Theo James, the 41-year-old British actor whose family name is Taptiklis, has emerged as the frontrunner to become the next James Bond, according to recent reports, even as he insists he is too old for the role and does not want it to take over his life.
James was born Theodore Peter James Kinnaird Taptiklis. He adopted the shorter stage name early in his career because his Greek surname was hard for English-speaking audiences to place. Friends have since nicknamed him "Bondopoulos", playing on the enduring rumours linking him to 007.
He argues that a role of Bond's scale is one an actor never truly returns from, and that the level of fame it brings would reshape not only his own life but his family's too. Reports nonetheless suggest the matter of James taking over as Bond is close to settled.
A Greek family shaped by war and exile
James's grandfather, Nikolaos Taptiklis, was forced to leave Greece after the Nazi invasion of the country. He travelled by boat and then overland through Turkey to Damascus. After the war he ended up in Göttingen, Germany, where he worked for the organisation that preceded the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, dealing with typhus and tuberculosis outbreaks in refugee camps.
The family's geography widened further in the following generation. James's father, Philippos Taptiklis, grew up in New Zealand, while his mother Jane's family line traces back to Glasgow, Scotland.
James describes himself as a product of migration and a "child of the Commonwealth." He has said he takes pride in Britain while remaining conscious of its colonial past and the idea that national identity is rarely as pure as empires, aristocrats or film heroes like to claim.
Return to Greece with the UNHCR
In 2016, James returned to Greece as a supporter of the UNHCR, echoing the work his grandfather had done for the organisation's predecessor decades earlier. He visited refugee families in Piraeus and Marathon, and facilities in Alexandria and in Lagkadikia in northern Greece, at the height of the refugee crisis.
From Buckinghamshire to Hollywood
James was born in High Wycombe and grew up in Buckinghamshire, the youngest of five siblings in a household he has described as a kind of controlled chaos filled with children, ducks, geese and other animals. He studied philosophy at the University of Nottingham before training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Before acting took off, he worked as a bartender, a lifeguard and in the NHS, while also performing music on guitar, piano, saxophone and harmonica as frontman of a band called Shere Khan.
His breakthrough came with Neil Burger's Divergent film trilogy, in which he played Four and was thrust into international teen stardom almost overnight. The sudden fame unsettled him enough that he considered quitting acting altogether. He has spoken with visible wariness about large franchise productions where an actor becomes little more than an "avatar", recalling green-screen shoots where no one could tell him exactly what he was meant to be looking at. He has returned often to advice given to him by Anthony Hopkins on his first film job, that an actor must have full awareness of his own identity, of where he comes from and where he is going.
The White Lotus and The Gentlemen
James found what he calls his real second beginning in HBO's The White Lotus, playing Cameron Sullivan, a role that turned his looks, long seen as both a privilege and a limitation, into a dramatic weapon by portraying a cynical, amoral man who exploits his own beauty.
He went on to star as Eddie Horniman in Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen, a former army officer turned reluctant duke and criminal who discovers a cannabis empire hidden beneath his family fortune, and a darker version of himself alongside it. A new season of the series is on the way. James has spoken to GQ about a character whose soul is drawn toward a darkness with no way back, as the corruption of the role becomes tied to questions of bloodline and inheritance.
A private life away from the spotlight
Away from the screen, James lives a far more grounded life. He is married to Irish actress Ruth Kearney, whom he met during drama school, and the couple have two young children.
For fifteen years, James has moved between roles that pulled him away from the image handed to him by nature and by the industry, from Four in Divergent to the toxic Cameron in The White Lotus to the darkly aristocratic Eddie in The Gentlemen, while also becoming a producer, husband, father and restaurateur who still wants to be able to walk out of a restaurant and disappear into a crowd. Behind all of it sits the Taptiklis name, carried across borders and hardship, which friends and reports suggest may make him the strongest Bond candidate of all.
