James McAvoy: Going Deep With Submergence

By Erin Free

Anyone who has watched James McAvoy’s career with interest will know why he’s so safely positioned on the Hollywood spectrum: the Scotsman is blessed with a rare natural charisma that literally burns off the screen, and he has acting talent in spades. But McAvoy’s path to big screen stardom has been neither a clear nor obvious one. Born in 1979 in Glasgow, McAvoy was raised by his maternal grandparents after his parents – builder James and psychiatric nurse Elizabeth – divorced in 1986. Though a movie enthusiast as a teenager, the idea of actually becoming an actor was totally alien to a kid growing up amidst the working class sleet and drudgery of Glasgow.

“It was just one of those things that you never consider,” McAvoy told FilmInk in 2008. “You think about being a pilot before being an actor. It just wasn’t something that you think about. It wasn’t like there’s a glass ceiling and beyond it was acting – it just never occurred to me in any way whatsoever. At 16-years-old, I was cast in a film literally out of the blue, and that was when I started to consider acting: when I was actually an actor.”

The film in which the young McAvoy found himself was The Near Room, a dark thriller starring Adrian Dunbar as a journalist dealing with a career in freefall, a personal scandal and a growing tide of amoral sleaze. The film was directed by David Hayman (“He’s a well-known Scottish actor who very famously played Lady Macbeth at The Citizen Theatre in Glasgow,” McAvoy explains), who just happened to live next door to McAvoy’s high school English teacher, who invited his neighbour to talk to his class about Macbeth, which they were in the middle of studying. McAvoy describes in charmingly casual terms what would become the most fortuitous of meetings. “After the chat, I said, ‘Thank you very much for coming; it was very kind of you.’ Four months later, David was directing a film in Glasgow about prostitution and pornography and phoned the school up and asked me if I wanted to do an audition. I did and I got it.”

Despite scoring the role, McAvoy was under no impression that his future was signed, sealed and delivered. “No, I was very unsure of myself,” he says firmly. “I got paid 800 pounds for four weeks’ work which was amazing. It was more money than I’d been paid in my life. I was very excited and that was good, but I wasn’t sure that I could do it. I thought that if nothing ever happens again, I could at least say that I was in a movie.”

McAvoy’s tiny role in The Near Room – as the son of a pimp – actually won him a spot at The Royal Scottish Academy Of Dance And Music. After graduation, McAvoy moved to London, but still wasn’t rock solid on whether he wanted to become an actor, even after scoring guest roles on TV programmes such as The Bill and Lorna Doone. He was seriously considering joining the Royal Navy, until he landed a small role in Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ epic World War II HBO miniseries, Band Of Brothers.

Now on the international radar, McAvoy then scored a major role in the sci-fi miniseries, Children Of Dune, an adaptation of the works of cult author Frank Herbert. “It was a great giggle,” McAvoy told Manchester Online. “Honestly, it was a typical American mini-series, but when I was younger my two favourite books were Lord Of The Rings and Dune, so when Children Of Dune came up, I was all, ‘Oh yeah, go for it! I can’t believe that I’m going to be [major character] Leto Atreides.’”

After Children Of Dune, McAvoy returned to the UK to take a role in actor/humourist Stephen Fry’s directorial debut, Bright Young Things, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, which is set amongst the mildly debauched world of London’s upper classes in the 1930s. Interestingly, this was the film that McAvoy volunteered when FilmInk asked him back in 2008 what he believed to be the greatest turning point in his career. “It convinced me that I could play with class, and not just play Scottish or working class men,” he explained, his Scots brogue further emphasising his ability with accents. “I’d done that at drama school, but I hadn’t been able to do it at a professional level. That was partly because no one had given me an opportunity yet and partly because at auditions I wasn’t sure that people would believe me as that. Bright Young Things was a huge turning point because I got to play polished English.”

From there, McAvoy promptly found himself cast in two programmes that would soon become near legendary. The taut, highly intense thriller, State Of Play, featured McAvoy in its ensemble cast as cocky young journalist, Dan Foster, who gets caught up in a web of corruption and murder. In the cult comedy, Shameless, meanwhile, he starred as Steve, a charming knockabout who falls for Fiona (Anne-Marie Duff), one of a large group of raucous, tearaway kids belonging to the working class Gallagher clan.

But despite clocking on in two hit TV shows, McAvoy was in the middle of a crisis of confidence. “I felt as if my career just happened to me,” he told The Observer in reference to his fluke-like entry into the acting world. “I hadn’t actually engaged in it. I felt totally disempowered, just by this fate thing. I was still struggling to find out the truth about myself. At that point, I was still lying to myself about my profession, and what I wanted in life. I got a bit slobbish. I drank a lot, and sat around in my flat in Manchester eating junk food.”

