On film, James has been the Creature in the one-man feature film Frankenstein's Creature, which premiered in 2018 at FrightFest, Leicester Square. For this bicentenary tribute to Mary Shelley's novel, James was awarded Best Male Performance of the Year on The Evolution of Horror and received a Best Actor nomination from Total Film. Among his other cinematic abominations are the Zoom-crashing Spirit in the lockdown sensation Host (Shudder), the marauding Parasite in DASHCAM (Blumhouse) and a sulphurous Demon in Salt (Fox), all for director Rob Savage.
James has also appeared in such short films as Black Mass and The Thing That Ate the Birds - essaying the title roles in both - and such feature films as Walking Against the Rain, The Jack in the Box: Awakening, The Banishing, Broadcast Signal Intrusion and Double Date. For these efforts, Kim Newman has called him 'horror-star-of-the-future James Swanton' and stated that he 'could plainly have a career as Britain's Doug Jones or Javier Botet'.
In the theatre, James is best known for his one-man play Sikes & Nancy - a show that Simon Callow describes as 'a startling and enthralling contribution to the art of the theatre.' Sikes & Nancy has played the West End's Trafalgar Studios, toured extensively across the UK (to venues including Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud, the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, York Theatre Royal Imaginarium and the Mercury Theatre, Colchester) and even crossed the sea for a sell-out engagement at Jersey Opera House. At every step, the show has been highly acclaimed - and James remains the youngest ever actor to create, direct and play all the parts in his own West End production.
James's other theatre credits include Ghost Stories for Christmas (seasonal performances of A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and The Haunted Man at London's Charles Dickens Museum), Lucifer in The York Mystery Plays and the title role in Dracula (for which James won Outstanding Performing Artist in the York Culture Awards), West End appearances in The Ghost Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (Tristan Bates Theatre) and In the Penal Colony (Arts Theatre), and Dippermouth productions Frankenstein's Creature (Theatre503) and Scrooge & Marley (Waterloo East Theatre).
On multiple occasions, James has resurrected the Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving: in his acclaimed one-man play Irving Undead, as well as the site-specific Winter Gothic (a double bill of Irving vehicles The Bells and The Dream of Eugene Aram). He has featured in two rehearsed readings for horror scholar Jonathan Rigby: Hammer's Vampirella (opposite Caroline Munro) and Nigel Kneale's The Road (opposite Mark Gatiss). James also holds the unique record of having performed all five of Charles Dickens's Christmas Books in a single day; Miriam Margolyes declared that 'it couldn't have been more vivid!'
Whilst at Cambridge University, James appeared in 24 productions, including eight for the renowned Marlowe Society (among them three world premieres, Much Ado About Nothing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and the Marlowe Showcase at the Actors' Church, Covent Garden), three one-man plays and the Cambridge Footlights panto The Pied Piper. He also played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, thus setting the pattern for many future dabblings.
James has also appeared in such short films as Black Mass and The Thing That Ate the Birds - essaying the title roles in both - and such feature films as Walking Against the Rain, The Jack in the Box: Awakening, The Banishing, Broadcast Signal Intrusion and Double Date. For these efforts, Kim Newman has called him 'horror-star-of-the-future James Swanton' and stated that he 'could plainly have a career as Britain's Doug Jones or Javier Botet'.
In the theatre, James is best known for his one-man play Sikes & Nancy - a show that Simon Callow describes as 'a startling and enthralling contribution to the art of the theatre.' Sikes & Nancy has played the West End's Trafalgar Studios, toured extensively across the UK (to venues including Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud, the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, York Theatre Royal Imaginarium and the Mercury Theatre, Colchester) and even crossed the sea for a sell-out engagement at Jersey Opera House. At every step, the show has been highly acclaimed - and James remains the youngest ever actor to create, direct and play all the parts in his own West End production.
James's other theatre credits include Ghost Stories for Christmas (seasonal performances of A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and The Haunted Man at London's Charles Dickens Museum), Lucifer in The York Mystery Plays and the title role in Dracula (for which James won Outstanding Performing Artist in the York Culture Awards), West End appearances in The Ghost Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (Tristan Bates Theatre) and In the Penal Colony (Arts Theatre), and Dippermouth productions Frankenstein's Creature (Theatre503) and Scrooge & Marley (Waterloo East Theatre).
On multiple occasions, James has resurrected the Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving: in his acclaimed one-man play Irving Undead, as well as the site-specific Winter Gothic (a double bill of Irving vehicles The Bells and The Dream of Eugene Aram). He has featured in two rehearsed readings for horror scholar Jonathan Rigby: Hammer's Vampirella (opposite Caroline Munro) and Nigel Kneale's The Road (opposite Mark Gatiss). James also holds the unique record of having performed all five of Charles Dickens's Christmas Books in a single day; Miriam Margolyes declared that 'it couldn't have been more vivid!'
Whilst at Cambridge University, James appeared in 24 productions, including eight for the renowned Marlowe Society (among them three world premieres, Much Ado About Nothing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and the Marlowe Showcase at the Actors' Church, Covent Garden), three one-man plays and the Cambridge Footlights panto The Pied Piper. He also played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, thus setting the pattern for many future dabblings.