“Cameron was 40% me and 60% people I came across at university and afterwards,” says Theo James of his odious *White Lotus* character.

Underworld Toff

He broke out in The White Lotus, and now he’s the lead on Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen. There’s also Bond chatter—but Theo James isn’t buying it

By Tim Lewis

When Theo James read the script for the second season of The White Lotus, the British actor wasn’t immediately sure what he could bring to the part of Cameron. The character was “another finance bro”: cocky, suave and superficial. “Interesting,” he recalls, “but we’ve seen it a hundred times.”

At the audition, though, the 39-year-old James was won over by Mike White, who writes and directs the hit HBO series, a comic psychodrama revolving around the employees and hyper-wealthy guests of the fictional White Lotus hotel resort. The first season was set on Maui. The second, with a mostly new cast, relocated to Sicily and was more explicitly carnal and lascivious. Cameron was part of a foursome, with his wife (played by Meghann Fahy) and another couple (Will Sharpe and Aubrey Plaza) whom Cameron appears to want to dominate physically and sexually.