis later worked for the organization that was a precursor to the UNHCR to fight the spread of typhoid and tuberculosis in refugee camps.

As a High Profile Supporter with the UNHCR, James traveled to Athens in 2016 to visit refugee camps holding Syrians who had fled their country in an effort to learn more about the crisis. Since the start of the civil war in Syria, 11 million people have been displaced throughout the world. Tens of thousands of refugees have run to Greece, and now live in camps—run both officially and unofficially—scattered throughout the country.

James says reading his grandfather’s diary, which detailed his escape, shed light on the situation unfolding in Syria.

“It made me think of how quickly we are able to forget recent history,” James says in reference to World War II. “Because it is so recent, but now, it seems so far away. It rammed home the fact that the situation we’re in at the moment is the biggest humanitarian crisis since then.”

What James gleaned from the visit to the camps was how refugees who had left Syria were “generally regular” people, a contrast to how the crisis is often portrayed in the news. During his visit, he met families who had led full lives back in Syria—one man and his wife, who were in a camp with their three children, had previously worked as attorneys.

“The way it’s presented is single males ravenously looking for job opportunities, or, in the worst case scenarios, fear-mongering about terrorism or enforcing culture,” James says. “But it’s families trying to save themselves and their kids. And they have the same ambitions they had when they left Syria.”

He was also struck by the conditions of refugee camps, and the long waiting periods refugee families face before they are resettled into new countries. Some families wait for years before even getting on the lengthy waiting lists to be resettled, James said, leaving enormous gaps in their lives. According to James, negative attitudes and political rhetoric toward refugees and immigrants in Europe and the U.S. don’t help the situation.

“I think the mistake is to view these people as opportunists or trying to grift a system or trying to infiltrate with plans for aggression against Europe or America,” he says. “These people are leaving because they have to, and they don’t want to leave. They’re escaping death.”

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified the agency where Nicholas Taptiklis worked. He worked for a precursor to the United Nations Refugee Agency, not the agency itself.

WHEN YOU WATCH Theo James in Season 2 of The White Lotus, you get the sense that he’s big—a big personality who drives almost every scene he’s in, yes, but also just a large, physically imposing man. You can attribute that to the 37-year-old British-born actor making it a point for his character, Cameron, who he calls a “pretty abhorrent” finance bro, to have a constant desire for dominance.

Cameron rarely sits still; he’s always got his hands on someone’s shoulders, always got his hands around someone’s neck, always got his hands…somewhere. He’s also always eating, always drinking, and always causing trouble. In any given moment, Cameron threatens to consume anything and everything within a five-foot radius. “I wanted him to represent the animal in a way. He’s like a gorilla,” James says on an early December afternoon in midtown Manhattan. “I wanted that to be metaphorical, but also semi-literal in places,” he says. “On one hand, it’s affectionate, but it’s also part of his need for dominance and control.”

James is a tall man—about six-feet flat—but the way he excels at dominating his scenes, you could convince yourself he’s half a foot bigger. He leaned into that physicality early in his career as the male lead in action-heavy movies like Divergent and later entries in the Underworld series. But since the former franchise fizzled out and the latter came to a natural conclusion, James has since refocused his energy. He’s had four other projects in 2022: acting in HBO’s series adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife (which was cancelled after one season), the subversive sci-fi thriller Dual, and the regency romance Mr. Malcolm’s List, and producing the Netflix docuseries Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?. These are projects that are made on a smaller scale than his action franchises of past, and that offer more opportunities for flexibility and variety.

Much like writer-director Mike White’s hit first season of The White Lotus, the second go-around has dominated the pop culture conversation. And after Season 1 saw stars like Murray Bartlett, Jake Lacy, and Sydney Sweeney get much-deserved career boosts, it’s fair to wonder if James might have his eye on taking a second crack at that big-budget franchise space he once occupied. The answer? A resounding no. “I feel doing this kind of work is definitely more fulfilling,” he says, looking off into the distance introspectively with his hand tracing the slight scruff of his chin. “The older—and achier—I get, the more I’ve realized that it’s got to be about enjoying it in the moment, because life’s too short.”

