James McAvoy in Arena Magazine - HQ Photos and Interview
James McAvoy has his head between Angelina Jolie’s legs. Normally this would be high on the checklist of every man’s fantasies, but from McAvoy’s pained expression, we’re guessing it’s not exactly the dream you and maybe he envisaged. This probably has something to do with the fact that Ms Jolie is lying half out the windscreen of a red Dodge Viper, which she’s steering with her stilettoed feet as it powers along at 100mph through Chicago’s rain-soaked streets, while simultaneously firing a shotgun at a pursuing pet-shop van.
Welcome to the set of Wanted, this summer’s most intriguing high-octane blockbuster. Intriguing not only for this particular scene (if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll be aware there are also cars flying into trains, bullets going round corners, Jolie in a hot tub…), but also for the fact it stars Britain’s brightest up-and-coming actor as a full-blown action hero. That scrawny bloke from Shameless, the impressionable sweaty doctor from The Last King of Scotland and the reluctant soldier from Atonement is not exactly the first person who comes to mind to be the flag-bearer for a new breed of action hero. But in Wanted he walks around with his shirt off, fires two guns at the same time and scampers atop a speeding train. We assume Bruce Willis and co are quietly soiling themselves.
“It’s why I signed on. My interest was piqued more than anything by why the fuck they wanted to cast me in it,” he says between drags on a cigarette. “I’m not famous, I’m not American, no one knows who I am, I’m not six foot five with muscles - so there must be something cool and different about this. I actually screen tested for this before I did Atonement. They ummed and ahhed for six months, never told me no and never told me yes. It was a big surprise when I got it.”
If the actor wasn’t exactly given the hard sell by Wanted’s directors, he found the action scenes a draw. “I thought it would be good to do something that would satisfy the 14-year-old in me,” he says. “There are a couple of scenes that are just ridiculous - one where I crash through a window and sprint along a factory floor, killing 50 people without stopping, catching their guns and using them against them. Forget the Angelina scene, that was the wet dream to be honest. That was fucking cool.”
Wanted is based on Mark Millar’s graphic novel about a secret society of assassins who have heightened powers of agility, reflexes and dead-eye shooting skills. It is directed by Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, the man responsible for stylised Russian vampire series Night Watch. McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, a disaffected office worker who’s recruited into the Fraternity by the aptly-named super-assassin Fox (Jolie) and transformed into a cold-blooded killer.
“It was not easy for us [to work together] because he had his Scottish accent and I had my heavy Russian,” says Bekmambetov. “Sometimes it was almost impossible to understand one another. Eventually, though, we were able to communicate on a higher level. James is a great actor who has an unparalleled ability to control his body, gestures and voice. He can do sluggish moves in one moment, and then switch on something inside himself and turn into a superhero, controlling every cell of his body and projecting energy in a one-mile radius.”
McAvoy admits working with Bekmambetov was a challenge. “I liked the fact Timur was into making the young hero in this film a bit flawed and not exactly alpha male,” he says. “Timur is fucking strange. He makes odd decisions. Sometimes he’ll ask you to play something in a way that seems completely ridiculous and sometimes it doesn’t work, but when it does work, it really works. For instance, if it’s a humungously tearful scene, we’d do it laughing. Quite often you get something really interesting out of it.”
Watching someone we’re more used to seeing taking tea with Jane Austen in Becoming Jane, or trotting around a snow-covered fantasy land on a pair of goat’s hooves in The Chronicles of Narnia emptying a Magnum with such proficiency is quietly unsettling. “In Band of Brothers I shot my rifle three times and hit nobody and then I was exploded by a random grenade, so that was my time over in Steve Spielberg’s realisation of the Second World War,” he says. “I don’t really like guns, I’m a bit bad with them. At one point the gun had jammed and I put it down and my finger slipped and it went off. I was like, ‘Ooh’. But yes there were lots of guns, machine guns, shotguns, handguns, throwing guns - all that kind of stuff. The best was catching a gun in mid-air, upside down and firing with my pinky. There wasn’t a bazooka though… I wish there had been a bazooka.”
For the part, McAvoy went into intensive physical training, so that when he did pull his shirt off, cinemagoers wouldn’t be blinded by a puny bone china-white Scottish frame. “I started off doing three days a week with heavy weights, then muscle building and cardiovascular training,” he says. “For me to put on a stone is really hard work. I had to eat like a bastard and work like a bastard. Lots of eggs in the morning and protein shakes. I stayed away from testosterone because I was worried about it fucking me up.”
It’s hard to imagine anything fucking James McAvoy up at the moment, however. His recent work has seen him nominated for a Golden Globe and three BAFTAs, winning the 2006 Rising Star Award (the one voted for by the general public), which sits on his mantelpiece next to the London Critics’ Circle Award for Best British Actor for Atonement. He’s one of the new phalanx of British leading men - alongside Daniel Craig and Gerard Butler - whose feet are firmly grounded. You won’t see McAvoy stumbling out of Bungalow 8 at 3am.
“I have noticed a difference since Atonement,” he says. “People are never nasty to me, but I do find it disconcerting when you’re having a piss and the bloke next to you goes, ‘Hey man, love the movie’, and I’m like ‘Er… thanks’. It’s even worse when they try to shake your hand. I’m like, ‘Fuck off, wash your hand, it’s just been on your dick.’”
