Stephan James knows what it’s like to be inside a Barry Jenkins close-up, but he’s struggling to find the words to describe it.
“Just think about having to emote all these things in front of a glass wall,” he says over Sunday brunch at a bright hotel restaurant in Santa Monica, the light bouncing off his iridescent nose ring. Much of his performance as Fonny, a young man falsely accused of rape in If Beale Street Could Talk, plays out in the director’s signature tight zooms as he sits across from his fiancée, Tish (KiKi Layne), in prison, the two separated by a glass partition. “I’m basically staring into a lens instead of looking at her,” he says, leaning in, framing my face with his hands to demonstrate. “The camera is in your face.”
This sounds very hard? “Yes,” he continues, “but it’s this weird thing where it allows emotions to unravel and allows you to not premeditate performance. Whatever is going to happen, we’re going to see every inch of it right now.”
As the male lead in both Beale Street and Sam Esmail’s Amazon series, Homecoming, the camera is drawn to James’s face with near-religious devotion, and it’s not hard to see why: He’s endlessly charismatic, with broad, open features and expressive, wide-set eyes; handsome, yet not so perfect as to be boring. While he spends the majority of his screen-time sitting down in both projects — in prison in Beale Street and a counselor’s office opposite Julia Roberts in Homecoming — he never feels stationary. You can track James’s movement in his eyes, as they dim over the course of Beale Street. In Homecoming, they flicker with the sort of hopefulness only youth can bring; at their most playful, they can make Julia Roberts seem like an awkward schoolgirl.
The number of inches James’s face takes up on screens this fall is a good measure of his rising profile in Hollywood. He’s riding with two of the most sought-after directors in TV and film, the kind who have the power to launch a career, as Esmail did with Rami Malek when he cast him on Mr. Robot. Beale Street has arguably already done this for James by mounting an Oscar campaign around him — a long shot, but still, the sort of buzz that puts you in “the conversation.” The 24-year-old Jamaican-Canadian actor got his start about eight years ago, doing guest spots on TV shows and indie movies in Toronto, along with an arc on Degrassi (practically a rite of passage for a Canadian teen actor). But the moment when things turned for him can be traced back to the trailer of an otherwise forgettable sports drama, 2014’s When the Game Stands Tall. James is only in it for a few seconds, but it was enough to catch the eye of David Oyelowo, star of Selma, who sent the clip to the film’s director Ava Duvernay. “I asked my casting director, Aisha Coley, ‘Who is this?’” recalls DuVernay, who was looking for someone to play John Lewis at the time. “I don’t know,” she replied, “but I’ll find him.”
James’s role in Selma is small, but it stuck out to another director coming off a career-defining film. “I was chilling in L.A., auditioning, taking meetings, and I get a call from my agent, like, ‘Barry Jenkins is making his newest film,’” James says. “It was so crazy, because ever since I heard of Barry Jenkins, I told myself I was going to work with him.” He put a couple scenes on tape and sent them to Jenkins, who reached out a week later. When they met for lunch in Hollywood, James, eager to make an impression, offered to put every scene in the film on tape. “He did [offer],” Jenkins chuckles, “which was ridiculous and unnecessary.”
(Excerpt) Read More at: Vulture.com
