Lily James admits phone call scenes are 'tricky' to film

Lily James has admitted that it can be "tricky" filming phone call scenes.

In the upcoming paranoid thriller Relay, the British actor plays a potential whistleblower who hires Riz Ahmed's mysterious fixer to broker a pay-off deal with her corrupt company.

The fixer only communicates via a phone relay service, meaning most of James and Ahmed's scenes feature a third-party operator reading typed messages back and forth.

The Downton Abbey actress told The Hollywood Reporter that "a really wonderful actor" came in to read the messages to her so she had something to react to while filming her phone scenes.

"Phone calls are the worst!" she shared. "Riz wasn't able to do it because of our times and turnarounds, and he was probably shooting other things... But I had a really great actor who was there. With acting, your focus needs to be on what the other person is doing and responding to them, but that's tricky in phone calls. So I was lucky to have an actor read the off-lines."

James went on to praise director David Mackenzie for managing to create an "electricity" between herself and Ahmed despite the stars having very little screen time together.

"The connection we were able to build despite our characters very rarely being in the same room together was a real challenge," she explained. "And when I watched the movie for the first time at (the Toronto International Film Festival) on the big screen, I was like, 'Wow, it's incredible that there's this great electricity between these two characters when they barely meet.' So it was quite a sleight of hand that David pulled that off in terms of filmmaking."

Relay, which debuted at TIFF in September 2024, will be released in U.S. cinemas on 22 August.