James McAvoy in The Wave magazine

James McAvoy may not be a target of the paparazzi, but after Wanted, he could soon hit the gossip magazines. The Last King of Scotland may have won the Glasgow-born actor awards and respect, but shooting guns with Angelina Jolie could make him a bona fide Hollywood star. McAvoy, a classically trained actor (at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama), plays Wesley Gibson, an average guy who is transformed from office geek to cool assassin after being taken in by a hit squad that trains him so well, he can make bullets curve through the air. The actor won endless praise for his role in the WWII-era film Atonement, but the rising star is clearly embracing his current contemporary role.

The Wave: So, you’ve got your badass hit man look going on with the black leather jacket and jeans.
James McAvoy: Hey, man. I have worn leather jackets in the past. I’m just so pleased to be publicizing a film that doesn’t require me to wear a suit 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because, generally, the films that I’ve been publicizing over the last two years have been very serious – and that’s great and I love them, but I hate wearing suits. So that’s the reason I did this film – so I could stop wearing suits.

TW: Was working on Wanted different from your recent roles in other ways?
JM: Kind of, yeah, because I’d never done a film that took four and a half months to shoot. Well, Narnia took five months or something like that, but I was hardly in it. When you spread it out over four months, there’s more opportunity for it to become disparate and disjointed. So you really have to be on top of your continuity and your script. You have to really ride the directors and the producers and kind of go, “Wait, wait, wait. While you’re making that decision, what happens before, can I do that actually?” Sometimes you make an ass of yourself, because you question them on everything, but sometimes you save stuff that could have gone really badly and really screw up your character’s arc.

TW: Are you able to switch back and forth between your regular and your American accent?
JM: There were a couple of words that I found hard. “Girlfriend,” I found quite hard. Other than that, it was fine. I’ve got a voice coach that I use when I do American accents. She worked with everybody on Band of Brothers, but she also did Penelope with me. She wasn’t available for this, but she’s so good, I just couldn’t imagine working with anybody else, so I just thought I’d wing it. It worked out all right in the end – but the one word that I had to fix in looping was “girlfriend.”

TW: Did you want to do all your own stunts?
JM: I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me. [But] I did a lot… probably 50 or 60 percent of my own stunts.

TW: Did you get hurt?
JM: I was really lucky, man. I never broke a single thing. I had a couple of sprains and a couple of twisted knees and ankles and stuff, but nothing more than I’d get playing football.

TW: How hard was it balancing the drama with the outrageous humor in the film?
JM: That was totally fun. I mean, I’m guilty of trying to find the humor in even the most serious of films that I’ve done, and it always gets edited out. So it was kind of a joy to be in an environment where the director and producers were saying, “No, no, no, try. You have an idea? Go for it. You want to fall down? Great, cool. There’s a rubber chicken over there if you want to get it in the frame. Here’s a banana skin.”

TW: Did you ever have a mundane job you hated?
JM: I had a very mundane job. I don’t know if I hated it, but, yeah, I worked as a baker for two years. It was very banal.

TW: So you could identify with Wesley?
JM: Yeah, I totally can identify. I loved where this character started. It’s a silly adventure, action piece of entertainment, but the character starts in a very truthful, sad place. I think he’s a proper sufferer of postmodern depression and apathy. I think that’s a condition, man, that’s all too evident amongst young men and women who’ve got fine lives, not bad, that can’t bring themselves to smile or feel better about their horrible existence. I thought that was quite an interesting place for your everyman to start from.

TW: Was there one movie that changed your life as a kid and made you want to be an actor?
JM: No, not really. I loved films when I was a kid – I watched a lot of films, but I never really considered acting a possibility. It was something that happened to other people, really. It wasn’t until someone gave me a job in a film that I kind of went, “Wow, this is an option? All right, okay.” via