When James McAvoy won the British Academy of Film and Television Art Rising Star Award this year, he was understandably overwhelmed. Not because he bested the likes of Gael GarcÃa Bernal and Rachel McAdams. Not even because he genuinely didn't expect to win. No, the 27-year-old Scottish actor was simply stunned to be meeting one of his idols. "Patrick Stewart presented the award," McAvoy says, still sounding incredulous. "And I'm a Trekkie. Are you kidding?"
It's that genial humility that McAvoy displays time and again during an interview at the Toronto Film Festival—the first festival the actor has ever attended. Take how he explains landing the lead role of Nicholas Garrigan, an arrogant Scottish lad who becomes the personal physician to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the The Last King of Scotland, which is based on a true story. "I think they were desperate to find someone cheap enough and Scottish," McAvoy muses. "All the other Scottish boys were too old and expensive, and all the American boys couldn't do a Scottish accent; they had to go with me. And thank God."
McAvoy's casting more likely had to do with his talent, on ample display in the hit British series Shameless and films such as Bright Young Things and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which he played the gentle faun Mr. Tumnus. McAvoy is undoubtedly a hot commodity—in addition to Scotland, his films Penelope and Starter for Ten were playing the festival—but he had never been offered a role like Garrigan before. Not only is McAvoy in every scene of the emotionally demanding film, he holds his own opposite Forest Whitaker as the charismatic but sadistic Amin. It was a role McAvoy was at first resistant to taking on. "I was repelled by the part to begin with," he admits. "I worried I was too young. I also worried it was just another 'white guy in Africa' story, which we've seen a lot of." Director Kevin Macdonald convinced McAvoy that the character—a composite of several real-life individuals—had to be young in order to sell his naiveté. The actor's other concern was put to rest by the casting of Whitaker: "I knew that he was going to do something so amazing and powerful it would combat that and make it something other than that 'just another "white guy in Africa" story.'"
McAvoy was also intrigued when he realized the character wouldn't be the hero of the piece: Garrigan is a selfish, reckless womanizer whose relationship with one of Amin's wives (played by Kerry Washington) puts Garrigan's and the wife's lives in jeopardy. "I wouldn't have taken the part if he had to be likable," says McAvoy. "I loved that the character is unredeemed. He's not sorry for the things he does; he's just sorry he gets caught." Still, the actor is willing to admit that Garrigan is probably the closest character he's ever played to himself. "He's not me, but he's not a million miles away from me," he notes. "He's young, he's from Scotland. He's vain and arrogant, and I can understand those things. His experience of human life so far is not that different from mine. He's in a place where he has no experience at all, and so was I. He's completely out of his depth, and so was I."
McAvoy made his movie debut in 1995 with a small role in the British film The Near Room. Although he went on to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, he says it wasn't until he left drama school that he realized he could have a career as an actor. "I just wanted to work," McAvoy explains of his early roles. "People always ask me, 'How do you choose your roles?' I don't, really; I pretty much took what I could get. It's only in the last six months that I've had any real amount of choice." He adds that he was incredibly fortunate that those early roles—including the miniseries Children of Dune and Band of Brothers, and the films Wimbledon and Inside I'm Dancing—were all projects he could be proud of.
Still, little could have prepared him for some of the brutal scenes in Scotland: While filming a torture scene, for example, McAvoy passed out and burst a blood vessel in his neck. "In the script there was a terrible stage direction that said, 'Through some act of defiance, even though he's being tortured, he refuses to vocalize it and scream.' And I just thought that was fucking bullshit," McAvoy says. "Because my character is weak, he's not a strong person. So I thought if I was in so much pain, I couldn't vocalize it, and I internalized all that angst and pain and couldn't breathe. I blacked out on the first take, and everyone thought I was acting."
He's quick to add that although he approaches all his roles seriously, he also allows himself to enjoy certain parts. "I think some movies demand of you to have fun," he says. "Some performances need you to be a different person, a different actor. I don't want to approach every role with the same equation. You need to experiment with styles and processes, and you become a better actor for it." McAvoy will have the opportunity to experiment with several styles in his upcoming films, including the romance Becoming Jane, with Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen, and an adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, in which he'll play opposite Keira Knightley and Vanessa Redgrave. Then he will be making a "big departure" in Universal's Wanted, a sci-fi adventure about a "geek who makes good." And is McAvoy playing the geek? "Oh, totally!" he exclaims. "I could never play a proper action hero. I could only play one where he's meant to be weak."