The monster and me

Date: January 6 - 12, 2007 Publication: The Knowledge (Times Online) Country: United Kingdom Author: James Christopher Excerpt: From Shameless to playing Idi Amin's dupe, James McAvoy is revealing huge talents.

The full article... It’s impossible to spend an hour in James McAvoy’s company without being humbled by his brain. The young Scot has recently enjoyed a sensational run of parts in gritty television dramas such as State of Play and Shameless (in which he met and later married his screen lover, Anne-Marie Duff). But it’s the intelligent performances he has banked on film that mark him out as one of the most exciting natural talents I’ve seen. The 27-year-old actor is handsome enough in a badly-drawn-boy sort of way. The face is neatly chiselled, and there isn’t much meat on his bones. But the Glasgow accent is raw and scruffy, as is the charm, and the outfit — a rumpled black sweater and jeans. In the past couple of years, McAvoy’s uncanny versatility in front of a camera has won him an enviable spread of roles, notably that of the slippery Mr Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia, and a seat on the Bristol University Challenge team in Tom Vaughan’s geeky comedy Starter for Ten. But it’s the rash of quality films McAvoy is about to star in this year that reveals just how fast and furiously this actor is coming, and the cut-throat competition that exists for his signature. For the record, there is Joe Wright’s eagerly awaited adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, with Keira Knightley; a controversial Jane Austen biopic, Becoming Jane; a dark tango with Christina Ricci in a modern-day fable called Penelope; and the lead role in Universal Pictures’ no-expense-spared sci-fi block-buster Wanted. But the first film on the block is Kevin Macdonald’s extraordinary account of the unlikely friendship between a naive British medic (played by McAvoy) and Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. It opens this week, and McAvoy is terrific as the blinkered young narrator, and conscience, of the movie. He arrives in Uganda as a humble medical volunteer just as Forest Whitaker’s feral Amin wrenches control of the country from Milton Obote. The impressionable Dr Garrigan is unexpectedly sucked into the dark bosom of this bloody regime when the tyrant takes a wild and instant liking to him. He is plucked from his bush hospital in the middle of nowhere in the presidential limo and whisked to a compound in Kampala as Amin’s personal physician. The film, based on Giles Foden’s “half-true” novel, sheds most of the back-story to explore the ghastly price of the doctor’s collusion. McAvoy still seems astonishingly young to play the linchpin in this big, sexy African adventure. “Yes,” the actor agrees. “I was very worried that I was too young to begin with.” He pauses to scratch his unruly curls. “But actually I’m spookily similar to Garrigan. We’re the same script age. We grew up in the same part of Scotland. And we had comparable educations, though we are from slightly different backgrounds.” Garrigan comes from a dour and stuffy lower-middle-class family in Foden’s book. McAvoy hails from a housing estate in west Glasgow, and studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. His parents split when he was 7, but young James and his sister subsequently spent an unremarkable childhood living with their mother’s parents. If acting was something of an accident, drama school was a shock. It took him years to cope with the endemic insecurity of his vocation, even when the awards started rolling in. “I’ve been doing this job for seven years now, so I’ve got a healthy level of wariness about the industry. “Success for me has always been defined by employment,” McAvoy muses. “I don’t like hype. I don’t like the free stuff people try and give you. I don’t really like parties. And I don’t know why.” Is it something to do with his background? “It might be. But I think it’s just the fact that I’ve learnt my craft the hard way. If I was suddenly crowned a major movie star at 21, which is what happened to Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, I don’t think I could cope. I feel sorry for those guys, because they’ve had no time to build any experience or skills. You suddenly just have to be good. You also have no training in how to deal with what you have become. I’ve got to where I am very, very slowly. If I fell for the hype now I’d feel I’d be devaluing all the work I’ve done when I had little choice over scripts. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always managed to find parts that pushed me.” McAvoy’s ability to melt into a part and turn a character’s flaws into an extension of his own is what makes his acting so effective. He has a taste for what he describes as f***ed-up characters, which is partly why his performance in The Last King of Scotland is such a plum. “If I was a bit more selfish and found myself in the same situation, I would probably have compromised myself as badly as Garrigan, to the point where he is seen to be condoning murder,” says McAvoy. “You’ve got to understand why Garrigan behaves like an irresponsible prick, but not hate him for it. If I played the character much older and supposedly wiser, I think the audience would have rapidly lost any empathy. The doctor is out there to have a good time. It’s the 1970s. He’s not happy with the way his life is panning out in Scotland. He thinks a free ticket to a mission in Uganda will be a blast until he realises this is miserable work with little pay and less facilities, and the only chick he fancies (Gillian Anderson) is married. “Humouring Amin suddenly allows him to live out a colonial fantasy: the parties, the money, and the access to power. In a sense this is a crude reflection of Britain’s fatal attitude to Amin’s regime at the time. Amin satisfied the colonial idea of what an African ruler should be: a big clown.” The journalist Jon Snow was a crucial source of anecdotes and facts. “Jon was fascinating to talk to. He was very much Amin’s favourite journalist. He was tall. He was funny. He was passionate – still is. What profoundly depressed him was that his editors didn’t want to know when the regime went sour. I found it very poignant when Jon said to me ‘We failed Uganda. The press failed Uganda. And the common Ugandan man was failed by the press.’ ” As McAvoy chats about how he based his character on an amalgam of Amin’s notorious “white monkeys”, it becomes frighteningly clear just how much graft he sunk into this part. When actors get this deep, directors tend to get very nervous. McAvoy flashes a Machiavellian smile. “Kevin (Macdonald) wanted me to toss the novel out of the window, and arrive in Uganda like a blank page,” he muses. “Unfortunately he had no idea I had specialised in Amin’s regime for my Highers.” Shooting in Uganda was an extraordinary experience, not least because no film had been made there for the best part of 20 years. Forest Whitaker learnt Swahili to play Amin, and refused to come out of character, much to the alarm of the locals (and, rumour has it, his baffled American wife). “We had no money, a skeleton crew, and Ugandan electricians who had never touched light bulbs this size in their lives.” says McAvoy. “It was an amazing gamble.” There were some healthy differences of opinion, notably in the ghastly torture scenes in the final reel which the actor says were the most taxing of his career. McAvoy wanted his character to squeal like a pig when Garrigan is hauled up to a ceiling by meat hooks through his chest. Macdonald wanted him to remain silent as an act of defiance. “I didn’t think Garrigan would have been that heroic,” argues McAvoy, “so I imagined myself in so much pain that I couldn’t physically breathe — and therefore scream — if I wanted to. I blacked out completely during the first take. So I’m hanging upside down and nobody does anything because they don’t know anything’s wrong. They just think it’s some mad acting experiment. I’m about to fall and break my neck when the props master, Josh Barraud, suddenly clocks what’s happening and hauls me down. I was in shock for the next three or four hours.” But the experience has done nothing to dampen his appetite for hard material. He is, it seems, quite fearless. In a curious way it also explains why he needs to distance himself from the trappings of success. “I have absolutely no desire to get carted off on any Faustian journey,” says McAvoy. “I shall die happy if I retain my soul.” The Last King of Scotland is on general release from Friday [full-link]Read more •[/full-link]