Life is definitely short. And that fact is hammered home when watching The White Lotus, a series where so much happens in the span of six or seven episodes that viewers almost—almost!—forget that at the end of the day, someone’s going to wind up dead. As the season comes to a close, we talked to James about his experience checking into TV’s most seductive series.

Men’s Health: When you first got involved with The White Lotus, was Cameron always the character you wanted to play?

THEO JAMES: It was always Cameron. I think one thing they were very keen on with Cameron—and Mike and I evolved this—was that he needed to be charming. He’s such a prick, really, that without charm he becomes very unlikable. He is unlikable, of course, because he’s doing all the horrendous things that he does. But if you bring an element of charm, at least he’s the kind of man you want to hang around with. That was very clear from the beginning.

What’s the key for bringing that charm to a character who’s otherwise a jerk?

I wanted him to laugh easily, to be loose, to not be affected or bothered, not be too terse or angry. He’s quite dry occasionally as well. I wanted to bring out in him some sense of humor. I just wanted him to be a good-time guy—be the life and soul of the party, pushing the energy of the scene forward, for better or worse.

How much of Cameron’s physicality—the way he puts his hands on Ethan’s shoulders, or his arm round Daphne’s neck—is decided on the spot?

All of that is really made on the spot as you begin to feel like you are the character. I always feel that during the first couple days of filming, you’re trying to figure out who this person is. You’re trying to get them into your skin a bit. Sometimes that can happen like that, and sometimes it takes longer. I knew from the first audition—even from just reading the scene—who he was because I’ve met versions of that man. And there are parts of him that are in me; in my better moments, I can have that good-time energy. I wanted to link that to parts of my own personality.

Cameron seems to be a multi-millionaire, if not a billionaire. Did any real-life one-percenters influence the character?

I based it off a mixture of people. I based it partly off of a university friend who used to work for Goldman Sachs. There are elements of his personality in Cameron, like the way he spends money. The more devious side [of Cameron] is partly based off of someone I knew for a period of time years ago who worked for a massive hedge fund—the way that man operated around wealth, but also his views on gender and masculinity. In a way, Cameron is quite old school. As a result, I think he’s confused to be in this new world that he’s living in. He’s a bit of a dinosaur in some ways.

Is it difficult for you to sympathize with a character who has such antiquated, sometimes noxious, world views?

Yeah, it’s tricky. It’s suggested that [he and his wife Daphne] are libertarians, or that they don’t vote, or at least don’t vote in the way you would want to—which is a tough pill to swallow. I’ll be honest: I remember doing some of the scenes, and me and Meghann [Fahy, who plays Daphne] would be like, “Oh god, I feel like part of my soul has been destroyed.” But the thing about fiction is that you need to be able to play characters on multiple ends of the spectrum. The good thing about Mike’s writing is it doesn’t all have to be one worldview. They don’t vote, which is really dumb. But Mike also has a commentary about the other couple [played by Will Sharpe and Aubrey Plaza] and their neoliberal views.

Daphne refers to Cameron’s friends back home as being “dark triad,” which are a group of personality types that I’m sure a lot of people looked up and were horrified by. She claims he isn’t like them, but there’s an insinuation that he’s not unlike them too.

I mean, he is a pretty abhorrent person, but as an actor, you have to like at least a part of him, otherwise you can’t play him. I never saw him as hyper-right wing or anything. But I think he operates in a world where he doesn’t really care. That’s probably worse, in a way. Well, I don’t know if it’s worse. But I just saw him as unequivocally nonplussed about world events around him, because he’s wealthy and white and privileged.

This season includes a lot of commentary on maleness. For example, Bert, Dominic, and Albie seem to represent three generations and outlooks on masculinity and misogyny. What do Cameron and Ethan represent to you?

I think Cameron represents an antiquated world view, and an antiquated view of maleness. Whereas Ethan is more evolved. He’s more thoughtful and reflective about masculinity. The commentary, then, is: where is the in-between? You need a piece of the animal and a piece of the existential.

Were there any scenes that scared you?

