The actor found fame as the cocky finance bro in The White Lotus. Now, as he stars in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, he talks to Tim Lewis about being ‘irritatingly competitive’, giving up music for acting – and whether James Bond really is on the horizon…
When Theo James read the script for the second season of The White Lotus, the British actor wasn’t immediately sure what he could bring to the part of Cameron. The character was “another finance bro”: cocky, suave and superficial. “Interesting,” he recalls, “but we’ve seen it a hundred times.”
At the audition, though, the 39-year-old James was won over by Mike White, who writes and directs the hit HBO series, a comic psychodrama revolving around the employees and hyper-wealthy guests of the fictional White Lotus hotel resort. The first season was set on Maui. The second, with a mostly new cast, relocated to Sicily and was more explicitly carnal and lascivious. Cameron was part of a foursome, with his wife (played by Meghann Fahy) and another couple (Will Sharpe and Aubrey Plaza) whom Cameron appears to want to dominate physically and sexually.
