Have you seen this man?
by Stephanie Trong
To a lot of people, James Mcavoy is either recognizable by name or by face, but rarely both. It’s a fun theory to test out, say in the lobby of a posh hotel on a freezing night in New York City. As the 30-yer-old Scottish actor approached the front desk, he elicits rubbernecking maybe one at most. In his heavy Glaswegian accent, he relays his personal information to the clerk in order to check out, and the guest at the counter next to him does that thing of looking over without looking over. But otherwise, even though at this point in his career he’s a certifiable celebrity, McAvoy goes completely unnoticed by a whole room full of people. Were you to approach any one of them, though and mention that he was the lead in Atonement or Wanted – it would immediately click. Everyone, no matter what particular brand of Friday-nigh movie fare they personally subscribe to, would exclaim, eyes lit up in a mix of excitement and respect, “Oh! That guy. That guy is awesome!”
Such is McAvoy’s curious place on the Hollywood food chain – he manages to fly under the radar, even while starring in some very, very big films. A master of accents with everyman looks, he disappears into his parts, captivating audiences for a couple hours, and then he simply lets them go home. And it goes both ways: Because his performances lack an superfluous flash, McAvoy gets to simply go home, too. For some reason, he has yet to be cannibalized by fame, and it’s doubtful he ever will be.
And thank God. It would be a shame to lose McAvoy’s bouncy, good humored personality. When we meet, there is no trace of the self-improvement broodiness or flinching paranoia that comes with being a victim of Tinseltown. His presence practically exudes “regular guy,” one whom you could close down a pub with at 4 a.m. ”Do ya mind if I get something to eat?” McAvoy asks, as we settle into a corner banquette in the hotel’s lounge, unidentifiable electronica playing softly in the background, velvet curtains draped over the windows, candles illuminating the tables. “Otherwise, I’ll be stuck in the airport forced to eat fast food – that’s the worst!” After this, McAvoy is catching a plane to Georgia, where he’s filming Robert Redford’s latest directorial effort The Conspirator. He’s dressed in a white henly, jeans, and brown cowboy boots – the only flourish a long blue scarf draped around his neck. His luggage consist of a filled-to-the-brim JanSport backpack that he slings onto the booth. “I’m going for French exchange student,” he jokes. It’s too dim to see his eyes – a turquoise so bright that onscreen they seem digitally enhanced – really are that blue. His hair appears freshly washed and left on its own to part in the middle and feather at will. At the moment, he has a full-grown copper beard, bright against the dark mp atop his hear. “But I don’t have ginger pubes, I promise!” he quips. The waitress approaches, and he orders a vodka tonic with fresh lime and a cheeseburger with a side of salad. “Thanks, love.” he says, as she saunter off.
Exceedingly polite with a wink of scrappy mischief, McAvoy is not an easy person to pin down, either on screen or off. He says he has no master plan, no grand strategy when it comes to picking projects; he just wants to do quality stuff – which is something that most actors like to nonchalantly claim but rarely have the resumes to support. However, McAvoy’s list of credits is wildly varied, and there’s not a throwaway in the bunch: a faun (The Chronicles of Narnia), a nerdy university student (Starter for 10), a personal doctor to a dictator (The Last King of Scotland_, a 19th century lothario turned romantic (Becoming Jane), a down-and-out American blue blood willing to court a woman with the nose of a pig (Penelope), a love-sick Brit sent to prison on false charges, only to end up on the beaches of Dunkirk in WWII (Atonement), and a cubicle drone transformed into a ruthless assassin (Wanted). His agents – he’s got two, one in America and one in the U.K. – “don’t really pressure me into doing anything. We think along the same lines on most things,” he says, putting on his gray skullcap, then snatching it off and stretching it in his hands. “Every now and again, they’ve thought that I should do something, and I’ve been, ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’ But that’s only happened once or twice in my entire career.” This month finds McAvoy making a typical about-face with The Last Station, in which he plays a secretary to Leo Tolstoy.
“I’d been wanting to do something that was a bit more of a strong ensemble cast after Wanted, something that relied more on the cast rather than just sort of one actor,” he says, unfolding his napkin and absent-mindedly giving the table a good whip or two. “What originally struck me about it, is that it’s a period costume drama and a biopic – that is quite funny. I haven’t seen that before. I think it’s funny in a very Chekhovian kind of a way. That humor is fantastic – it’s the comedy of the mundane.”
