Lily James steps back in time with The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
ENGLISH rose Lily James stepped so far back in time with her new movie The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, she ended up back in Downton Abbey.
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Lily James is no stranger to travelling back in time. To England of the 1920s in Downton Abbey. To the Napoleonic Wars in Russia for War & Peace. But this time, the time-travelling got personal.
Stepping back to the days following WWII for The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, James came face-to-face with her maternal grandmother: in 1940s costume and with her hair in the perfect waves of the time, James looked in the mirror and saw a striking resemblance to the Granny she knows from black and white photos.
The connection doesn’t end there.
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The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society tells the story of a writer who travels to Guernsey, an island between France and England, to learn from the locals what their life was like under occupation.
Similarly, James has coaxed stories out of her grandmother over the years, about how she and her family fled rural France for Paris when Nazis took over their home.
“My Granny was a young girl living in occupied France, which really brought home what people from Guernsey had to go through — what (occupation) means, the reality of that,” James says.
“I can’t believe what my Granny lived through, it’s so awful and so huge. Her life has been so different from mine.”
Life for James, in recent times, has been hectic. The 29-year-old laughs that only recently did she realise “breaks are good!”; thankfully, she squeezed one of those in at the start of this year. She hasn’t shot a movie since Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again wrapped in early December (“It was great,” James says of the musical, in which she plays the younger version of Meryl Streep’s character) and enjoyed a “nice holiday” with her partner Matt Smith, of Doctor Who and The Crown fame.
Still, she’s more than happy to be back at work pushing Guernsey.
Based on the much-loved novel, the film focuses on Juliet, a London writer restlessly seeking her next book idea.
Then a letter arrives from Guernsey, in which the writer tells Juliet how he found her name in a book — one of few kept safe from the Germans during occupation — and how its pages became a saviour for he and the members of his club, known as The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society.
Interest piqued, Juliet leaves her handsome American fiance in London to sail for the island, where she naturally finds much more than a story: “Meeting all these mad, eccentric, brilliant people,” as James says, and finding love in the letter-writing Dawsey, played by handsome Dutchman Michiel Huisman.
It’s spirited, heartwarming, tear-jerking stuff sure to appeal to the Best Exotic crowd, but James also sees a modern touch in the approach of the film’s director, Mike “Four Weddings and a Funeral” Newell.
“I love how he shot the film. Those book club meetings, they’re so rowdy and there’s no sense of period — it could be a book meeting that I have with my friends, you know?”
Juliet’s life conundrum is also one that James and countless other modern women will relate to: She may appear to have it all, but she never quite feels content.
“She doesn’t want to settle,” James succincts. “You know, she’s had some success as a writer, she’s made some money, she’s got a great guy that’s offering to marry her and give her security and a life that some people may be more than happy with, but for her it’s not enough. She feels stuck. She wants more.
“She eventually is brave enough to follow those instincts and really fulfil her potential. It takes courage to do that.”
Though she’s no writer (“I used to write poems, they weren’t very good”), James also sees parallels between what she does for a living and Juliet’s drive to put pen to paper.
“When the story gets under her skin, she can’t help but find out more, it becomes her sole passion and focus,” James says. “And certainly I find when I’m starting work on a new character it becomes my world, it’s all I can think about. So I could relate to that all-encompassing passion and desire to figure it out.”
Much to James’s surprise and delight, Guernsey ended up being a Downton Abbey reunion — Lady Rose reuniting with Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton), Sybil Crawley (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode).
“It was so wonderful when I saw the cast list,” says James. “There’s such an ease to working with people that you’ve worked with before, especially Downton, we were such a close-knit group — after so many years we became like a family.”
Goode plays Sidney, Juliet’s publisher.
“They’ve got that banter and a closeness where Juliet is very true to herself around him,” James says. “And that was really simple with Matthew; I loved doing those scenes with him.”
Wilton plays Mrs Maugery, the hardest nut in the Society for Juliet to crack.
“Penelope is one of those magnificent, rare actors who can switch from comedy to breaking your heart in an instant. In that scene when she says she lost her husband to the mud on the Somme, you can feel this world of grief,” James marvels.
Brown Findlay plays Elizabeth, whose absence is the main riddle Juliet is drawn to solve. Though they shared no scenes, the two actors had plenty of “hang out” time.
Guernsey also celebrates the power of books. The first James can recall being engrossed by were by Enid Blyton hand-me-downs from her mother, stories of schoolgirls like Malory Towers and The Twins at St Clare’s.
Then came Harry Potter. “I was the perfect age,” she says, “and I remember being so, so obsessed.”
James and her brother Charlie would read them together: “One looking at one side of the page and the other looking at the other — and we had to time our reading to each other so we could turn the page at the same time,” she laughs.
James is just a year older than the Potter films’ Hermione, Emma Watson. But while Watson was cast in the franchise aged nine, it took James another few years to really lock onto acting. She’s fine with just being a fan: “I would have been the right age to be one of the kids in it, yeah, but I wasn’t doing acting as a kid,” she shrugs.
These days, you’ll still find James with her head stuck in a book between takes. And each job, she adds, is like cracking open a new novel: “One of the things I love about being an actor is you’re suddenly placed in these different times and worlds and you get to absorb and learn all sorts of things.”
This time, she just happened to learn about her own family history.
James’s Granny hasn’t seen Guernsey yet — she couldn’t make it to last week’s London premiere — but the two have made a date: “She’s gonna watch it in her local cinema and I’m gonna go and watch it with her,” says James.
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