Institute: What was the most memorable on screen performance you saw growing up?

James: I had never seen Dustin Hoffman in anything and saw him in both Rain Man and Midnight Cowboy on the same day. That pretty much fried my brain. I just couldn’t believe it was the same actor. Or indeed that either of those parts had actors in them at all. I assumed they’d got someone autistic to play that part in Rain Man…

Institute: You are currently filming Cloud Atlas – How is that going and can you tell us about your
character?

James: It’s going great. It’s hugely ambitious and I’m having a blast on it. I play 4 roles. Well, 3 actually, but one of them I play at both 30 in one story and 70 in another. Every day there’s some one who is so heavily disguised that you don’t realise that you’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to a major film star.

Institute: Do you like to rehearse a lot before shooting scenes or prefer to experiment and improvise on set?

James: That’s really the Director’s call – I like it either way. There can be real benefits to either approach.

Institute: You play Mr Zimit in The Philosophers, how did you become involved in the film?

James: Well they offered me the role and simultaneously sent pictures of the locations we would be filming in. And so having seen those, I was desperate for the script to be half good! But to my total delight, it was a complex, interesting, challenging and rather epic indie…

Institute: What has been the most challenging role to date?

James: They all present different challenges, but Sam in Screwed was certainly a stretch vocally.

Institute: Could you single out an actor or film that had a profound impact on you in the last five years?

James: I would have to say Ryan Gosling. He’s the classiest actor I’ve seen in quite some time.

Institute: What has been a stand-out out moment in your career so far?

James: The Venice Film Festival last September was pretty good. The crowd went as mad as I’ve ever heard a crowd when Madonna arrived on the red carpet…