McAvoy just nailed the primary appeal of The Last Station. There is weighty subject matter at hand: The ailing literary titan, political theorist, and philosopher (played by Christopher Plummer) must decide either to leave the copyrights of his work to his wife, Baroness Sofya (a radiant Helen Mirren), or to the Russian people, as he is urged to do by his most loyal disciple, Chertov (Paul Giamatti, at his sinister best).McAvoy’s character, Valentin, is caught in the middle – he’s asked by both parities to spy and report on any changes that might be afoot with Tolstoy’s will. Considering the caliber of the cast, the nuanced performances come as no surprise, but what really saves the film from drowning in boring, high-brow land is the levity of the dialogue: the way Leo and Sofya bicker like a contemporary married couple, or how Valentin and his love interest, Masha (Kerry Condon), make fun of Chertov’s moustache. “I just felt like I was getting to do a play on film,” says McAvoy, a theater veteran, with a smile. He takes a swig of his drink.
Born in Glasgow and raised in the nearby town of Drumchapel, McAvoy wasn’t an obvious choice to become a big-league actor. He wasn’t reared by a stage mom or shuffled to commercial auditions. His parents split when he was seven, after which his mom moved them into his grandparent’s government–housing flat. “I grew up in a bad area,” he says. “But it’s difficult; I don’t want to sit here and dis it, because that’s where I’m from, know what I meant? Yes, there are beatings and mugging and all that stuff, but you have them anywhere. There’s actually good things about Drumchapel, as well.” He describes the setting as “projects, with a bit of green.” The food arrives and he takes a bite of his burger and licks his fingers.
Growing up, McAVoy did display one characteristic that he could later translate to the big screen: He was a terribly emo little kid. “I was very sensitive, Cried easy. Enjoyed crying from an early age,” he offers. “Ehm, not in public. On my own. I think I recognized its therapeutic qualities early on. And then as I came into my teenage years, it became very handy ‘cause I could wallow about my lack of girlfriend or general cool or mystique.” He’s quick to point out that he wasn’t a nerd back then, but more of a “ned.” That would be Scottish equivalent of the English chav, complete with requisite track suit, gold jewelry, and total disregard for authority. “My heart wasn’t really in it,” he says. “I didn’t like drinking on street corners and stuff, and I didn’t really enjoy the aggressive nature of that shit.“
Funnily enough, it was rebelling against this rebellious subculture that got him into acting. Director, actor, and writer David Hayman came to speak at McAvoy’s high school about his trades. “Nobody was really interested by the fact that he was there talking about the film industry and about what it is to work within that world.”
He burps and solicits a pardon. “People were taking the piss out of him a little bit.” Afterward, McAvoy went up and talked to him. “The real reason was to apologize on behalf of my classmates, which was fucking hugely snobbish of me, but I wanted him to know that we appreciated it.” But the teen also found what Hayman had to say “hugely interesting.” Six months later, Hayman offered McAvoy his first part, in The Near Room. The budding thespian later enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama where he studied theater, paying his way with money earned while working at a bakery. “I got fired after two years,” he deadpans. It was the hours that killed him – getting up at 5 a.m. on weekdays and working weekends. “I was fucked. I ended up slacking off. Some people got some very bad cream cakes.”
After that came a few years of taking bit parts in movies, and then in 2004, McAvoy got his real break playing a petty criminal in the gritty British dramedy Shameless. The critically acclaimed series set him on a professional path to later play leading men opposite the likes of Keira Knightly, Anne Hathaway, Christina Ricci, and Jolie, but it also served as a stepping stone to a major pairing in his personal life: McAvoy’s girlfriend in Shameless, British actress Ann-Marie Duff, soon became his girlfriend, and the two married in 2006. He doesn’t usually speak about their relationship in the press, but at the moment it’s especially relevant, since she is also in The Last Station, playing one of the Tolstoy’s daughters. He’s not cagey about the topic, even when asked if their relationship caused any tension during filming. He leans back casually and lets out a good-natured laugh. “Noooo,” he says in a jolly baritone. “When we were on set together, we would have a laugh; we all would. There was nothing weird between anybody.” He says that one of the things that allowed the couple to take the job was that they didn’t have many scenes together, so keeping things separate was not really an issue. He leans forward, as if he can’t help himself, a proud glint in his eyes. “All I know is – and this is behind–the-scenes shit – that she inspired another actor on that job to raise their game one particular day, because she was so good,” he says. “Everybody went, fucking hell, let’s put on the acting hat.”
