SCOTTISH ACTOR JAMES McAVOY HAS SAVED HIMSELF FROM BECOMING A PERPETUAL NARNIA CREATURE WITH A NUMBER OF BREAKTHROUGH ROLES—INCLUDING ONE WITH PLENTY OF SEX SCENES
It’s a question every actor faces at one time or another: how do you follow up your breakout role as a child-abducting half-man, half-goat? The 27-year-old Scottish actor James McAvoy decided to hedge his bets. Over the next year, he will be seen in roles ranging from the man who inspired Jane Austen’s canon to a guy who falls in love with a pig-woman to representing the entire nation of England.
A former baker who was raised by his single mother in a Glasgow housing project and chose drama school over enlistment in the British navy, McAvoy is no pantywaist when it comes to dramatic range. He first made an impression on American audiences as Mr. Tumnus, the Faun in last winter’s Chronicles of Narnia. The role required him to prance around shirtless with hair glued to his nether regions and to come across as both pedophilic and sympathetic. “It was my favorite book when I was a kid,” says McAvoy, as enthusiastic as if he got the role yesterday. “I got a call from my agent asking, ‘Would you like to audition for Tumnus? Naw, you wouldn’t want to—it’s a bit silly, isn’t it,’ and I said, ‘What, are you kidding me?’ I went in and talked to them for three hours and figured they would give it to someone more well-known.”
As it turned out, the role made his name. But first there were some issues with the costume. “Or lack of costume,” laughs McAvoy. “It was quite uncomfortable. Makeup was three and a half hours every day. I was covered in glue, covered in hair, and had prosthetics and things covering my nose. Hair kept falling off, so every two minutes people had to come up and glue it back on with hot tongs. But every actor has a self-harming side that loves that shit—when you’ve been shooting for fourteen hours, and everyone’s tired, and it’s freezing, and they say, ‘Can you take your top off and run through the snow even though your nipples are about to turn black and fall off?’. Even if it’s a mundane thing like making sure all the bits are sticking to your body, it gives you purpose, makes you feel more noble, you know?”
McAvoy’s next film is The Last King of Scotland, a biopic of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who rose to power after the U.K. ceded control of its former protectorate, and then murdered thousands of his countrymen while British tabloids looked on in amusement. McAvoy plays a Scottish doctor who is working in a Ugandan field hospital when he’s chosen by Amin (Forest Whitaker) to be his personal physician. They become close confidantes; eventually McAvoy’s character discovers the extent of Amin’s brutality and realizes that he’s enabled it. “My character is a microcosm of the British presence in Uganda,” says McAvoy. “A complete fucking waste of time. We should never have been there.”
What was acting with Forest Whitaker like? “Scary. I haven’t told him that,” he says. “He was so much in character when we started filming. He was as large as Idi every day, in every way, which is something I think people will be surprised to see. Forest Whitaker seems to be a quiet man, reserved, thoughtful, while Idi is anything but. He’s huge. He’s bawdy. He’s gauche. He’s confrontational. So Forest became that, and that had so much effect on everyone. When he would come on set, the crew would just be shitting themselves. I could gauge the difference,” he laughs. “People worked much harder when Forest was on set.”
Other challenges included building up a chaste romantic tension with Gillian Anderson, who plays a co-worker, and undertaking several explicit sex scenes. “My character ends up having sex with a number of Ugandan girls. Shooting that was a complete nightmare. Uganda’s really religious—almost everyone’s Catholic, and there weren’t many performers who were willing to simulate sex. Getting them to take some clothes off was really difficult. In the situation, I felt mortified. Because, you know, I don’t love sex scenes, but I’ve been doing them for seven years, and here’s this girl in a roomful of men who all speak a different language, they’re all white, and they’re all fucking focused entirely on her, and she’s never been on a set before! But the scenes turned out really well—there’s a lot of story told through the sex.”
Familiar to British television audiences thanks to the mini-series Children of Dune, a BBC adaptation of White Teeth, and a butt-baring stint on the popular sitcom Shameless, McAvoy next stars in the U.K. college drama Starter for Ten. Later this year he’ll be internationally conspicuous in Penelope, as a compulsive gambler and social misfit who falls in love with a pig-snouted woman (Christina Ricci). The romantic lead in Becoming Jane, a Jane Austen biopic starring Anne Hathaway, follows. “Yep, I’m the dude she falls in love with,” he says. “It’s strange to be in two films back-to-back playing the love interest, because I look at myself and say, ‘You’re really not that attractive.’”
Somewhere, a coven of Narnia fans are howling in agony. “I’m very fortunate,” says McAvoy. “It’s not like I had huge amounts of choice of roles—luckily all of the work has been good. You look at superstars who did shit films and you think, How did that happen? You could have done anything you wanted!”
Still, he’s circumspect about his meteoric rise over the last year: “You can’t really strategize your career. If you could, everyone would be successful, and everyone’s obviously not. You just have to do what’s good, what stretches you.” Even if it involves pig snouts and cloven hooves. Michael Martin
Photography Philip Ga
Styling Celestine Cooney
Grooming Peita Gregory using Redken
and Dermalogica skincare
Location The Street Studios, London
Production Holly Jagger (And Production)
Above left: Blazer Gucci
Shirt Dsquared Sweater Surface to Air
Jeans Tsubi Belt Beyond Retro
Above right: Coat Burberry
Shirt Vivienne Westwood Man Tie Peter Jensen
