By her own admission, Lily James wanted her life to hurry up. “After Cinderella, I longed for parts that weren’t ‘the ingénue’, that weren’t ‘the young heroine’, that weren’t always in historical films,” she explains, casually running through the cliches that tend to engulf the young, white actresses who at one point or another are deemed to be Britain’s next big thing. She told Kenneth Branagh, her director on that live-action Disney revival, all about it. “He just said, ‘Lily – you don’t need to rush, it’s all gonna happen.’ But I was so impatient.”
Looking back now, at the age of 36 and exactly 10 years after Cinderella made her a star, James knows that Branagh was correct. “As a woman, it happens inevitably – as you grow older, the roles are going to be different. But I also just didn’t need to run away from those young ingénues. Honestly, I’d love to go back!” She lets out a massive, enveloping hoot.
