James McAvoy

James McAvoy thrives on the intense pressures of filmmaking and making the action thriller Wanted provided him with a whole new set of physical challenges that he didn’t expect. “It was bloody hard,” he says. “Great fun and very, very challenging but physically demanding as hell. It really did take its toll and you were knackered by the end of that four-month shoot. But I wouldn’t have missed it because it really was an extraordinary experience.” McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, whose mundane life is turned upside down when he discovers he is not the ‘apathetic loser’ he always believed was his destiny. He is, in fact, the heir of a highly trained assassin who worked for a shadowy crime-fighting organisation called The Fraternity.

“It’s about this pretty apathetic guy who really doesn’t have a life, and I mean that in the true sense — he doesn’t have a life and he lets it all go past him,” McAvoy explains. “And then he’s suddenly told that he has a very interesting life, actually, and it’s just been hidden. And his father, who he thought was dead, is actually a very interesting person as well. And the killer, who was trying to kill his father, is now going to try to kill him. And his life suddenly becomes very exciting indeed.”

He is taken under the wing of an operative known as The Fox — played by Angelina Jolie — who, along with Sloan (Morgan Freeman) the enigmatic leader of The Fraternity, begin to train him in the dark, deadly arts needed to be an enforcer.

So state the obvious, this is quite a transformation — from nerd to action hero, equipped with lightning fast reflexes and agility — you are making in this film?

Definitely. I had to get fit and healthy and all of that before we started filming.

Did you enjoy that kind of physical preparation for a role?

Yes, I did actually. I’d never do it in real life. I’d never be caught down at the gym. So it was good to have an excuse to do that kind of thing because it’s something that has always appealed to me but I’m just too lazy to do. So to have a reason is good motivation. I’ve not really been down to the gym since I finished the job, so I’m afraid I’ve reverted back.

How much each day would you spend down at the gym?

I spent about an hour each day at the gym, five days a week. But it wasn’t about bulking up hugely; there is no point in casting someone like me if all you are going to do is become the kind of person they could have cast anyway. And also it’s important that you can play both sides of the coin, the guy that he was before as well as the guy he is going to become. So I didn’t get too massive, but I got better than I am usually.

Morgan Freeman has an amazing screen presence. Was it intimidating working with him at all?

Yes, he’s got the ‘Voice of God’, it’s brilliant! (laughs). You are sitting there, ‘how do I make this scene work? That sounds like shit! Oh no, what am I going to do!’ And then he just comes along and just goes ‘I’m Morgan Freeman and I’m going to stand here and say the lines and it will sound like it was written by Jesus himself.’ And you go ‘Oh, that’s how you do it. OK. I’ll just stop trying to change the lines…’ He’s brilliant.

Timur comes to this project with the Night Watch, Day Watch films under his belt. How did he handle working in English?

His English is very good. It’s certainly good enough to be able to communicate what he wants. I’ve worked with directors whose English is perfect because they are English and they can’t tell you what they want, so sometimes language isn’t actually what you need. But we had very good communication. He is a very, very sweet guy. All these weird, dark ideas come out of his head but you talk to him and you realise that he’s not like that in any way. He’s very cuddly and very lovely.

Was acting alongside one of the biggest stars in the world, Angelina Jolie, a rewarding experience too?

She is a really nice woman. Good fun and down to earth. It’s always been the case, I’ve found, that the bigger hype there has been about an actress or a singer or someone like that, the more rumors there are, the more normal they are. Angelina has this mad life, but she is in the middle of it just being as nice as she can be to people every day and I really respected her for that. And she’s a great actress, too. I really enjoyed working with her.

Are you a fan of the action genre?

Oh yeah. Indiana Jones! Any Indiana Jones rocks with me. I love sci-fi, fantasy stuff, definitely. All of the Star Trek and Alien films. Action movies per se I rarely enjoy, I like them to have a little bit of a twist of sci-fi or fantasy in them and then I’ll really get into them. And this one has that so I was very keen and very happy with it.

Wanted is based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar. Did the graphic novels help your preparation in any way?

It was important to look at it because you never know what you are going to find and you might find something very useful.

Are you working on a new film at the moment?

Yes, I just finished filming The Last Station in Berlin. It is really good, it’s a nice Chekhovian comedy. It’s a contrast again, but that’s what I enjoy doing in my career. A lot of people think I do dramas a lot, and I probably do, but they all feel very different to me.

How do you look back on Atonement now?

We were all very, very lucky to be involved in that. I don’t know if Atonement changed things for me. I already had my next job lined up before Atonement came out. I had already done Wanted before Atonement came out and then I went on to The Last Station. So whether it’s changed my career or not you can never tell until a couple of years down the line. It changed things for me a little bit as an actor because I had the most rewarding experience of my career. But you know, professionally and career path wise, I really couldn’t tell you. It hasn’t changed my private life too much. We still get left pretty much on our own and nobody is too nosy. Working with people like Keira and Angelina you hear what it could be like and nobody seems too bothered about doing that with me and that’s very, very nice and I’m chuffed about that.

Do you know what you are doing after this film?

I think it’s a break after this. I think you can get to the point where you are planning the next two years of your career and I think one of the things that is great about being an actor is you never know what is going to happen tomorrow. But when you get a little bit of success you start stacking them up and all of a sudden its two years ahead and you have everything in your entire life planned out. I’m trying not to do that, I’m trying to leave things to the last minute a little bit. And if I get to the end of this and I don’t have a job, then I won’t have a job. But if I want to do something hopefully something will come up. I used to feel that this job was an adventure when you didn’t know where you were going to be or what kind of job it was. And I’ve missed that over the last couple of years just because things have been going well for me. So I’d like to recapture that sense of adventure a little bit.

If you learn something from each film, what do you think you learned from Wanted?

That certain protein shakes make you fart less than other protein shakes. That is a major piece of advice for anybody trying to get buff for a film — those protein shakes really make you fart (laughs).

Not good! And I assume diet — and protein shakes — was all part of the preparation?

Oh yes. I had to eat like a gannet throughout, I couldn’t stop eating. No, actually, it wasn’t that I couldn’t stop, I wanted to stop but I had to eat and eat because I was burning up so much energy.