James McAvoy bounds into a London hotel room in prize-fighting form, sporting a tightly shorn noggin, jeans and T-shirt, and the kind of buff body definition you might expect to find on a welterweight champ. I nod to the bod, and he admits, straightaway, that he’s been powerlifting in the gym on a regular basis. “It’s f***ing brilliant, I love it, man!” says the 37-year-old X-Men star, beaming. He tells me he joined forces with a professional powerlifter on the set of his last movie (the thriller Split, for Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan). “I never thought I would be into that shit. But it’s so much fun, really technical, and quite Zen.” 

He sits down and pours himself some water. This, somewhat unusually, is our fifth encounter in as many years. Over that half-decade it has been remarkable and informative to watch McAvoy’s transformation from quip-cracking Glaswegian wiseacre (joshing about the “epic snog” he shared with Angelina Jolie on the movie Wanted) to serious London stage actor (he won an Evening Standard best actor award last year for his role in The Ruling Class) and Hollywood heavyweight — he’s got three big movies on the way, including X-Men Apocalypse , Split and a romance for the German master Wim Wenders called Submergence.

I remind him how he once complained to me about the tyranny of gym bunny culture, and how casting directors would soon have to fly to Lithuania to find a man with a “normal looking” body. “Yes, but the thing about powerlifting is that it doesn’t give you a ripped body,” he shoots back, grinning, unflustered. “It just makes you really f***ing strong.”

We’re still fascinated by all that shit!
McAvoy, quick on his feet, sharp as a tack, is never stuck for words. We are here to talk about his latest appearance as the telepathic team leader, Charles Xavier, in the X-Men franchise. He hasn’t seen X-Men Apocalypse. Neither have I. The film isn’t even finished and he’s not allowed to discuss the plot. Problem? Not on planet McAvoy.

The movie, we know from the trailer, features Oscar Isaac as a mega-mutant called Apocalypse who has lived since the dawn of time, has been mistaken for God and Krishna, and now wants to destroy the world (his name is a bit of a giveaway, no?). Only our trusty X-Men (McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Hugh Jackman) and X-Women (Jennifer Lawrence, Olivia Munn, Sophie Turner) can possibly save the day.

The quasi-religious narrative has given McAvoy food for thought, and specifically a cogent explanation for the present comic-book blockbuster craze. “We live in a world, certainly in the western world, that’s increasingly devoid of spiritual interest, and certainly religious interest,” he begins, rapid-fire pace (that’s another thing about McAvoy. Speaks very quickly. Always has). “But we are still fascinated by the idea of someone who can change water into wine, walk on water and raise the dead. And who can do all these things now? Guys in comic books. We’re still fascinated by all that shit!”

He adds, nonetheless, that he can see how the comic-book blockbuster onslaught might be “getting a bit dull”, but he says that it’s up to the filmmakers to branch out. “Yes it’s a superhero movie, but what is it beyond that? Is it a buddy movie? A chase movie? We’ll have to stop them being just crash, bang, wallop and start deviating into other things.” He notes that his three-movie contract to play Xavier is up, but he is not reluctant to renegotiate for another spin. “Everything that the writer, Simon Kinberg, has been talking about for the next film sounds quite exciting,” he says. “Plus, it means working with a bunch of people that I love.”

BROMANCE BOYS ‘McBENDER’
None more loved, if you believe the X-Men fan chatter, than Fassbender (the Magneto to his Professor X), whose bromance with McAvoy, on screen and off, has become so well-established that it has inspired YouTube parodies (a romantic swoon to Coldplay’s Fix You) and the power couple sobriquet “McBender”. McAvoy groans. The whole thing, he says, has been wildly overplayed.

“The truth is, we’re really good pals, and I love the guy,” he says, with a complete absence of sassy frisson. (McAvoy has been married to the actress Anne-Marie Duff for 10 years; they live in Crouch End in north London and have a five-year-old son, Brendan, of whom he says: “Your happiness used to be in your own hands, but now you’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest child”). “I think he’s f***ing amazing. But he’s a busy actor, I’m a busy actor. I’ve got a family and he’s got a girlfriend. So, you know what? We don’t hang out all the time.” [McAvoy and Anne-Marie filed for divorce last weekend].

