James McAvoy: ‘The film industry has given me an amazing life, but I don’t want to live to work’

“Is he grotesque? Yeah, yeah. Is he actually civilized? Yeah, yeah. Is he fucking crazy. Yeah, yeah. Is he chauvinistic? Or is he actually just, like, a good version of masculinity? Or is he toxic masculinity? Is he a good husband, is he a bad man?” Actor James McAvoy, 45, throws out these questions in the bar of a rather lackluster North London hostelry of ill repute. Of course, these aren’t just arbitrary ravings aimed at some random bar fly, he is in fact considering the psyche of Paddy, the lead role he magnificently renders in his latest motion picture, Speak No Evil.

A remake of a 2022 Danish thriller directed by James Watkins — who scared the pants off many an unsuspecting cinema goer with Eden’s Lake in 2008 — it is an uncompromising and thoroughly riveting thriller.

“Paddy, is as much as he’s malevolent and questionable, is a very likeable chap, enjoys his work and is having a good time and so was I,” chuckles the actor mischievously. “Is Paddy your average Joe in a world gone mad, or a mad person in a world gone normal?”

Whatever the answer, little might prepare you for the actor’s absolutely powerhouse performance — reminiscent of Robert De Niro in Cape Fear — that sees McAvoy grow both physically and malevolently until, by the end of the picture, one fears that his furious spiky testosterone might jump out of the screen and bite you on your privates.

“At the beginning, I tried to keep myself as small and as soft as possible,” he says, looking as fit as a flea on steroids. “But I deliberately put on more muscle as we went on, pumped up before the takes and all that, until by the end, Paddy’s purely out for blood and literally bursting with ferociousness. He is a charismatic, scary as fuck bastard. I grew up around people like that. You see them and keep well away.”

McAvoy knows what he is talking about. He was born on April 21, 1979 in Glasgow. His dad James was bus-driver-turned-builder, while his mum Elizabeth (née Johnstone) was a psychiatric nurse. His parents separated when he was seven, his dad went AWOL, his mother fell ill, so her parents took the little boy in and raised him in the notoriously violent, Drumchapel Housing Estate on the edge of Glasgow, which was then known as “The Murder capital of Western Europe.”

“Drumchapel was tough, but I loved it,” says McAvoy. “My grandparents were just wonderful; they made me feel that I had the right to try and do anything I wanted but, with the added caveat, that you’ve got to work for it. They also knew the dangers of the estate so didn’t allow me to cross the door at nighttime until I was about 16 and rightly so. But I think feeling trapped and constricted gave me a bit of an edge to want to get away and something.”

Indeed, such was his desire to get away, aged 15, his ambition was to become a Catholic missionary.

“Aye… and that was mainly so I could travel abroad and get out of Drumchapel,” he reflects whimsically in a Scottish accent hardly diminished by years in the U.K. “But at that same time, I did start to get a little bit of progress with the opposite sex which that made me realize that I could not be celibate for the rest of my life.”

Not without pluck, when the great Scottish actor and director, David Hayman visited his school, he asked him for job, and a part in Hayman’s Near Room followed. Initially the boy from the estate wasn’t a keen on acting but after developing a major crush for his co-star, Alana Brady, stuck with it for a while but then decided to join the Navy.

He was then offered a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama to study acting, graduated in 2000 and dived in clothes on, head first into the milieu. He was a soldier in Band of Brothers (2001); an upper-class society hack in Bright Young Things (2003), Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and was a middle-class guy from down South Steve McBride in the hugely successful dodgy Manchester housing estate comedy/drama Shameless. Forrest Whitaker caught it and requested McAvoy for the role of Idi Amin’s doctor in, The Last King of Scotland and his career went ballistic.

He then shared top billing with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman for Wanted; starred as an American lawyer in The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford; excelled in Gnomeo and Juliette and Arthur Christmas and consequently portrayed a man with 23 different personalities in Glass directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

A formidable cannon by anybody’s measure, but what job gave him the most satisfaction?

“Oh, Christ, I don’t know, man,” he groans, head in hands. “I’d spent 10 years on X-Men so that’s where I made the closest bonds with crew, cast and producers. But the one singular film that I had the best time with, both artistically and socially, was Atonement with Keira Knightley by director Joe Wright. Yes, Atonement and Filth. Atonement is probably my favorite story that I’ve ever told and Filth, is, the most artistically fulfilling.”

After sitting with McAvoy for the best part of an hour, these two entirely diverse choices come as no surprise. For the former, he plays a rather earnest son of a servant in love with the younger lady of the house who — wrongly convicted of rape — is sent to the WW1 front and dies of sepsis. For the latter movie — based on the Irvine Welsh novel — he plays a world-class sociopathic, alcoholic bent copper, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, who has creepy anonymous phone sex with his best mates wife, coerces a 15-year-old schoolgirl into performing oral sex and does more drugs than the United States. Of course, McAvoy is unerringly excellent in both movies, firing from both barrels and owning the screen.

“I can’t do half measures,” he says, rubbing his beard. “I have to really go for it with all I’ve got or nothing. I take no quarter. So, these days I try to spend more time with my family [he has two children: one with Shameless co-star Anne Marie Duff whom he divorced in 2016 and another with his wife Lisa Liberati] as I just don’t want to live to work. The industry is great, and it has given me an amazing life, but it’s truly grueling. I can’t live for being in a fucking unit base in the middle of fucking Snowdonia at 4 a.m. making a movie. The public only see pictures of the premieres so think film is very glamorous, but there is never any glamour when you’re making a film; you’re either freezing pretending to be hot or you’re fucking roasting pretending to be temperate, and you’re either dry pretending to be wet or wet pretending to be dry and surviving on a fucking jacket potato, a bit of spam and a piece of pastry.”

When asked what advice would he give his teenage self, he replies: “Be positive and find the positive in any situation, spread a good vibe, be a good guy and have a good time. Then hopefully good things will come your way.”

Styling by Fabio Immediato.

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