The only one was when Cameron comes on to Harper in front of his wife. That was fairly bold. I still wanted him to be likable, because that’s the fun of his character, so I was treading that tightrope. I mean, he’s still a scumbag, obviously. But I wanted to thread the needle in a way where you’re repulsed by him occasionally, but also you love being around him.

There were a lot of fan theories throughout the course of the show. What was your favorite?

I heard one from a friend about Cameron and Daphne being part of a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that they’re trying to manipulate Ethan into. I thought it was a good theory, but not correct.

How did you go about building some of your on-screen relationships?

When we arrived [in Sicily], I called Meghann and said, “If you’re up for it, let’s hang out as much as possible, especially in the first couple of weeks.” She was totally up for it. We both agreed that we needed to be in a place where, as a married couple, Cameron and Daphne are affectionate towards each other in a way that feels completely natural at all times. We had to work on that because it can be hard sometimes. In other jobs, you get there and you’re supposed to be a married couple the next day, and you barely know each other. So we worked on that specifically.

In the last few years, HBO has really upped the ante on male nudity. You spent a lot of time naked on The Time Traveler’s Wife, and had a nude scene in the very first episode of The White Lotus. What’s your perspective on on-screen nudity after those filming experiences?

You know what? I was just like, Well, I’ve done enough of that. It’s part of the lexicon of TV and film now; it’s part of the landscape and it’s inescapable.

It was particularly well-executed in The White Lotus. Your scene wasn’t played just for shock value, but very much established and played into the power dynamics that the show explores. Do you see it the same way?

Yeah, the scene when Cameron takes his clothes off in front of Harper, Mike tussled with different versions of that, because it needed to specifically tread the line of: “Was it accidental or deliberate?” And it’s exactly that. It’s a power play. He’s showing himself with no hint of fear. It all goes back to dominance.

It really set the tone for the season, and it’s the kind of thing that Mike White is so good at writing. It’s a conversation starter. What was your ultimate read on that moment?

I think ultimately, even though he seems like a man of total confidence, when his friend—someone he thought he could control, whom he put in a certain position in his mind—becomes a billionaire and is suddenly elevated in wealth and status, it actually sends Cameron into a spiral. He’s attempting to do anything he can to have one-upmanship over Ethan. From the beginning, he essentially has his eyes on Harper.

You’re shirtless a lot, and you’re outside a lot in the show. What sort of physical preparation did you do? Did you work out a lot before heading to Italy?

Yes, yes. I wanted him to look a specific way, because that type of man is often quite vain, and they’re very into fitness. Because Cameron is of that “Joe Rogan world,” I wanted him to look physically dominating as well. I wanted him to have physical presence. I worked on lifting heavy to achieve that.

Cameron clearly sees himself as an alpha male. And now that Ethan is suddenly in a position of higher status, Cameron has a competitive need to regain his place as the alpha. What do you think that dynamic says about modern masculinity and how these sorts of men have relationships with one another?

Well, I think Cameron actually loves Ethan—there is genuine friendship there. It’s a whole thesis about gender and masculinity from multiple angles. I would say Cameron is defined by wealth, he’s defined his identity through wealth, he’s defined his masculinity through wealth. Then when Ethan has more money than him, he’s now unassured of his own identity. He doesn’t know how to project himself in the modern world without being the wealthiest man in the room. That says something about a toxic male need for dominance; without it, they don’t understand their place in the world.

You’re working on Netflix’s series adaptation of The Gentlemen with Guy Ritchie. What’s your experience been and what can people expect when that comes out?

It’s set in the world of The Gentlemen, but not the same characters or story. It’s about a soldier who comes home because when his father passes away. He inherits this big estate and becomes a Duke kind of unwittingly. Then he realizes that the estate is broke, and that it’s being controlled by a big crime syndicate, which he has to try to pull the family out of it. It’s funnier than I thought it was going to be—it’s a lot of comedy and it’s really anarchic and fun.

We’ve talked about some things you’ve done, and some things you wouldn’t do. What are some things you haven’t done yet that you’d like to accomplish?