While working on Shameless, McAvoy and Anne-Marie Duff became a couple off-screen as well, and he credits her with putting the brakes on his personal downward slide. When he won a BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2006, he publicly declared his thanks for his future wife. “I would like to thank Anne-Marie,” McAvoy said from the stage, “because she taught me to respect life, and it took my career to a whole new level.” He couldn’t have been more on the money. It was after Shameless that McAvoy’s career really took off. Unfortunately, the couple (who have a son) called it quits in 2016 after ten years together.

In an ironic connection to his initial big break as a teenager, he scored the much sought after lead role in a modernised TV retelling – set in a restaurant kitchen – of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. McAvoy got great notices for his edgy, richly detailed performance, but it was with his next turn that he finally got recognition on an international level. Though filled with fantasy, special effects, major set pieces and a large ensemble cast, McAvoy was regularly singled out by critics for his sensitive turn as Mr. Tumnus, the compromised faun in The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The With, And The Wardrobe. “Playing Mr. Tumnus knowing, like me, how much he means to people was a privilege, but also a big pressure,” McAvoy told The Daily Record. “Mr. Tumnus was always one of my favourite characters, so to play him was a big honour.”

The film was a major hit around the world, and McAvoy parlayed that into an impressive streak of fine film roles. Forest Whitaker may have received all the plaudits (and an Oscar) for his fierce performance as dictator Idi Amin, but it was McAvoy who provided the beating heart of the excellent drama, The Last King Of Scotland. He plays Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a young medico who stumbles his way into a position as the tyrant’s personal physician. “Nicholas is the personification of all the people who fell in love with this monster who was Idi Amin, and woke up to see that they had created a nightmare,” McAvoy told the BBC. “The challenge was to make Nicholas feel like a real human being, and not just the lens that you see the story through.” McAvoy succeeded: Whitaker’s Idi Amin is the film’s flashpoint, but it’s Garrigan with whom the audience bonds, and it’s ultimately him who makes the film so impressive.

While he may have been getting compared regularly to the likes of Hugh Grant and fellow Scot Ewan McGregor, McAvoy’s on-screen intensity was truly singular, and he employed it again in the low key, little seen dramas, Penelope (this little seen adult fable sees him star opposite Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon) and Starter For 10. His talents were certainly being recognised, and McAvoy was also being tagged as an unlikely sex symbol. That side of his persona was first exploited to its full extent with the period drama Becoming Jane, a fanciful look at the life of a young Jane Austen, played by Anne Hathaway. McAvoy essayed the dashing but troubled Tom Lefroy, a prototype for Austen’s seminal romantic creation Mr. Darcy in Pride And Prejudice. “I really like James McAvoy,” his co-star Anne Hathaway gushed while doing press for the film. “He’s smart, terribly clever, a lot of fun, and a brilliant actor.”

All of these films, however, were a build up to what remains one of McAvoy’s key works: his devastating performance as Robbie Turner – a working class lad who is exposed to deception and tragedy through his connection to the wealthy Tallis family – in the highly acclaimed British epic, Atonement, an adaptation of the equally acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan. Saintly but tough, Robbie Turner is a difficult, complex and deeply romantic character, and McAvoy rose to the challenge of giving him shape and utter believability, while his chemistry with co-star Keira Knightley is near flammable. “We tested a few actors just to be sure,” director Joe Wright told FilmInk at The Venice Film Festival in 2007, “and we knew what we wanted because there are many beautiful descriptions of Robbie in the novel. But the description that really struck me was that he had eyes of optimism. That was very important for the story, because that optimism is ultimately crushed. And I knew James had those eyes.”

Though the film’s financiers questioned McAvoy’s bankability, Wright fought for him, and the actor fought equally hard for the role. Once cast, however, he realised what a challenging character Robbie Turner really was. “It’s not until about half way through the film when he becomes damaged that he becomes very, very conflicted,” McAvoy told FilmInk at Venice. “He’s trying to stay alive, but he’s suicidal. Initially, however, there’s no conflict in him. I’ve never played anyone like that. I found it dreadfully difficult. It’s strange because it’s a very simple character to begin with. He’d be quite uninteresting if it wasn’t for the fact that we destroy him utterly and tear his heart open and then spit in it. That’s what I think becomes interesting – it’s sad that I think like that really.”

When FilmInk asked McAvoy about his career turning points in 2008, Atonement was the first film suggested. “I don’t see it as a turning point,” he replied, “but it is something that I am intensely proud to be in, and I had an incredible experience on it. It’s actually not that long since I’ve done it, so I don’t know if it’s a turning point yet.”

It certainly was. It led to McAvoy’s first lead role in a big budget American flick, and while Russian auteur Timur Bekmambetov’s (Night Watch and Day Watch) trippy action thriller, Wanted – which also starred Angelina Jolie – failed to make a major impression on the box office, it proved that McAvoy was in the sights of Hollywood’s power brokers. “It was great that they cast someone like me rather than the usual action figure or somebody more physically dominating,” McAvoy told FilmInk just before the film’s release. “I thought that was wonderful, because people in the real world aren’t always the best looking guy or the biggest guy or the strongest guy or whatever. It’s nice to see that reflected in film sometimes. I actually did start to wonder initially if maybe they should have just gone with the usual type of guy. When we started making it though, and when I began to make it my own show, I started believing in myself. And weirdly, that probably happens in every film that I do; you just come to believe in yourself in the first couple weeks and then make it work in your own way.”

