Theo James says that Divergent has put him in “boring” roles and projects for years. The 37-year-old actor from White Lotus played Tobias, aka Four, for the first time in 2014’s Divergent, which starred Shailene Woodley.
Over two years, he was also in the two sequels of the YA dystopian movie series, Insurgent and Allegiant. In an interview with Vanity Fair, James said that he had felt stuck in these kinds of roles for a long time.
“You do a certain type of movie and sign contracts that tie you to those roles for a certain amount of time, and people see you in a certain light that you have to fight your way out of,” he said. “That is 100% true for actors, and it was 100% true for me.”
James also said, “I didn’t feel like I had the freedom to go where I wanted. You have a certain role to play, and those roles can be pretty boring.”
James has also been in the sci-fi action movies Underworld: Awakening (2012) and Underworld: Blood Wars (2016). He has also been in the Netflix animated show Castlevania and the HBO show The Time Traveler’s Wife, which was just canceled.
He is now in The White Lotus, an Emmy-winning show on HBO. Then, he will be in Guy Ritchie’s new Netflix show The Gentlemen. The English actor told the Evening Standard in 2020 that “big movies” are no longer interesting to him.
“I like L.A. and have a lot of friends and a place to live there. When you’re young, you might think, “This is great,” but the older and wiser I get, the more I realize that I’m not interested in that.” James said at the time.
He also said that he was “aggressively private” and would not join social media: “Right from the start, I just said I wasn’t interested in doing it.”
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