No matter how much we loved the Divergent movies, we have to face the facts. They tanked. In fact, they tanked so badly that they couldn't even finish the series out.
Shailene Woodley quit acting for a time after the series of films, but that was due to illness. After that, she was cast in HBO's Big Little Lies with her Divergent co-star Zoë Kravitz, and now they've both gone on to do bigger and better things. The women of Divergent seem to have become the most successful actually.
The same can't be said for the men. While Miles Teller did have some success, the heartthrob of Divergent, Theo James, went virtually radio silent. After playing Four, what happened to him? Where did he go? Out of the mainstream apparently.
He Starred In A Couple Of Successes And A Couple Of Flops
James was relatively unknown by the time he starred as Four in Divergent in 2014, but after the film was released he was catapulted into fame, whether he liked it or not.
The first two Divergent films made about $300 million each, but the third and final film, Allegiant, only made $180 million. James already had mixed feelings about fame by the time the series ended but the failure of them more than likely added to his dislike of big franchise movies.
Despite this, he was a perfect Four. Other than his sometimes wonky American accent (he's British), James performed really well in the films. He had the skill, the physique, and of course, the looks, that made fans fall in love with him.
James even has his very own fan club. There's a site called The Theologians, where fans keep other fans updated about the goings-on of James.
But after Allegiant, if you weren't already clued up by the Theologians, you might have wondered where James went. He showed such promising talent in Divergent, you'd half expect him to appear in another successful franchise or more predictably, a Marvel film.
James went in the other direction, however, back to smaller films, shows, and theater. Right out of Allegiant, James joined Vanessa Redgrave, Rooney Mara, Eric Bana, and Aidan Turner in The Secret Scripture in 2016.
James played the villain, Father Gaunt, who has a hand in accusing a woman insane, leading to her forty-year incarceration in an insane asylum.
That same year, philanthropy was just as important to him as his acting career. He went to Greece and France in 2016 and 2017 with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to talk about the Syrian refugee crisis. The crisis was important to him because his grandfather was a Greek refugee when the Nazis invaded Greece.
He managed to squeeze one more film in during 2016 when he played David in the fifth Underworld film, Underworld: Blood Wars.
He didn't make another film until 2018, which proved to be a busy year for him. He starred in Backstabbing for Beginners, the first film where he starred and produced, the Amazon Prime film, Zoe, Netflix's How It Ends, London Fields, and the musical audio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
He's Done With Blockbusters
James next starred in the crime drama Lying and Stealing, which he also produced. He must have liked producing the film along with Backstabbing for Beginners because he started his own production company, Untapped, in the middle of the year.
He also voiced two episodes of the Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and one episode of the streaming service's The Witcher. As for the Henry Cavill-led series, many fans are speculating whether he could become part of the cast in season two.
James is a veteran voice actor. He's been voicing the character Hector on Netflix's Castlevania since 2018.
But more recently, James has returned to period drama in ITV and PBS' Sanditon, based on Jane Austen's novel, which he also produced. He previously appeared on Masterpiece's Downton Abbey.
Along with playing in smaller films, and returning to PBS for a period drama, James also returned to the theater, where he's probably most comfortable, having studied at the Old Vic in his early career. He appeared in City of Angels on the West End this past March.
The musical can, in fact, explain James' experience with big-budget films, and why he's become uninterested in them. It's about a writer trying to turn his book into a Hollywood script.
"[The musical] is all about the degradation of his original book to the lowest common denominator," he told the Evening Standard. "I’ve been personally aware of that, not only in friends’ work but in work I’ve done. There’s a push always to make something as broad as possible — they’re trying to make money, but the problem is the broader you make something, the less distilled the story... it becomes weak and a bit meaningless.
"I like LA and have a lot of friends there [as well as a home]. As a young person, when you first get offered big movies you think, ‘This is great,’ but the older and slightly wiser I am, the more I know that isn’t something I’m particularly interested in."
His most recent film is Archive. He told The Hollywood Reporter, it's been his most rewarding project in a while, and enjoys how dynamic it is.
Among his resistance to do big franchises, he is also a very private person and does not have social media, so it can seem like he's fallen off the grid at times. We'll continue to see him in things though if he doesn't truly catch the producing bug. But even then we know he'll be giving us some four-star films.
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