I’d love to do play at The National in London. I love that space. I would love to play a real person in history. I think it’d be interesting to be able to play someone that you could directly look at archival footage of and be able to draw from that. I think that’d be really interesting. Yeah, other than that, keep on trudging.

Anyone in mind specifically?

No.

No?

I wouldn’t say, just because then I’d sound like a twat.

His smouldering looks made him a Hollywood heartthrob (and earned him an army of fans) but Theo James says he’s more than a pretty face. He talks to Stefanie Marsh about stripping off on stage, why he won’t pose for selfies and the downsides of being very, very good-looking. 

Forgive me if I rehash an old sexist joke — but it’s hard to recognise Theo James with his top on. The one he’s wearing, teamed with blue

jeans, is sensible, navy, long-sleeved — not even skin-tight. Doubly disappointing for the British actor’s sizeable female fanbase, who like to watch this ‘smouldering at all times’, ‘incredible hunk’ dressed in as little as possible, he is armed today not with a Chiappa Rhino 50DS revolver, but a freshly pressed green juice deadly weapon (against colds and flu).

At the Shoreditch café in which we meet, he is alternating between sips of coffee and green sludge through a straw. ‘Actors can be very boring to talk to,’ he says, with a straight face. ‘I only want to talk about this green juice.’ He laughs — perfect teeth. He frowns — brooding brow. He is in a relationship, probably still with Irish actress Ruth Kearney (he won’t go into it). Still, what James’s love-struck legion of fans would give to be here.

On the internet, James is seen mostly through the lens of young, pulsating female lust: gifs of him with his pecs out; videos with panting ‘THEO JAMES IS FLIRTING!!’ headlines; a montage of his clips painstakingly strung together to Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’.

Parts in The Inbetweeners Movie and the British supernatural drama Bedlam have been overshadowed by his roles in the £440m-grossing Underworld franchise, in which he plays a vampire revived from the dead by Kate Beckinsale’s fellow vampire, and alongside Shailene Woodley in the dystopian Divergent film series (the first grossed £235m, although the fourth and final movie was shelved last year amid talk of a possible TV adaptation). The ‘Hunky Action Hero’ label has stuck to him like velcro for eight years now. Not necessarily with his say-so.

‘Yeah. That’s what has to be escaped from,’ he says.

Perhaps he feels boxed in as ‘too perfect-looking’; an actor/model? ‘Well,’ he says, smiling through his alarm. ‘I hope they don’t say the latter because I may as well jump off a cliff!’ Yet for a long time he was the face of a Hugo Boss fragrance.

‘Well, you are a model and an actor,’ I say.

‘I’m not a model.’

We compromise on the fact that he ‘might have the looks of a model’.

‘It’s a tricky one, right,’ he says, ‘because I can’t decry it, can I? But purely in terms of career progression, if you don’t want to do things that are representative of that image, and if you have half a brain — yes, that’s definitely something you have to escape. The aim is to be multi-dimensional. And being seen as “hunky…”’ he says, starting to mumble into his coffee, ‘…whatever that word describes… can be restrictive. Yes.’

This year, he hopes, will be the one that changes the incredible-hunk typecasting. ‘I’m 32. As fun as those films are, they’re not particularly representative of who I am as a person. I’ve got to get past that.’ Just in time — ignoring the ‘big clusterf***’ that James says the film adaptation of Martin Amis’s London Fields was (of which more later) — all the signs are there that he may be about to succeed.

First there was his role in last year’s War On Everyone, in which James played a funny, aristocratic drug-addict. And he’s just finished a run at Hampstead Theatre in the American two-hander Sex with Strangers, starring alongside Emilia Fox. The role involved stripping off on stage for live sex scenes, which doesn’t appear to have fazed him: ‘Nudity happens in probably 70 per cent of films. I was interested in this story because it’s about what modern sex is, what modern love means — and you don’t turn around to the director and say, “There’s going to be no sex”.’

But the major game-changer comes this September, when he will star in Backstabbing for Beginners, an adaptation of UN whistleblower Michael Soussan’s autobiography. Directed by the highly respected Danish film-maker Per Fly, it tells the story of how Soussan helped bring to light the UN oil-for-food scandal, in which Benon Sevan, the former director of the oil-for-food programme, was accused of accepting bribes from Saddam Hussein’s regime (claims he denied). James plays Soussan opposite Sir Ben Kingsley’s Sevan.

