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The
Glasgow-born actor insists that he’s not your typical
leading man, but in back-to-back films—2007’s Becoming
Jane and Atonement—James McAvoy defines just that. With
the upcoming Wanted, where he stars opposite Angelina
Jolie, he might be well on his way to becoming a major
Hollywood player as well.
AS
one-half of the fatalistic couple at the tragic heart of
Atonement, director Joe Wright’s adaptation of
Ian McEwan’s complex, decade-spanning novel, James
McAvoy looks every inch the classic leading man—even if
McAvoy himself doesn’t happen to agree. “I’m 5 foot 7,
and I’ve got pasty white skin,” he insists. “I don’t
think I’m ugly, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not your
classic lead man, Brad Pitt guy.”
McAvoy’s
not complaining; rather, he’s celebrating the fact that
someone who looks like him can be cast in such a role.
“I’m always moaning about [the fact that] you see
humanity represented as nothing but perfect, so it’s
good,” he continues. “But I won’t deny I felt a little
bit self-conscious or worried. Will people accept me
physically or visually for this role?”
The
answer, most assuredly, is yes. McAvoy’s performance as
Cambridge-educated housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner in
the stately 1930s-set drama has, along with that of his
costar, Keira Knightley, been generating serious acclaim
ever since Atonement opened the Venice Film
Festival in early 2007. (The film went on to collect
multiple nominations in the Golden Globes, Bafta and the
Oscars, winning a handful as well.—Ed.) Everything
Robbie holds dear is ripped apart after one hot summer’s
night when his long-suppressed feelings for Cecilia (Knightley),
the eldest daughter of the household, passionately
surface.
As
written, Robbie was initially a little too angelic for
McAvoy’s liking. “I felt he was too straight,” explains
the 28-year-old Scot over a chili burger in a gastro pub
near the North London home he shares with his wife,
actor Anne-Marie Duff. “So I had to make him a bit
dirtier and grumpier to make him more real.”
Ultimately, McAvoy says he found his way into the heart
and soul of a character through the physical and
spiritual transformation he undergoes midway through the
film. “He knows who he is, which is incredible. But then
a little girl comes along and tells him you’re not who
you think you are—you’re [a] rapist and, by the way, the
entire world believes me. The only person other than him
who knows who he is is Cecilia. If it wasn’t for her,
he’d kill himself. In all my other characters I’ve
always used conflict, and I couldn’t with this until
halfway through. [Then] he becomes the opposite of
everything that made him difficult to play: damaged,
conflicted and a much more recognizably human figure.”
“McEwan
has lots of descriptions of Robbie, but the description
I liked the best and thought was most important for the
story was of him having ‘eyes of optimism,’” says
Wright, who also helmed the Knightley-starrer Pride &
Prejudice, which earned the actress an Oscar
nomination. “I feel James has those eyes of optimism.
Also, he’s the best actor working in
Britain
today, of his generation. He’s extraordinary.”
Wright
first saw McAvoy seven or eight years ago on the London
stage, playing a young, gay hustler in Out in the
Open. “I had been watching him for a long time after
that,” he reveals, “and I kept offering him roles that
he kept turning down. First small roles, then fairly
decent supporting roles and then, eventually, the lead.”
Wright
even tried to cast him in Pride & Prejudice,
though neither man will reveal for which part. “It’s not
fair on the guy who got it,” says McAvoy, “but it wasn’t
Mr. Darcy.”
Young
man of many trades
WRIGHT
hasn’t been the only one keeping an eye on the
Glasgow-born thespian, however. McAvoy’s stock has been
climbing steadily on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks
to standout performances onstage, TV and film. Earlier
in 2007, he picked up the Bafta for Rising Star and a
Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role as an
idealistic young doctor in The Last King of Scotland,
even if his performance was overshadowed by that of his
Academy Award-winning costar, Forest Whitaker. He also
played Mr. Tumnus the faun in The Chronicles of
Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. McAvoy
is nothing if not versatile.
To nail
Robbie’s upper-class English accent, McAvoy worked with
a voice coach—“For anybody who was a bit posh, it was
all right, but for me it was quite difficult”—and
listened to tapes of the period, but it was watching
movies such as Brief Encounter, In Which We Serve
and Listen to Britain that really helped. “People
didn’t really speak exactly like that then, but they did
in movies,” he says of an English dialect in which the
vowel sounds are more clipped compared with today.
Indeed, in many ways, his and Knightley’s performances
recall the acting style of the time, representing a
whole different manner of being, presexual revolution,
when repression was the order of the day.
“The
script is written for a type of acting that requires you
to not emote, to not show everything,” he notes. “If you
watch Noel Coward, he doesn’t move his face. He hardly
uses his voice, but he’s so expressive, you know exactly
what he’s thinking. The same with Trevor Howard and
Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.” But, he
stresses, it’s not just about doing nothing for the
camera. “You can have a lot of stuff going on
underneath, but the suppression of it increases the
power of it.”
Before
shooting, Wright corralled his actors for three weeks of
rehearsal that McAvoy says was the best he’s experienced
outside theater. “We figured out what the script was all
about. I know that sounds really basic, but it’s not,”
he says. “It galvanized us.”
During
the filming of a country house segment at Stokesay Court
in Shropshire, Wright, Knightley and the majority of the
cast lived together, though McAvoy chose to stay
elsewhere. “Partly because I felt a little bit too old
for that, but also because my character’s kind of
separate and I wanted to keep myself a little bit
separate. I’m not somebody who uses the whole Method
thing, but it felt nice to keep myself away from the big
house and all the people playing the posh people. To be
honest, all those actors were posh actors, so it felt
quite useful.”
Certainly, Atonement has pushed McAvoy into the
brink of major stardom, although he’s not sure he wants
to be a star. “I didn’t have any plan when I started
doing this,” he says when the issue is raised. “I
certainly didn’t do it to be famous, and I certainly
didn’t do it because I wanted to be in the movies. I
wanted to do it because it was good fun, and nobody told
me I couldn’t.”
Although
his next role, as an assassin in the comic-book
adaptation Wanted opposite Angelica Jolie, looks
to be a markedly different one for him—that of the
action hero—McAvoy insists it’s business as
usual—playing someone, well, normal. “It’s going back to
something that’s easier for me to do than Atonement
was. I’m playing a proper, insecure, normal dude.
They didn’t give me the part straight away. They offered
it to a dozen other guys and eventually came back to me
because they realized this part doesn’t work if it’s the
classic leading man-type figure. This part needs to have
somebody a bit more normal.”
■
Atonement opens in Philippine theaters on March 12 from
Universal Pictures, distributed by United International
Pictures through Solar Entertainment. |
