This week’s Take Ten guest is Lily James.
In this episode, we’ll talk dating apps and James’ latest film Swiped, the best advice she’s ever received, favorite memories of making Downton Abbey and her upcoming film Cliffhanger, opposite Pierce Brosnan.
In Hulu film Swiped, directed by Rachel Lee Goldberg, James plays Whitney Wolfe Herd, the real-life founder of dating app Bumble. After experiencing misogyny at the tech startup that created the app Tinder, Whitney breaks out on her own with a female-driven, women-first approach, supported by her former Tinder colleague and friend Tisha (Myha’la).
L-R: Myha’la as Tisha and Lily James as Whitney.
Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/ 20th Century Studios
We asked James what her one requirement would be if she was creating a dating app herself.
“Ghosting is just so disgusting and anyone that ghosts should be just never allowed to date again! Cancelled! It’s so crazy, it happens all the time, it’s so gross. Just write back. It’s so weird. Not that that comes from personal experience,” she laughs.
James says she’d felt moved to tell the Bumble founder’s story, because of “what she achieved in the tech space as a woman, a very male-dominated space, and she did it against all odds, and having experienced a lot of personal setbacks. The resilience that she had to plough forward and create an empire and Bumble, to me, was a story I wanted to champion in the sense of her achievements, but also the human story and who she is as a woman. I was drawn to playing someone so inspiring and exploring that real depth of her humanity. There are so many stories about male entrepreneurs, so it was Whitney’s turn.”
Lily James in ‘Cliffhanger’
Rocket Science
James serves as a producer on Swiped and on her upcoming film Cliffhanger — a reboot of the 1993 film that starred Sylvester Stallone. Brosnan and James play a climbing guide and his daughter, who find themselves kidnapped in the Dolomites. “Pierce is the greatest,” James says, “and Jaume Collet-Serra directed it, and I had such a phenomenal time working with him. We shot in real life in the Dolomites. I really learned to climb. I was really hanging off mountains with skeleton crews. I would hike with my own stuff on my back, and for hours, to get to these very remote locations. It was truly extraordinary to shoot in conditions like that, and to have got so physically strong and pushed myself way beyond my limits. I’m really proud of this film, and can’t wait to share it with the world.”
To find out more, including the great advice Helena Bonham-Carter gave her early on, the films and TV shows that make her cry and the one thing she wishes she’d stolen from the Cinderella set, click on the video above.
