Theo James has spent the last decade being Hollywood's most reliable second lead—the guy you recognize from *Divergent*, the voice behind a certain animated fox, the internet's collective crush in *The White Lotus* season two.
But 2025 has turned him into something else entirely: a full-blown leading man with three projects dropping in the same calendar year, and fans cannot stop arguing about which version of him wins.
Start with *The Monkey*, the Stephen King adaptation that hit theaters in February and promptly became the year's most unhinged horror-comedy.
James plays twin brothers Hal and Bill, a dual role that required him to share scenes with himself and, in one now-viral sequence, react to a cursed toy monkey with a straight face while the internet lost its mind.
The film opened to a solid $14 million domestically and has since become a streaming staple, largely because of clips of James doing deadpan horror that fans keep reposting with captions like "he's so real for this." Then there's *The Gentlemen*, Guy Ritchie's Netflix series, which returned for its second season and confirmed what season one hinted at: James is genuinely funny.
His Eddie Horniman—reluctant aristocrat, accidental crime boss—has become the role fans quote most, and the show's blend of British snobbery and underworld chaos keeps pulling new viewers in months after release.
Netflix has not officially confirmed a third season, but the cast has been conspicuously coy in interviews, which is Hollywood code for "yes, but we can't say it yet." And then came the curveball: James was cast as the lead in Luca Guadagnino's next film, a project that has been described only as "a psychological drama" with a script so secret that even the trades could not get details.
He casts people he wants to photograph for two hours.
James, who has spent years being the handsome supporting presence, is about to be the entire movie.
The announcement alone sent film Twitter into a spiral, with fans digging up old interviews where James said he wanted to work with "directors who scare me a little." What makes this moment interesting is that James has never seemed particularly hungry for it.
In interviews, he is dry, a little sarcastic, and openly skeptical of the fame machine.
He has talked about how *The White Lotus* changed his life and then immediately undercut the sentiment with a joke.
He does not do the celebrity-couple red carpet circuit with his wife, Ruth Kearney, and he rarely gives the press anything to work with.
And yet here he is, accidentally becoming one of the most in-demand actors of the year simply by being good at his job.
The fan discourse, of course, has gotten out of hand.
There is a faction that insists *The White Lotus* Cameron is his definitive performance.
There is another that argues *The Gentlemen* proved he should only do comedy.
And there is a small, very loud group still mourning the *Divergent* franchise and demanding a reboot.
James himself has addressed none of this, which is probably the smartest move he could make. **Our take:** Theo James is having the kind of year most actors spend a career chasing, and he is handling it with the energy of a man who would rather be at home.
That refusal to perform fame might be exactly why audiences keep leaning in.
Final Thoughts
If the Guadagnino film lands, he will not be able to hide behind dry humor much longer.