McAvoy was born on 21 April 1979 in Glasgow, Scotland, to James, a bus driver, and Elizabeth (née Johnstone), a nurse. He was raised on a housing estate in Drumchapel, Glasgow by his maternal grandparents (James, a butcher, and Mary), after his parents divorced when James was 11. He went to St Thomas Aquinas Secondary in Jordanhill, Glasgow, where he did well enough and started ‘a little school band with a couple of mates’.McAvoy toyed with the idea of the Catholic priesthood as a child but, when he was 16, a visit to the school by actor David Hayman sparked an interest in acting. Hayman offered him a part in his film The Near Room (1995) but despite enjoying the experience McAvoy didn’t seriously consider acting as a career, although he did continue to act as a member of PACE Youth Theatre. He applied instead to the Royal Navy and had already been accepted when he was also offered a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD).He took the place at the RSAMD (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and, when he graduated in 2000, he moved to London. He had already made a couple of TV appearances by this time and continued to get a steady stream of TV and movie work until he came to attention of the British public in 2004 playing car thief Steve McBride in the successful UK TV series Shameless (2004) and then to the rest of the world in 2005 as Mr Tumnus, the faun, in Disney’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005). In The Last King of Scotland (2006) McAvoy portrayed a Scottish doctor who becomes the personal physician to dictator Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker. McAvoy’s career breakthrough came in Atonement (2007), Joe Wright’s 2007 adaption of Ian McEwan’s novel.Since then, McAvoy has taken on theatre roles, starring in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (directed by Jamie Lloyd), which launched the first Trafalgar Transformed season in London’s West End and earned him an Olivier award nomination for Best Actor. In January 2015, McAvoy returned to the Trafalgar Studios stage to play Jack Gurney, the delusional 14th Earl of Gurney who believes he is Jesus, in the first revival of Peter Barnes’s satire ‘The Ruling Class’, a role for which he was subsequently awarded the London Evening Standard Theatre Award’s Best Actor.On screen, McAvoy has appeared as corrupt cop Bruce Robertson in Filth (2013), a part for which he received a Scottish BAFTA for Best Actor, a British Independent Film Award for Best Actor, a London Critics Circle Film Award for British Actor of the Year and an Empire Award for Best Actor. More recently, he reprised his role as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019). He began his depiction of Kevin Wendell Crumb, also known as The Horde, a man with an extreme case of dissociative identity disorder in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Split (2016) and continued it in the sequel, Glass (2019). Also in 2019, he played Bill Denbrough in It Chapter Two (2019), the horror sequel to It (2017).McAvoy and Jamie Lloyd look set to continue their collaboration in December 2019, with a production of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ at the Playhouse Theatre in the West End, London. The project has been on the cards as long ago as 2017, when McAvoy posted a picture of him reading the script and wearing a false nose.
James McAvoy
Movies
Wanted
A young man finds out his long lost father is an assassin. When his father is murdered, the son is recruited into his father’s old organization and trained by a man named Sloan to follow in his dad’s footsteps.
Fun Facts
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My favourite kind of theatre is when I see the actors bleed and sweat blood and look like they're having heart attacks. You've got to try and dash yourself without breaking yourself too much.
[on playing Macbeth in the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told (2005) series] I was very young. I think I was about 25 or 24. And that made me think
Quotes
We're in a horrible, repugnant place now where kids are told it's their right and due to be hugely famous. Not good at their job, not good at anything, just hugely famous. This is not sane. Little girls think they'll be famous if they have vast breast implants and might as well die if they don't.
Where it gets difficult is when you get two or three jobs back to back where you're playing leads and doing 13, 14 hours a day, six days a week, and you suddenly think, hang on a minute, how can you have a life like this? Do I work to live or live to work? How can I work properly with no life to inform the work?
I always believed that I never wanted to be an actor. I only did it because I was allowed to do it and I had to do something.
I'm 5 foot 7, and I've got pasty white skin. I don't think I'm ugly, don't get me wrong, but I'm not your classic lead man, Brad Pitt guy.
[Talking about Andrew McCarthy and why he inspired him to be an actor] Yeah, St. Elmo's Fire (1985) is probably the one that I love him in the most. He was really vulnerable, really open, I think. And he had floppy hair, kind of bad hair, and I had really bad hair for quite a long time when I was a kid.
I talk about this a lot when people ask me about my favorite films and things, and I try to be as honest as possible, but it is The Goonies (1985). I did watch The Goonies (1985) a lot.
[speaking in 2007] The thing that attracts me to all the jobs I've done over the last few years was the offer of employment. I've had to audition for every single job I've ever done, I think. So it's not just a question of being attracted. Yes, I like the things I've done, and I've been very luck that the things I've done - I think - have a certain level of quality. But had I only got parts that were rubbish, I'd be doing them as well, because I'm an actor and I need the work. But I'm getting a little more choice. When I read The Last King of Scotland (2006), I thought this is excellent, and I'd be very lucky to get this. That was my choice, but afterward I still had to convince somebody else to choose me.
[on his role in Wanted (2008)] I got to satisfy the 16-year-old boy's yearning to break things and jump up and down and beat people up. It was a very physical film, and I had to get fit and go to the gym, which I don't really enjoy.
[When asked what an actor should never do] Read reviews. You just try and do your job and not worry about what people say, because ultimately it can only affect what you do in a negative way. It can only make you a worse actor.
The minute you start to strategize too much, the more you start to think you're in control of your own fate. And you're not, really.
Thank God X-Men: First Class (2011) is not in 3-D, which is just an excuse to charge an extra ten bucks at the theatre. Then, in the end, they're not 3-D at all. The idea of things coming out of the screen and making you jump out of your seat are done very well, but I think it's a waste of time and money and I wouldn't pay for a ticket to go to one of those films.
I was one of the lucky people that saw Black Swan (2010) thinking that it was just a movie about ballet dancing. And what an amazing surprise and treat to go, 'Oh right, so it's about ballet dancing; oh right, it's also about a messed-up ballet dancer; oh right, it's about a mental case ballet dancer; oh my God it's about an absolute nut job!'
I am a nerd, but I don't dive head-first into any fiefdom of nerdiness, except for maybe Star Trek.
[on dealing with the media] It's a difficult thing - you've got to talk about yourself but you've also got to try not to say anything about yourself. The more you give of yourself, the more there is to chase after.
[on his relationship with his wife] We keep our noses clean and keep our stuff private. We don't have affairs, we don't turn up to parties, we don't fall out of places drunk. We're not that interesting. I don't wear a dress where you can see my knickers when I'm getting out of a taxi. Do you know what I mean? I find all that weird.
[on working with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen] It will be interesting when Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick and I are all working on 'X-Men'. We might have a Macbeth-off. I might just go, "My Macbeth's better than your Macbeth... And your Macbeth: hmm