McAvoy continued to do that across a hose of fascinatingly diverse films. He brought class and restrained passion to The Last Station (an adaptation of the novel by Leo Tolstoy); The Conspirator (Robert Redford’s cruelly ignored Abraham Lincoln assassination drama); the romantic double shot, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby (a two-film affair with Jessica Chastain that tracks a relationship from both the male and female perspectives); and Victor Frankenstein (in which he plays the titular horror icon opposite Daniel Radcliffe); and a supreme dose of unbridled madness and fury to the Irvine Welsh adaptation, Filth, brilliantly essaying a corrupt, junky cop battling a horde of personal demons. The much loved author called McAvoy’s performance “incendiary”, putting it higher even than Ewan McGregor’s brilliant turn in the film version of his most famous novel, Trainspotting. “It’s one of the best solo performances that I’ve ever seen,” Welsh told FilmInk. “He’s better than Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. He has all the craziness, but he has more pathos than De Niro has in Taxi Driver. It’s really edgy, and it’s a totally disturbing performance.”

In amongst those diverse projects would come with another key turning point. With such a rich filmography, the once unsure-of-himself James McAvoy seemed like the natural choice when it was announced that the actor had been tapped to play the iconic role of Professor Charles Xavier in 20th Century Fox’s 2011 Marvel Comics film, X-Men: First Class. A prequel to the X-Men series of films starring Hugh Jackman, First Class is set in the sixties, and tells the story of how the superhero mutants initially met each other, and how their relationships developed to lead up to the events of the original X-Men film.

McAvoy admitted to FilmInk in 2011 to having some initial doubts when he discovered that he had been chosen to play the character made famous by Patrick Stewart. “It was quite weird to accept that I was playing not only the young Patrick Stewart, but that character as well,” the actor confessed. “I was a fan of the original movies, and I was a fan of the cartoons as well when I was growing up. I never got the comic books at all though. It was just weird, because I never saw myself in that role. So at first it was weird, but then the fun came when I realised that they wanted to make a prequel. The plan at this stage is to make three movies, and by the end of the third movie, we want to lead the audience on to the events of the first X-Men film. We start at a very different place at the beginning of First Class; we’re going to have the characters as far away from what we recognise them to be in the other movies. We want it to be almost inconceivable that they will get there. Massive, great, epic, horrible things need to happen to them in order to change them, which you will see as the series goes on…”

That intended series did of course happen, with McAvoy reprising the role of Charles Xavier in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse and the currently-in-production X-Men: Dark Phoenix. It’s likely the role that most film fans would recognise him for, but the deep expanse of McAvoy’s acting abilities was further accentuated in M. Night Shyamalan’s nerve-shredding 2016 thriller, Split. In this surprise companion piece to the director’s 2000 cult favourite, Unbreakable, McAvoy is masterful as a tortured man with multiple personalities, one of which is a next-level supernatural monstrosity. “It is for me,” McAvoy laughed to The Guardian’s suggestion that it was an actor’s dream role. “There was the opportunity to flex many muscles and employ all the dexterity you can muster.” McAvoy will return next year in the continuation, Glass, with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.

Currently filming the highly anticipated horror follow-up, It: Chapter Two (playing Bill Denbrough), and TV mini-series literary adaptations, His Dark Materials and Watership Down, the ever unpredictable James McAvoy can be seen on local screens right now in Wim Wenders’ Submergence, in which he and Alicia Vikander star as lovers separated by thousands of miles but united in their shared memories. No typical romance, this big screen take on J.M Ledgard’s acclaimed novel also takes in subjects as diverse as Islamic extremism, complex oceanography, and geopolitics. “I had to let myself be guided by Wim’s vision, which seemed articulate and very intelligent,” McAvoy told Codigo Uno. “This is a philosophical film, intentionally romantic, sensual. It is the story of a couple who fall in love. Their conversations, for moments, are academic, they do not fall in love with a smile, but of their intelligence. We were all in Normandy exploring the characters, rehearsing before shooting. Wim Wenders is a wonderful guy.”

Playing a British spy taken hostage by jihadists in Africa, the role provided the ever diverse and daring James McAvoy with one of his closest on-screen counterparts. “I did not feel like I was playing a role,” the actor told Codigo Uno. “That character could have been me if my lifestyle had been different and if I would have chosen that kind of job. Of course, he is not like me…he has lived experiences that I will never be able to live. However, inside, he is much more like me than any of the other characters that I have ever played in my career.”

Submergence is screening in cinemas now.