Its timing is perfect. Here is a tale of institutional corruption, the release of which coincides with the newly politicised atmosphere in Hollywood. Whistleblowing has an undeservedly glamorous reputation, says James. ‘With Snowden, he’s become an icon. Yes, whistleblowing has become more acceptable — but the interesting thing about Michael is that he didn’t become a hero. People did f*** all about it. He left the UN and found it very hard to get work for about 10 years afterwards.’

The youngest of five (he has two brothers and two sisters), James grew up in Witney, just outside Oxford, former home constituency of David Cameron. His father worked as a consultant, his mother for the NHS — a clue as to why their son ended up one year in a summer job, ‘picking up equipment from disabled people… who had passed away recently. That was really hard. Really depressing.’ He holds strong views on NHS funding cuts. ‘I have friends who are junior doctors. What they get paid is unbelievable for the experience they have.’

He attended Nottingham University and graduated with a philosophy degree. He had been acting here and there in amateur productions — but his mission was to go global as guitarist and frontman of his band, Shere Khan. Acting won; it was while at the Bristol Old Vic drama school that he caught the eye of an agent.

Urban myth holds that his film career took off after his cameo as Kemal Pamuk in the first series of Downton Abbey (ratings soared when his character died of a heart attack after a forbidden tryst with Lady Mary). In fact, it had been his first film role, a small part as a personal trainer in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, that attracted the big Hollywood studios, who began to cast him in power sci-fi. The roles emerged ‘by proxy’; he says he never relied on his looks. In fact, they have their drawbacks: ‘There are preconceptions of what you’re going to be like as an actor, as a person. People I’ve worked with who’ve become friends have said to me: “I assumed you were going to be a dick.”’

His casting in London Fields, in 2013, must have represented a welcome change. He played the posh banker Guy Clinch; the cast included Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. James won’t say anything about his co-stars (or their acrimonious breakup) but seems to blame the appointment of an inexperienced American director, Andrew Cullen, for the fact that it hasn’t been released.

‘I love the book — that’s why I wanted to do it. The director was American and adapted a Martin Amis book about very specific British class roles. It’s tricky because it is a subject that is very nuanced — and the director missed the nuance of Amis’s fiction.’ Court records show that Cullen sued the producers for $1m (he says they tampered with the edit). The producers then sued Heard for 10 times that amount for supposedly having failed to fulfil her ‘contractual obligations’ regarding sex scenes.

James is a stage name. His actual surname is Taptiklis; his paternal grandfather was a Greek doctor who lived in Athens and joined the anti-fascist resistance after the Nazi invasion of Greece, before sailing across the Aegean for four days to Turkey with a view to joining the Allies. ‘Then he went overland to Damascus, and ended up in Cairo, working for the British Navy… So only recently, in 1942, my grandfather was going from Europe to Damascus — a refugee on a boat, doing exactly what people are doing now, but in the other direction.’

Brexit, he says, ‘was a huge shock. I mean… it’s so deeply depressing, if I’m honest. I know that people say they’re tired of too much bureaucracy — but on a basic moral level, there are serious questions about community; the prospect of a future with entrenched disunity.’

James divides his time between north London and Los Angeles, where people were left mystified by the vote to leave the EU. ‘Americans tend to have a very positive view of Europe — the culture, the history of it. When the UK deliberately put itself at a distance from Europe, the Americans didn’t understand it; the trend towards isolationism, the fear of immigration.’

Of course that was before Trump became President. Is Hollywood now worried about a new McCarthyism; a ‘fake-news’ version of the deep cleanse of alleged communism in the film industry? ‘You could say that it’s impossible in four years to make those kind of cultural changes; you have to have a lot of power and he is not popular enough. But we said he’d never be the Republican candidate, then we said he’d never be President.’

