James McAvoy Interview

Congratulations on an excellent film. Have you been pleased with the reception so far?

Thank you very much. It's had a couple of dodgy reviews, but other than that it's been 99% positive. I don't read the reviews, but I do get them to tell me what sort of scores it's been getting. The public who go to see it seem to like it. It's been out for months in America on limited release and the audience reaction has been excellent. You know, just to be in a film anyway is brilliant, but to be in one that the audience love and pay money to go and see, and the critics like it - when you've got those things together, it's brilliant. It doesn't matter whether you get any awards or not.


It was obviously important to keep the character of Nicholas Garrigan sympathetic and likeable, but he's a bit of a dick isn't he?

Yeah, but he was already sympathetic and likeable. I think it was important for him to be a dick. We had to work hard to make him more of a dick. He was too much of a good guy, he was too forgivable in the script and my worry was that people wouldn't accept the story because it was just another white hero figure in Africa. Now, I'm sure there are really good white people in Africa, doing nothing but good, but if you look at our presence in the continent over the last 500 years, you definitely couldn't sum it up as being positive so it was important for me to give an idea of that side of things. Make him culpable and make him vain and arrogant and someone we could maybe not sympathise with, but empathise with. You can understand him without saying he represents me. But then that's the thing, he does represent us, he's the protagonist, he is the audience.


The character goes through a very interesting arc, doesn't he, from naivety to complicity to actually doing something?

Yeah, but I guess the only reason he really does something about it is that he gets caught and he has to get out. He's not even going to kill Amin, he's just going to try and run away and it's only when it's made abundantly clear to him by the murder of Amin's wife, there's no way that he's getting out, that he tries to kill Amin. He doesn't do it out of some sense of nobility, he does it because he has to.


Amin did have a Scottish doctor. Did you manage to speak with him?

No, we kept it very separate. Not many people who had anything to do with Amin wanted to talk about it. I spoke to John Snow who my character is partly based on and another guy whose name I probably shouldn't tell you who, well, if my character was a little bit bad, he was incredibly bad, a normal average guy from England who became the kind of guy who made a lot of people disappear.


It must have been quite refreshing to be able to speak with your own voice for the first time in a while?

It was quite a change, that's for sure. It was weird at first but I really enjoyed it and I'm glad I was able to do it. I talk in my own accent and I feel fine, but when I started to act in it I got all tongue tied and thought that surely I should be doing some silly English accent or being Welsh or American or Irish or whatever fucking thing I've been doing over the last seven years. I've only played Scots maybe three or four times in the last seven years, so it was lovely. This is all wank, but I do think accents change the way the muscles in your throat work and it has an effect on your body and it has an effect on the way your mind works and the speed at which you can get words out. And the way that words form in different accents has an effect on the way that you construct the sentence and if you construct the sentence differently in a different accent then that means that you effect your personality a little bit, d'you know what I mean? So doing something in a Scottish accent meant I was a lot more "me" than I've ever been before.


Can you tell us about your upcoming movies, Atonement and Wanted?

Atonement is all done and dusted and it's coming out at the end of the year. I'm really excited about that – it's the best script I've ever read. We're kicking Wanted off in April, although the only two cast members so far are me and Morgan Freeman.


Is award recognition something that interests you?

Och, I'll always take the public going to see films and good reviews… In fact, forget good reviews, just have the public going to see it over awards. But yeah, it's lovely and it's good, but then again these awards, Oscars and Batfas and stuff like that, they help the box office so yeah, it's interesting to me but it's not something that's a priority, it's not like I read a script and go "Is this a part that could get me such and such?" I think it's more "is this a part they want me for and are they going to pay me?"


How healthy is Scottish film at the moment?

I don't know, I mean Red Road was one of the best films of last year, I'll be so pissed off if it doesn't do well at the Baftas. Award ceremonies aren't just a "well done" anymore, they're another piece of entertainment for the public to watch so if the awards are for the films that people don't know then who's going to be entertained? I'm just kind of worried that Red Road will be the kind of film that suffers from shit like that.


Starter For Ten was a lovely film. Were you disappointed that it didn't really take off? Was there maybe a lack of promotion and awareness?

Och, I don't know. I was a bit annoyed, but then when you think it came out a week after Borat and a week before Bond, there's not much else you can do, and they only put it in 75 cinemas. It did very well in those cinemas and made a lot of money on those screens, and the idea was always after a couple of weeks to expand to 300 cinemas, but they just thought what's the point. There's no beating Bond and there's no beating Borat, but I'm very proud of it, as much as it's just a bit of fluff. I think British film finds it difficult to make a nice romantic comedy without it being a carbon copy of Four Weddings or Notting hill. And you know, while there's certain 'format' similarities, it wasn't a carbon copy, it did something on its own with a working class hero figure for a change, which you don't tend to get in rom-coms in Britain, so I was very proud of it and I still am. But yeah, naebody went tae see it.