It’s a good time to interview James McAvoy. His second turn as Charles Xavier in X-Men: Days of Future Past was the number one movie in the world last weekend, as expected. You can also see possibly his most challenging role now on VOD and in theaters this weekend in Filth. Based on the Irvine Welsh novel, McAvoy plays Bruce, a corrupt cop in Scotland having his own sort of Trainspotting crisis. I was able to land a brief phone interview with McAvoy while he was making what can only be a whirlwind round of worldwide press, to discuss Filth and his thoughts on the future of X-Men.
CraveOnline: You’ve done American accents in movies before. For Filth did you actually have to make your accent thicker?
James McAvoy: A little bit, but not much. Also, I was playing someone from Edinburgh and I’m not from Edinburgh. You guys probably won’t be able to tell the difference but it’s a different accent from my own so I was putting on an accent. We could’ve gone much further with the accent in Filth actually but we chose not to. As much as the movie comes out right at the top and it talks about Scotland and the nature of Scotland, the film is not a movie about Scotland. The film is a movie about the state of this guy’s mental health. As such, we thought it was actually quite a good idea to pull back with some of the more full on colloquialisms. There’s still going to be stuff that completely makes no sense for an audience, but I think we sort of came back from it a little bit because it’s not about Edinburgh, it’s not about Scotland. It’s about this guy.
Is Irvine Welsh a national treasure in Scotland?
Yeah, I think he is. He’s a sometimes maligned national treasure in Scotland. Sometimes I think that the Scottish press don’t love him as much as the foreign press do, but there’s nobody like him on the planet. We should treat him like a treasure, because he is. Like I say, there’s nobody like him in Scotland but he isn’t one of those writers from Scotland who writes like that. Nobody writes like that in Scotland. Nobody writes like that in the world. He’s so unique. He’s more Dickensian than anything else I think, if you’re going to liken him to anybody. He’s so special and I’m so proud that we managed to get what is arguably, to a lot of people, his best book which was deemed unfilmable, I’m so glad that we managed to successfully translate it to screen.
How did you and the filmmakers create that sort of fever dream we experience in the first half of the film?
Just really understanding what it is to be inside the head of somebody who’s that paranoid, delusional and bipolar who’s also then complicated it with massive drug abuse and alcohol abuse. You add a raging inferiority complex. Even when he was mentally healthy, I suppose he had a raging inferiority complex as well. Understanding that this man is constantly trying to project a fantasized version of himself out onto the world. He’s been doing it so long that I don’t think he can tell the difference anymore between who he really is and this version of himself that’s all powerful and content and successful, when inside he’s crumbling. So it became important to us, rather than to make it gritty, realistic British kitchen sink drama, it became important to make it more surrealistic, energetic, gritty British drama-comedy.
Was it equally challenging to portray his outrageous side and his emotional collapse?
Weirdly no, because at times he goes from one to the other within a couple seconds really. That was the strength of it and it was also, strangely, I found it quite easy. It was a lot of effort and a lot of sweat, but artistically it came out very easily. I think that’s just testament to the fact that it’s a really, really brilliantly written piece of filmmaking. For me, it’s the best script I’ve ever read and that just frees you. It makes it so much easier and I did find it quite easy to get there, if you know what I mean, that term that actors use sometimes.
It was very easy to go there with this film whereas in other films, apparently it can seem like it was a difficult performance. It’s much harder to go there because generally you’re reading the script and you’re going, “I’m not entirely certain where ‘there’ is. I’m not entirely certain where this script wants me to go.” So you’re having to kind of make it up a bit more as you go along and you make your own decisions, whereas in this script it was so strong, so forthright and so clear about what was driving him that it just fell out of me easily.
We always hear, and I can imagine, that love scenes are very awkward to shoot. How awkward was simulating some of the acts you have to do in Filth, and doing it so convincingly?
The only one that was awkward for me was on the first day of the shoot and I had to do a scene where I blackmail the young girl into giving me a blowjob. That was really tough and I felt really unsettled about that. I hadn’t felt bad about it when I read the script but just being there doing it felt horrible. And the girl who was playing the part was not 15. She was in her 20s but it still felt horrible to be creating this scenario. But other than that, it was kind of all fairly fun. You just kind of have to laugh at it and enjoy it.
My favorite scene in the movie is one where I’m masturbating and crying and pretending to be Frank Sidebottom whilst watching home movies of my wife and kid and prank calling my best friend’s wife. That’s like the most complex thing ever that’s designed to be grotesque, harrowing, upsetting, funny, depressing and surprising all at the same time. And yet, it just seemed completely natural at the moment. It was actually strangely chilled out and easy, this film. Lots of effort but the effort came easily.
Did it seem soon to you to unite both the X-Men casts in Days of Future Past, or was it the right time?
It was completely unexpected for me. I had no idea they were going to do it until I got the call, which I was very surprised. That’s what I want to be. I was worried after First Class they’d kind of reverie to the same old Charles that we’ve seen before, but what I’m really pleased about is that they surprised me, not just with a totally different take on Charles and asking me to do something quite traumatized and damaged. But the fact that they then introduced the previous cast as well was really exciting because it was just a move out of left field which I really didn’t expect.
And then with what they’re going to do next with Apocalypse, again it was a move out of left field because the Days of Future Past and the Apocalypse story lines in the comic books are two of the most iconic, yes, but they’re also really out there in terms of putting them on in movies. I applaud Fox for having the balls to go there.
And is the Frankenstein movie you’re doing very faithful to Mary Shelley?
No, not really. It’s faithful to the essence of what she was writing and it’s faithful to the themes of obsession and transgression and crossing moral and ethical boundaries and stuff, and whether man can become the creator and all that. Definitely all about the same things, but narrative-wise it’s different.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