Are these subjects that the army of fans who queued at the stage door in Hampstead were keen to discuss with him? ‘One thing I couldn’t get used to was that a lot of people after the show would ask, ‘Can we have a picture?’. I’m a little allergic to selfies and I’m not on social media — I find it a bit invasive, and very self-centred. So I would say, “I’m not going to take a picture, but I’m happy to chat to you”.

Is Theo the next Leo, as has been suggested? Can he be more than a walking target for a fan-girl siege? There’s no doubt he has the brain and the right intentions. He can act. It would be a bonus if he could try to be a bit uglier; avoid the gym; let his hair grow long and greasy and his perfect teeth turn brown. But of all the problems to have in the world, your beauty overshadowing everything you do is not the worst I can think of.

Among authors, Stephen King stands out as the most adaptable, alongside Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other authors whose works have been frequently remade. Nevertheless, King’s adaptations are typically unique compared to the aforementioned authors, who have had their works remade multiple times, including “Ice and Fire” by Christopher Columbus and “The Monkey.”

Due to the popularity of King’s adaptations, it was inevitable that someone would purchase the film. Neon managed to secure the distribution rights and has announced a release date for the 2018 version in 2025.

The film’s production team is composed of multiple experienced genres, including Atomic Monster, Atomic Monster, and Banneanne Mann. C2 Motion Pictures has produced the film, while Range’s Fred Berger, Stars Collective’s Peter Luo, Nancy Xu, and John Friedberg are the executive producers.

The movie’s cast will feature Theo James, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy, with Theo’s star being Theo at the helm.

The short story’s official summary is presented here:

A trailer and further information on the release date of the film are expected soon, so stay tuned with List23 for all the information you need.

When Theo James first appeared on TV and movie screens in the early 2010s, he wasn’t given many chances to be funny. With his dark eyes and chiseled cheekbones, he was slotted into mostly boring love-interest roles. He romanced Lady Mary on “Downton Abbey” only to promptly die. He entered the bland sci-fi YA world of the “Divergent” series to woo Shailene Woodley.

But sitting in a hotel room at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, James, 40, dressed in a boxy ensemble of muted grays and browns, was keen to remind me that he really enjoys being a sort of cheeky bastard.

“I quite like broad humor and s— humor, and I keep getting told off for it,” he says, erupting into a devilish laugh. It’s a laugh that I’ll witness a couple of times throughout our conversation. James’ eyes widen once he knows he’s said something naughty, delighting in his mild transgression. (He’s still, for the most part, a very polite Englishman.)

This quality in James makes his latest role — or should I say roles — a perfect fit for the actor. He stars in “The Monkey,” the latest from “Longlegs” impresario Osgood Perkins. James plays both Hal and Bill, twin brothers whose family is cursed by the presence of a murderous windup monkey their father brings back from a trip. Like many horror films these days, it’s about a legacy of generational trauma, but, unlike most of those, it’s also extremely funny. When the monkey starts beating its drum, people die in gruesome and hilarious ways. (A throat is sliced at a hibachi dinner; a pool turns a diving woman into a shower of blood.)

But the humor also comes from James, who creates a distinctive weirdness for each brother. Hal is a glasses-wearing introvert trying to keep his estranged teenage son away from the terror that haunts his family; Bill is a theatrical douchebag with a mullet attempting to wreak havoc.

It’s a dual turn that caps a career-redefining last couple of years for James, who thanks to similarly surprising work in “The White Lotus” and “The Gentlemen” is now proving himself to be an actor willing to take risks.

“I think early in my career, I felt a little boxed in after doing a kind of slight studio world — and you do have to wrestle your way out of that,” he says. “And then there’s the aesthetics of it, being seen as, you know, f— hunky or whatever it is. You have to kind of force yourself not to be defined by that.”

Not that James isn’t hunky. In fact, his perfume-campaign-worthy looks — combined with that sense of gleeful playfulness — are what convinced Perkins he was the right man to play Hal and Bill. They had met earlier when James, as a producer, was trying to develop a television series called “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?” about the mysterious discovery of a skeleton in the English countryside. That never got off the ground, but their personalities aligned.

“He’s a movie star, right?” Perkins, 51, says, matter-of-factly. “I wanted to be reminded of the sensation that I had when I went to see ‘Gremlins’ with my parents. The idea that you could see a weird gross-out movie with your family.”