McAvoy’s grounded attitude comes from his upbringing. He was born in Glasgow in April 1979, the son of a psychiatric nurse and a builder. His parents divorced when he was seven and little Jimmy lived with his grandparents. Knocking early ambitions of being a missionary on the head and after a brief stint making cakes for Marks & Sparks, he joined the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, graduating in 2000. Picking over the details of his childhood, there’s little that makes him stand out from the crowd - he played football, supported Celtic and spent one summer watching The Goonies endlessly at his local cinema. Well, didn’t we all?
“It’s not like I always wanted to be an actor, I only did it because I was allowed to do it and I had to do something. I’m really no different now than I was then. I see my pals, play football, write, cook,” says McAvoy, who married his Shameless co-star Anne-Marie Duff in 2006. “I don’t really go to the opening of an envelope. I like staying in.”
The next time we meet, James McAvoy is in the bath. Fully clothed. He’s just flown back to the UK from a week-long trip to LA, where he was doing the whole Oscars hoopla and now he’s lying in the tub of a run-down east London terraced house for Arena’s photoshoot. It’s five months since Wanted wrapped and McAvoy is now in the whirl of publicity for the movie’s June release before he heads to Russia to film The Last Station, a weighty drama about the last days of Leo Tolstoy (“I play Tolstoy’s adoring assistant. Sort of his Debbie McGee”).
“You might think this is weird, me sitting in a bath, but what’s weirder is you all looking at me in the bath,” he laughs. “To be honest, I usually find myself in odd situations like this. There’s always very cold water or very hot water involved. And invariably you’re pretending to be hot when you’re freezing, or pretending to be freezing when you’re fucking boiling. I’m used to that. So when you said get in the bath and there wasn’t water involved, that was cool.”
We move to a bar off Brick Lane for a couple of beers. He hasn’t rocked up with a lengthy entourage - it’s just him on his motorbike, and as he eyes the passing burgers greedily, we discuss photoshoots in general - something that he’s reluctantly getting used to. “I was fucking knackered today. And for someone who’s not 100 million per cent happy with his looks, having your photo taken is peculiar. I can understand standing in front of people and performing, that’s what I trained to do. Yet you could argue there’s more interest in seeing you standing on a red carpet doing nothing than there is standing on a stage off Broadway. You’ll get more punters looking at that than going to the theatre. People say, ‘Oh it’s part of your job,’ but I really am going to get to the point in my career where I go, ‘Fuck off, no it isn’t, it’s something I have to do but it’s not my job.’”
You can tell he’s uncomfortable being in the spotlight, although he enjoyed this year’s Oscars more as he’d been and done it before - “It’s just wash your hair, brush your teeth and put on a black suit”. His evening ended in typical McAvoy fashion, forgoing an invite to see Prince perform with Stevie Wonder at a private Oscars party because “if I want to see Prince I’ll pay to see him. And anyway, I was just too fucked.”
I tell him that there are similarities between him and Daniel Craig, another reluctant celebrity, and he nods in agreement. “The media’s defence is that, ‘You know what you’re getting into’ and now I know what I’ve gotten into. When I first became an actor, there was no likelihood of this happening, it’s not why I became an actor. But you can’t just suddenly get off your career path, because your career happens to you, you don’t plan it. You have to go with it,” he says.
“As much as there was a part of Daniel Craig that must have known that his whole life was going to change if he took Bond, there was also a part of him, commendably and completely healthily that goes, ‘But I have to do this. This is why I’m an actor. I can’t not do Bond’. Can you imagine an actor saying ‘I didn’t want to do James Bond because I was worried it would change my life in the eyes of the media?’ That would be so sad. Of course you should do it. It would be fucking brilliant.”
Last month, Arena ran a story entitled ‘The Square Route’, highlighting the shift in American culture away from jocks to nerds. If there is a British champion for this geek generation, it is James McAvoy. An unashamed sci-fi buff who can reel of endless trivia about Street Hawk or Battlestar Galactica, he’s already worked out who should be cast in what role if Hollywood ever makes a live-action Thundercats movie (“I’d play Snarf, I’d give him inner demons. Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment would be WileyKit and WileyKat. In fact I should fucking direct it, I’d make it a work of art.”)
He got a lucky break with something of a busman’s holiday in February when early footage of Wanted was screened at the WonderCon sci-fi convention in San Francisco. “I managed to find some Thundercats T-shirts that I’d wanted for a long time. There was one with Lion-O with his Sword of Omens and one with Cheetara - I’m really fucking keen on that one. She was so hot. She had muscle-y breasts.
“There were actually about 300 people there and we showed a few minutes of the movie. Comic book fans are pretty hardcore, you don’t want to piss them off. I think some fans will be disappointed that it’s not adhering that closely to the original material, but the fact that Mark Millar loves it makes me feel more comfortable. The fans can moan but if the writer likes it - come on man, surely you’ve got to give it a bash.”
Angelina Jolie’s presence will also surely entice men to give it a bash, a point not lost on McAvoy as he picks up his helmet in anticipation of the short motorcycle ride to his home in North London. “Angelina was cool, she’s been in that territory a lot of times and she’s familiar with the action stuff. Seeing as I hadn’t done it before, it was good to have someone there that you could use as a litmus test and take advice from,” he says. “I got the shit beaten out of me by her on a daily basis. It would be in the script that Angelina slaps James once in the face and it would turn into her smacking my head repeatedly on the table. But I guess it’s all in a day’s work.”
For a moment, it’s almost like you’re just talking to a mate about his day in the office. But if his new role as an unlikely action hero comes off, James McAvoy’s reputation as Britain’s most versatile actor will be sealed.
Source 1, 2.