Great Scot!

Date: December 2007 Publication: Angeleno Country: United States Author: James Servin Excerpt:He sums up his view of fame with just one sentence: "It's nice that people like you and don't think you're a dick."

The full article... You've seen James McAvoy quitely steal scenes from acting champ Forest Whitaker as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's doctor in the Last King of Scotland, and stealthily snatch the entire film the Chronicles of Narnia as Mr. Tumnus, a pan-like, bearded faun. But get ready: McAvoy is about to make the leap from relative newcomer to acting supernoca with Atonement, in which the 27 year old Scot catapults from nerdy-cute status to drop-dead leading man heartthrob. In the film, he nails the role of Robbie Turner, a working class guy in pre-World War II England who wins the heart of the aristocratic Cecilia Tallis, played by Keira Knightley. Offscreen, a cheeky Ms. Knightley has been telling reporters that his kissing skills are perhaps the best she's ever encountered. And the drumbeat doesn't stop there. Atonement is being trumpeted as Academy Awards Best Picture material, McAvoy himself is being talked up as a serious contender for Best Actor, and his next leading lady is none other than Saint Angelina, in the film Wanted, due out this spring. But whatever Hollywood (and Keira) see in him, he doesn't quite see it in himself. In person, the Glasgow native is beyond self-effacing. "I'm a bit realistic in the way I look. I just think I've been hit by the ugly stick," says McAvoy, who comes across as humble and earnest in Levi's, a t-shirt, work boots and ginger scruff, a contrast to his opulently decorated surroundings, a velvet curtained function room complete with blazing fireplace at The Bowery Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Clearly, this growing cult of adulation hasn't affected the actor, who seems oblivious to the current buzz surrounding him as well as his own good looks. Even with his name in the same sentence as the word Oscar, he doesn't seem to think he'll be changed by a sudden shot of fame. "I don't think it's going to be too bad," he says, "Unless you have a scandal like a nanny-gate, you're going to be left alone. Unless you're Keira or Angelina or Brad Pitt...They're all brilliant actors, but they're also ridiculously good-looking. I don't think I'm goin to have that ever." McAvoy isn't paying attention to the numerous swooning fan sites devoted to him on the web, either. He chalks the whole thing up to movie magic. "Movies make you look better than you do, and camera angles do and make up does," he says, his pale blue eyes distractingly magentic. "I'm convinved that, should someone who perhaps thnks that you're gorgeous and all that kind of stuff...ever meet you in real life, the speel would definitely be broken. It's lovely that people like it, but it is the myth, and you've got to forget the myth. Otherwise, you start believing your own shit. You start believing that you're incredibly good-looking, just because someone filmed you looking better than you actually are. You've just kind of got-to get on with your life." McAvoy has done just that, choosing roles that show his remarkable versatility, playing everything from Austen's suitor in Becoming Jane to a quiz-sho geek in Starter for 10 and a feisty paraplegic in the little-seen gem Rory O'Shea Was Here. But his part as Robbie Turner in Atonement- a hunk with an essentially benign nature- was a departure from the scalawags he relishes portraying. Typically, he likes to "play an absolute prick but still make you like him," he says with a mischevious smile. McAvoy highlights The Last King of Scotland, in which "the guy I played was an absolute asshole. He wasn't malevolent as much as incredibly selfish." In Becoming Jane: "It's a much more sedate kind of film, but, within that genre, I still quite like playing a dick. As an actor, you get to behave in a way that (you) wouldn't normally, and also it's slightly more representative of humanity as well." Thank some tough lessons from his childhood for contributing to his view of the human race. When he was 7, his mother, a psychiatric nurse, and his father, a construction worker, split up, and McAvoy was partly raised by his grandparents. His mother and young sister, Joy, lived across the street. "My mom brought me up, man," he says, "My mom still lives across the street from my gran. I lived with my grandmamma half the time. I lived with my mom half the time." McAvoy appears to have had a bit of a devilish streak since childhood. "I was about 10, playing hide-and-seek with my little sister in my granny's house," McAvoy recalls. "I hid in the top-floor bedroom in a closet, and sat on top of a chest of drawers. I could hear my sister getting closer and closer. I knew she was going to open the door, so I crossed my legs and went into a meditation pose. She opened the door and said, 'Ah, I found you,' and I said,'No, you haven't. I'm not James. James is dead. I'm James' ghost.' She burst out crying, ran downstairs, and told my grandma. My gran came running up the stairs, screaming, bawling her head off. She found me and she beat the shit out of me, man. Quite rightly, as well." When asked if he's ever seen his father since the breakup, McAvoy shoots a direct, flat, silencing-the-point "No." But as bleak as it might sound, the childhood scenario, according to McAvoy, was not all that bad. "I think the human capacity to rationalize is vast," he says. "I think the child's capacity to rationalize is fucking galactic. Even though things might have been weird for a tiny part, most of my life was kind of fine, do you know what I mean. I had a great childhood. I wouldn't change anything." He describles himself in boyhood as being "a bit drifty," academically underachieving and not showing any talent for athletics right away. "I was in the bottom group for everything, " he says. "until I was 11, just before high school, when a teacher upgraded me, and put me in all the top groups, except reading. Secondary school was different. I started playing [soccer], doing better in class, and defining who I was." When i came time to think about a career, he briefly flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. "I wanted an adventure," he says. "But then I realized I should join the navy if I wanted to see the world. I'd only just started to discover women properly and that really helped sway me as well." Luckily for us, McAvoy discovered his sensual side and, around the same time, he also lighted upon acting. At 16, he met David Hayman, an actor giving a talk at McAvoy's school who cast the oung hopeful on the spot, in his first part, as the son of a pimp in an indie called The Near Room. It got McAvoy into the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. To pay the bills while he was studying, he worked in a bakery as an apprentice to a master confectioner ("I made cream cakes. I put wings on the butterfly cakes."), before getting a part on the hit World War II miniseries, 2001's Band of Brothers. His next big splash came in the form of the UK nighttime drama, Shameless, about the lives of a few working class residents living in a public housing estate in Manchester. McAvoy won a nomination for a British Comedy Award as Best TV Newcomer. On that show, he also met his future wife, British actress Anne-Marie Duff, 36, who play his love interest. The two married quietly in October 2006. Bt, since McAvoy hit it big, footage of the pair's sexy romps on the show (picture McAvoy naked on a bus with a dozen roses over his crotch) have caused heavy YouTube traffic, providing fans with what feels like a peek inside the window of the couple's private life. "It's a tiny window," McAvoy laughs. Equally steamy are the actor's love scenes in Atonement, at least according to his costar, Keira Knightley. "James is the best kisser ever!" she recently trilled. (And, apparently, the on-camera proceedings go so hot-and-heavy that, at one point, the film's director, Joe Wright, jokingly instructed Knightley, during a sex scene with McAvoy, to "wank him off!") So, what did McAvoy think of his costar's kissing skills? "I'm never saying," he says definantly. "I will never tell. She blabbed; I'm not." Then, very diplomatically, he adds, "Not as good as my wife." Beyond that, McAvoy avoids talking about his personal life. "As an actor, there's a lot of talking about yourself," he explains. "So I think I've learned how dangerous it is to treat yourself and your personality and your life as a commodity. If you sell it cheaply, you're not going to get much back." He's watched his more recent costar, Angelina Jolie, struggle with the press. In the spring release Wanted, McAvoy plays an assassin's son who learns the ways of his late dad's trade from Jolie's character. On the set in Prague, he got to experience th Pitt-Jolie media circus close up. "We hung out a bit. It's weird, their life. They're lovely people, and they deal with it very well. You also get an understanding of how much is printed about them that's untrue...but even though I know better, and I work with these people, I still go 'Ooh!'" he says, popping his eyes dramatically, as if he were reading a tabloid. Not that he reads tabloids often. McAvoy views modern celebrity as dangerous and fickle, which is something his next film, Penelope, touches on. In it, he's the leading man once again, this time as the flawed suitor to Christina Ricci, who plays an heiress born with a pig nose. "I think the message of the film is just be happy with yourself. Try to love yourself no matter what the fuck people think." That's McAvoy's challenge over the next few months. Obviously, he could suddenly morph into some polished pretty boy. But Joe Wright, who directed him in Atonement, isn't betting on it. "He's got such an enormous heart. He's constantly excited by what life has brought him. James comes from this kind of quite hardcore background, but his heart is reaching to something so bright and sparkly and beautiful, and that kind of contrast and conflict within him is really lovely," says the director, who attributes McAvoy's resilience to his Scottish roots. "There's a toughness to him and a real strength, which is very Glasgow, a strong kind of background. That's inherent in his genes, in his grooves." As McAvoy sees it, "You can't spend too much time thinking about it. It could get you quite self-obsessed." But, for now, he's not worried about it. He sums up his view of fame with just one sentence: "It's nice that people like you and don't think you're a dick." [full-link]Read more •[/full-link]