Perkins used Cary Grant as another example of the kind of throwback performance that he was looking for: Grant could be an everyman saying funny dialogue but still looked like Cary Grant.

“It’s that sort of beautiful alchemy that Hollywood allows for,” Perkins says.

James himself was thinking of another classic star when he entered the business — more of a brooding, serious type.

“When you start out in your 20s, I think lots of young actors want to be James Dean or something,” he says. “What I realize now [is] what I would like to be is just known for being an actor who does a gamut of different work.”

His path to acting primed him to be versatile. James grew up in Buckinghamshire outside London, the youngest of five siblings. It was a “chaotic madhouse,” per the actor, in which the kids would perform to stand out, but he was the only one to end up pursuing anything professionally.

After studying philosophy at the University of Nottingham, he wanted to be an indie rock star and had what he calls a “modicum” of success with his band Shere Khan. “And some even other worse-named bands than that,” he quips, that self-deprecation once again coming through as he sinks into a chair, playing with a fraying piece of fabric on the arm.

He had done comedy at university, taking a sketch show called “The Slippery Soapbox” to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every summer, but only considered auditioning at drama schools once his girlfriend at the time decided to do so. He got into the Old Vic, where he was trained in Jacobean Shakespeare. The technique didn’t serve him particularly well when he started auditioning for the screen.

“I got out of drama school with a s—load of debt,” he says, erupting in another cackle. “And plays don’t pay, to be honest, unfortunately. Screen was the place you needed to go to pay off your debt, but I remember having some pretty bad early auditions where they were like, ‘Please stop shouting in my face.’”

Opportunities did start to come, including the “Divergent” films, based on a bestselling young adult series and designed to be the next “Hunger Games,” where he co-starred opposite Woodley as the love interest named Four in a dystopian society. The trilogy was a box-office success but never became a cultural phenomenon. A fourth film was ultimately scrapped.

His early ups and downs gave James a healthy sense of skepticism. “One thing that you learn is, anything you do, everyone around you wants it to be a success, so the voices around you are, like, ‘Hey, this is the best thing ever f—ing made,’” he says. “And even if you are sanguine enough, subconsciously that leaks into you.”

James learned to take everything with a grain of salt. “Some people think I’m a little bit — not pessimistic, but not joyful enough,” he says. “But I guess I’ve been doing it long enough that you never know until the thing’s out. And even when it’s out, you don’t really know.”

The trajectory of his professional life changed when he was cast in the second season of “The White Lotus” as Cameron, a finance dude on vacation with his wife who loves to party and constantly neg his supposed friend. James was grateful for the opportunity to do comedy again, but he also felt he knew the character intimately.

“There was a piece of me in there,” he says. I mention that it’s amusing of him to say there’s a piece of himself in a character most people find pretty loathsome.

“The nice bits of Cameron are in me,” he says, laughing. Not the parts of him that are an unprintable word commonly used in Britain. He elaborates, this time without the slang. “What I wanted to bring was a kind of affability,” he says “You want to bring people together. You want to drink and have fun, take the piss out of yourself and others around you, never take yourself too seriously, which I think are the positives of him.”

A seal of approval from “White Lotus” writer-director Mike White also comes in handy when it comes to convincing other directors of an actor’s talent.

“What Mike White does is so insanely strong that when he ratifies an actor — or gives someone their moment — it’s just so deeply impressive,” Perkins says. “In a way, you almost draft off of that. You’re like, ‘Oh, Mike White saw in Theo this amazing thing. If Mike White validates it, I’m probably going to try it too.’”

Perkins explains he has a somewhat hands-off approach to the performances in his films, mostly leaving the actors free to interpret the script as they wish. But James says he and Perkins did discuss 1980s Tom Hanks as a touchstone for Hal — “the everyday Joe,” the actor says. “The world had beaten him down a bit, but he had a twinkle in his eye and a slight irreverence to the things that happened around him.”

For Bill, on the other hand, James imagined him as a petulant child in a man’s body, an idea complemented by the costume, which finds him rocking a too-tight suit jacket that makes him look like a glam rocker.