The couple now lives in London. It’s possible to cobble together a few details about their everyday lives: He says his wife does most of the cooking; his friends tell him that everything he makes tastes like curry, even things that are not supposed to taste like curry. Despite this, he’s currently on a culinary kick of his own, having recently fallen in love with Mexican food, he searches for the dodgiest-looking recipe on the Internet, “the one that looks most like it could have been posted by some little old woman who really doesn’t know how to work a computer, and I try to make that shit.” Outside of his kitchen pursuits, he has a motorcycle, a Triumph, which he describes as “loooovely” and which he says he misses while he’s here in the States. McAvoy is a huge fan of the Scottish football team Celtic, and thinks that Arsenal “play the most beautiful football on the entire planet.” Very rarely is this low-key existence interrupted by the trappings of his career. “I’ve only had somebody try and take pictures of me outside my house once in my entire life, “ he says, stabbing into a pile of greens on his plate. “And they stopped after about half an hour.”
This isolated incident happened right after Wanted came out. And good news for anyone wondering if it’s worth lurking in McAvoy’s bushes: He has signed onto step into Wesley Gibson’s shoes once again. “They’re between scripts. So until they get a script, they can’t do a schedule. And until they get a schedule, they can’t do a budget. And until then, they can’t green-light it- they can’t hire people, they can’t do anything really. So God knows,” he says when probed for details. One thing is for sure – he’s going to have to get back into fighting shape whenever filming does start. For the original, the actor worked out intensively with a trainer for six weeks prior to shooting. “I got more buff than I’d ever been in my life,” he says, collapsing into the booth at the sheer memory. Chided about the “James McAvoy Wanted workout,” which made the rounds in fitness magazines and on the Web, he hits back with, “We also employed the 300 workout, which nearly fucking killed me. Oh my God, the 300 workout was a bastard!” But then he earnestly reveals: “I was really proud of being able to do wide-grip pull-ups. That is something that is so hard to do in a smooth motion. For the first two months of filming, I couldn’t do one, but by the end of the movie, I could do 30 in a row! That was brilliant.” He pauses for a minute, then looks up as if he’s just had a stroke of genius and suddenly adopts the lisp of a hot, tranny mess. “I might go skinny for the next film. He’s a bulimic assassin; he vomits after killing,” he says. Back in his own accent, he continues: “Nobody who went through that stuff would be mental sane. So no matter what the script says, I think I’m gonna play the second film like he’s in dire need of therapy. And I think he might’ve stopped eating.” He pauses. “I might go for the ninja look. Less muscles, more ninja.”
It remains to be seen who will be cast as his leading lady (Jolie’s chacter, Fox, died at the end of the first movie). But considering McAvoy’s track record with A-list pairings, it’s likely to be someone very famous. Asked whether he ever gets intimidated when meeting such stars, he shrugs. “I was intimidated by humongity – this is a good made-up word – the humongity of Keira’s sort of the world presence,” he sucks in air through his teeth. “Angelina’s the same; she’s huge. But with Keira, it was just so weird that somebody so young should be so humoungous, you know? But then as every actors says in every interview – and it’s totally boring, but its is the truth – within five minutes, that disappears, and she was proper normal, really nice. Which is remarkable, considering the extraordinary nature of her life. I couldn’t even imagine it.”
It’s about this time that McAvoy has to leave for the airport, and he produces a wad of cash from his wallet to pay the bill, which has yet to be delivered. But the waitress, who’s just come over to clear our plates, is having none of it. “No, no, no, no – it’s on the house,” she gushes. When he protests, she protests even more. It seems somebody else in the room knows exactly who James McAvoy is whether by face or by name doesn’t really matter. Before he gets up, he makes sure to leave a huge tip on the table. Because he’s that guy. And that guy is awesome.
Credit: watching-in-the-dark, cris_a
