Hot Shots 2025: James Parris

James Parris has quickly made up for lost time since switching acting for film-making in his late 20s. Five years into his second career, he not only produced Blast Films’ ambitious Nat Geo series Tsunami: Race Against Time, but also secured his first director credit on an episode featuring a logistically complex shoot in Sri Lanka and India that included working with vulnerable contributors.

Other achievements on the series included a month-long quest to track down a tape shot inside a Sri Lankan emergency ward after the tsunami struck, and eliciting moving testimonies from a seismologist and a someone who had been a passenger on a capsized train.

Parris describes Tsunami as a “fundamental departure” from his interview-led earlier films, which include BBC series The Cameron Years and Days That Shook The BBC, as it foregrounds contributors achieving “radical emotional discovery” by telling stories they had never previously shared.

“The weight of responsibility I owed to these contributors, and the responsibility to the audience of wrestling their raw memories into a unified story, was what defined this project’s challenge,” he says. “It has redefined what I want to make: films with a historic scale and stakes, but which are, above all, examinations of the human experience built on intimate, confronting, emotional revelation.”

Parris’s commitment impressed Nat Geo commissioning editor Carolyn Payne. “The episode he directed required a large editorial pivot and additional shooting during the edit, but James was unflappable and handled the pressure incredibly well,” she says: “James is not only hardworking but hugely thoughtful and intelligent about work. I have no doubt that we’re going to see him rise through the ranks of factual television incredibly quickly.”