As Bill, James fully indulged his goofy side in deleted sequences that he describes as “incredibly weird.”

“There was one scene where I was crawling around on my hands and knees yelping like a dog, there’s another one of me crying, there’s another one of me licking the microphone when a character appears at the house,” he says. “We went pretty hard on it, and I’m lucky some of that didn’t end up in the movie.”

Perkins, however, was most impressed by the smaller emotional beats that James brought to Hal, specifically one in which he utters the name of his mother for the first time since she died.

“When he does that moment, it’s really gorgeous,” Perkins says. “You see it choke him and you see it be this thing that’s too precious to even give out to this horrible world. The precious name of his mom was not something that he even exposed to the elements.”

Although “The Monkey” is based on a Stephen King short story, it’s also a deeply personal movie for Perkins, the son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins and model Berry Berenson, who both died in tragic circumstances. (Anthony kept his AIDS diagnosis a secret before dying in 1992; Berenson was killed in one of the hijacked planes on 9/11.)

Still, the movie’s legacy of family trauma also rang true for James, the father of two young children.

“I am constantly terrified that I am impressing something upon them, which they don’t want in their later lives,” he says. “You try to be as good as you can as a parent, but you’re going to make mistakes.”

One of his fears is about not being present enough. The nature of being a working actor means sometimes being called away for months at a time. After he leaves Los Angeles following the premiere, James will head to Korea to shoot “The Hole,” co-starring “Squid Game” actor Hoyeon, a project he describes as “‘Misery’ meets ‘Parasite.’” He’ll then return to London, one of his home bases, to shoot the second season of “The Gentlemen,” the Netflix Guy Ritchie crime drama that has also significantly raised his profile.

James wasn’t quite sure how the hyperviolent-yet-jokey “The Gentlemen” would be received.

“It was a complex shoot where I didn’t know what the outcome necessarily was going to be,” he says. “But it’s actually been very satisfying in a way because what Guy does connects with quite a broad audience.”

People of all ages have been stopping him on the street to compliment him on his work as Eddie Horniman, the U.N. peacekeeper turned crime lord.

James and his wife, actor Ruth Kearney, currently split their time between London and Venice Beach. Now that their daughter is nearly 5, they are trying to decide whether they want their children to go to school in California or England.

“I like London — it’s good to be close to Europe and some cultural sensibilities,” he says. “But I do love California as a state with young kids. It’s the great outdoors. You don’t have to wrestle a coat on a 4-year-old every morning. The gray of London is pretty monotonous.” (On the day we speak, Beverly Hills feels more like Bloomsbury: overcast with a perpetual drizzle.)

Not that James seems like a Hollywood type. Despite modeling for Hugo Boss, he asks me to check the tag of his pants when I ask him what brand they are. (Studio Nicholson, for those wondering.) He began working with the U.N. refugee agency as a result of the Syrian civil war. His grandfather was a Greek refugee from World War II who ended up in Damascus, and he wanted to honor that history.

“The beginning of it was just trying to remind myself and others and members of my friends and family that things like that can happen all the time,” he says. James continued his volunteer work in part because he was uncomfortable with the “murky world between doing your job” and then “this idea of a celebrity.” He’s now a goodwill ambassador.

As for the fame game, he’s fine with it, in moderation.

“I realized dipping a toe in is fine, but be careful of the elixir of it,” he says. “There’s something quite glamorous, sexy, when you go to parties and tap people on the shoulder and you hug each other. Do that occasionally but mainly keep your old friends that you’ve known since you were a kid. That will ground your identity.”

Now that he’s turned 40 — an “old dog” in his parlance — the jobs he takes have to be worth it, he says: odd, funny and challenging. Just like “The Monkey.”

“I would like to do things that are unexpected and are a little subversive because I think that will be more interesting for me as an actor,” James says. “I think when you have to be away from your family, for example, you don’t want to be away and you’re there thinking, ‘Why did I do this crock of s—?”

There’s that not-quite-pessimism, the proverbial monkey on his shoulder. It’s serving him well.