“I remember being really young and seeing The Empire Strikes Back and thinking ‘That’s it. They’ve filmed my imagination. How is that possible? I want to be part of this’. We spent every playtime acting out what happened at the end of that film. My friends and I wrote Return Of the Jedi, I swear!”

James D’Arcy fell in love with movies early in life. No wonder the boy has made good! He is currently on a roll too. After parts in Exorcist: The Beginning, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World and An American Haunting, D’Arcy became a household name in the UK when he joined the cast of TV’s Secret Diary Of A Call Girl. Starring Billie Piper, the smart, sexy and controversial show was based on the blog of real escort Brooke Magnanti a.k.a. Belle du Jour.
“I’d worked with Billie Piper before and just love her,” he recalls. “She has this quality that’s so rare, in that 16-year-old girls and 96-year-old great grandmothers really like her. But I wasn’t prepared for how many people would come to know me from the series. It’s funny, it really is the one thing I’ve done where people have called me by my character name when I’m walking down the street. People would be calling out ‘Duncan, Duncan!’ and it wouldn’t register so I’d ignore them. Some of them would get quite moody about it!”
Playing King Edward VIII in 2011’s W.E. did not inspire the same level of attention. Madonna’s largely self-financed directorial debut, the film was a commercial and critical disaster. The press, of course, was only too happy to indulge in snarky personal attacks on Madge.
“I knew when the film came out it would be all about her, because she’s possibly the most famous woman on the planet. It was never going to be about the movie. How could it be? She’s too big of an icon for her not to be the focus of attention. But I was never going to let that stop me being involved in the project. When I met her, she was so smart and educated and prepared on the subject that I knew it would be the hugely enjoyable experience that it turned out to be. Not being the main focus of the reviews wasn’t a big price to pay.”
The past year has seen D’Arcy work with more of Hollywood’s elite, including Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock and, of course, an array of stars in the ambitious Cloud Atlas, directed by the Wachowskis (Lana and Andy) and Tom Twyker. Starring alongside Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Ben Whishaw and Hugo Weaving, D’Arcy plays both a nuclear scientist pining for a long lost love, and an enigmatic Archivist in a futuristic Neo Seoul in Korea. Never mind the incredible cast, though: D’Arcy says it was a rare privilege to collaborate with such inspiring directors.
“Lana is incredible. Have you seen her speech?” he asks, referring to the transgender director’s stirring address at the 2012 Human Rights Campaign gala, where she wittily and emotively spoke of her coming-out experience. “She’s pretty amazing – warm and inspirational. And Andy is all jokes, while Tom is so kind. They all have the exact same style of directing too. They’re so in tune. It was like working with one person.”
D’Arcy admits he found watching Cloud Atlas a hugely emotive experience; the theme of interconnectedness through time, place and culture awe-inspiring.
“It’s mindboggling,” he beams. “I felt so excited and invigorated by the possibility that everything we do has an implication, even a small implication. And my life suddenly felt like it had some meaning, which is something you don’t always experience. And I was really struck by the beauty of that. I came out of it and it made me want to be a better person. ‘The movie made me want to be a better person’. Oh God, that sounds like such a cheesy tagline, doesn’t it? ‘Go see this film, it’ll make you want to be a better person!’”

Cloud Atlas is in cinemas now. We hear it’ll make you be a better person.