When he takes a breath I ask him about being a boy from Drumchapel, a working-class estate in Glasgow, now thriving in a profession that’s seemingly overrun, if we are to believe the hype, by the privileged and the entitled. He answers with a memory, from secondary school, of “being invited to a posh ball by a girl I fancied”. The boys at the ball, all posh, were “such d***s and started giving me shit for being from Drumchapel”. He left the party, left the girl. “And that was the last time that people like that ever really changed my evening, or affected me emotionally, or made me feel uncomfortable.”

Back then he was being raised, with his sister, by his grandparents (his parents had split when he was seven, and his mother, a psychiatric nurse, was frequently ill). He nonetheless describes his childhood self as incredibly “well-balanced and confident”, noting that he “dealt with all that family stuff” as it was happening. While still a teen, his school was visited by the Scottish actor David Hayman, whose talk inspired a letter from McAvoy, which nabbed him an audition, which led to two years at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, a supporting role in Paul Abbott’s TV series State of Play and, eventually, a central role as a roguish car thief in Abbott’s Shameless, where he met and fell for co-star Duff. (“She’s a much better actor than me,” he’ll tell you, as a rule, if you ask.) 

McAvoy’s career ascent has been relatively swift, aided and abetted, he notes, with some irony, by his ability to play upper-class English gents. “The early part of my career was built upon playing posh,” he says, referring to films such as Bright Young Things , Becoming Jane and Atonement. “In fact, most people, at the beginning, thought that I was posh English.”

I CAN DO BETTER THAN 90 PER CENT OF POSH ACTORS
His biggest subsequent hits have been Wanted, The Last King of Scotland and, of course, the X-Men franchise. He brought to that blockbuster series a febrile intensity and a tear-streaked vulnerability (Professor X becomes a drug addict in X-Men: Days of Future Past) that you would normally expect from his stage work. Macbeth , Three Days of Rain and The Ruling Class — in which he played a deranged English aristocrat — have been exemplary, award-nominated, if not award-winning, performances. He credits the director of all these productions, Jamie Lloyd, with his ability to let go in a role: “He’s the one who helped me feel that it’s okay to go out there with a performance and be f***ing batshit crazy in an industry where people, including your colleagues, are willing to shoot you down.”

These days he says that his shaven head has been doing most of the real graft. Originally done for the bald Xavier in X-Men, he says that the skinhead look has nabbed him some proper roles. “I was in San Diego, at Comic Con, promoting 
X-Men, and I got f***ing blind drunk and stumbled into M. Night Shyamalan and he was, like, ‘Heeey! I’ve never seen you like this before!’ And he gave me a part in his next movie. And the next director I met was like, ‘I really like you bald. I’m going to give you this part!’ It seems that everyone likes me bald right now.”

That next movie is the upcoming spy thriller, The Coldest City, with Charlize Theron. It will be followed by Submergence, a film that co-stars Alicia Vikander and is, says McAvoy, “the most beautiful love story I’ve read since Atonement”.

The conversation inevitably works its way back to class, and McAvoy, perhaps bored with the subject, perhaps spitting out something that’s been bubbling under, finally sums it up. “I don’t know what it is about posh actors,” he says. “Maybe it’s down to the fact that I don’t care what they’ve come from. Instead, I do know that I can do what I can do better than 90 per cent of them.” And then he laughs. Because, buff, punchy and in fighting form, he means it.

X-FACTS

Bryan Singer has called this film “kind of a conclusion of six X-Men films, yet a potential rebirth of younger, newer 
characters” and the “true birth of the X-Men”.

According to writer Simon Kinberg, this is the final film in the First Class story arc, which also comprised X-Men: First Class (2011) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). Kinberg says that this film is the culmination of Xavier and Lensherr’s relationship. 

James McAvoy is not the only actor to shave his head for this film. Alexandra Shipp, who plays Storm, shaved her head in the shape of a mohawk.

X-Men creator Stan Lee will put in a cameo — his fourth in an X-Men film.

Kevin Maher
(The Times, London)