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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, ...

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