James McAvoy
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
James McAvoy's rapid ascent toward Hollywood stardom might seem more surprising to the 29-year-old Scottish actor than to any of his fans -- and yet in most ways he already acts like a pro who's weathered too many questions from a nagging publicity machine. Last year, if you had asked him about the awards prospects for his movie Atonement, he had a well-rehearsed answer about how Oscars didn't matter to him. This year, he'll joke, with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation, about how out-of-shape he was when he began filming the new action thriller Wanted. And ask him about his kiss with Angelina Jolie in the movie, and he'll politely downplay it.
"She's a married woman -- well, she's not a married woman, but she kind of is, and I'm a married guy, so you just get on with it and do your job," McAvoy says. Tough job, from the sound of it. But he insists the kiss really wasn't anything to get excited about. "As usual, it ends up being the least intimate moment of your day. I'm probably more intimate with my makeup artist than I was that day with Angelina. That sounds really strange. I wasn't having an affair with my makeup artist. There are just a lot of technical things happening around you, and a lot of people around you, and you're usually more worried about your breath because you just had the garlic pasta at lunch. It's just one of those things."
Pleasantly surprising for him, he says, was how nice Jolie was to work with in the first place.
"She's a very nice lady. I'm an actor so I should know better, but I'm still informed by all the things you hear in the media, and she was just completely different from anything I expected. It was really nice working with her."
In the film, Jolie's character -- known only, appropriately, as Fox -- recruits McAvoy's lowly office worker Wesley into a secret society of assassins led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman). What follows is the biggest celebration of cooler-than-words action since The Matrix, complete with bullets that curve, death-defying jumps, and keyboards whose keys spell out obscenities while flying through the air after the keyboard was smashed against somebody's head. (Just go with it.)
"You have to disbelieve your suspenders a little bit, yeah," McAvoy says, laughing. "But then, there's that in every film. We had to do that in even Atonement, you know what I mean' That's a compromise most actors make on a daily basis, and if you end up not making that compromise, you end up not filming the scene. You get into those arguments with the director, and finally you're like, wait a minute, you're right. If I win this argument, we don't film the scene. I should just bite it."
One thing he did need to do, though, was get in appropriate shape. "There's a lot of physical training that went into it," McAvoy says, "and all the usual stuff happened -- I went to the gym and stuff, which to be honest, really isn't my bag at all. But I did that through the entire shoot. And there's a lot of fight training with the stunt team. My stunt double was a three-time world kickboxing champion. He took me for kickboxing sessions every morning, and that was exceptional. To be able to train every morning from a champion in anything is cool."
The hardest part of training was something unanticipated but, now that you mention it, perfectly logical: "It was really hard for me to stop blinking whenever I shot a gun, which I've heard is hard for a lot of people."
Ultimately, the training wasn't too insane simply because for the first half of the film, McAvoy's supposed to be a weakling. "I was never Conan the Barbarian," he says. "There's no point in casting me in this film if you're just going to ask me to become completely different. And the strength of casting me is, you look at me in the beginning of the film and think, really' This guy's really going to do all the things we saw in the trailer'"
Last year, McAvoy appeared in two period pieces - Atonement and Becoming Jane. The year before, he starred in the Oscar-baiting The Last King of Scotland. Given his frequently highbrow choices, you might think he'd look down on a silly action flick like Wanted. But while he hesitantly admits that action isn't his favorite genre, his full answer is, in typical fashion, very diplomatic.
"I do like a really good action film," he says. "When action movies are bad, it can feel like being at the dentist. But when they're good, they're really fun. I think the last one I really enjoyed was Mission: Impossible-3 of all things, because J.J. Abrams did a great job of making you care and making you feel scared. If you drop somebody off of a building, but don't do it well as a director, nobody will care."
Still, he's quick to mention that he doesn't necessarily flock to more serious fare, either.
"I find it very hard to watch something like Atonement, only because I get very emotionally connected to that character, still, and what happens to him is so incredibly awful," he says. The frequent beatings his character gets in Wanted, by contrast, hardly reach the levels of high tragedy: "Lots of bad stuff happens to me, but it becomes kind of hilarious watching me do those [stunts], and being made to look so much cooler than I could ever possibly be."
For all the angles about McAvoy's rise to stardom, though -- if he's a credible Action Hero or whether he has Heartthrob Status among teenage girls or blah blah -- when it comes down to it, he seems like a very amiable guy who likes his privacy. Whether he'll get it or not is another story, especially if Wanted becomes big enough to warrant a sequel. "At the end of this film, it's not exactly all 'yay!' -- Wesley's very messed up, quite psychologically unhealthy. So it might be somewhere interesting, somewhere darker, that a sequel could go. But I'm probably speaking for the studio when I shouldn't be." He grins. "It's gotta make some money first, I think."
