Still, despite his borderline brattiness, there is something undeniably charming about McAvoy. Maybe it’s the accent, or the fact that he’s a tough guy with an unabashed feminine side. (He keeps a stash of his favorite Swirling Mist white tea in his backpack and excuses himself midconversation to apply Dr. Hauschka lip balm, which he swears was a freebie from the hotel when Knightley ribs him about it.) Director Kevin Macdonald says that when he cast the actor as Idi Amin’s personal physician in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, he was taken off guard a bit at his wife’s gushy reaction. “She was like, ‘Oooh, I just love him! He’s so cute!’” the director recalls. “It’s strange because from my point of view he’s not exactly eye candy. But he has this quality that women really respond to.”
Raised largely by his grandparents in a bleak Glasgow housing project, McAvoy had his first exposure to show business when he was 16, after Glaswegian actor and director David Hayman came to speak at his school. “He’d done loads of movies and worked with f---ing Schwarzenegger, and as a young kid I was like, ‘Oooh, that’s interesting,’” McAvoy remembers. After class, he asked Hayman if he could make the tea or run errands on his next film, but when Hayman called six months later, it was to offer McAvoy the chance to audition for The Near Room, a movie he was directing. McAvoy landed the part, and though it wasn’t exactly instant stardom—“I had no agent, so I had no way of getting other work,” he explains—the experience was enough to pique his interest. Two years later he enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. “I wanted to leave the life that I knew,” he says. “I wanted an adventure.”
And so it has been. McAvoy first began attracting major attention in the UK in 2004, with a well-reviewed small film about two wheelchair-bound young men called Inside I’m Dancing (released in the States as Rory O’Shea Was Here), and the television series Shameless, where he met his wife of one year, actress Anne-Marie Duff. His powerful performance in The Last King of Scotland earned him a BAFTA nomination and an international reputation. Says Macdonald, “He’s the best actor under 30 in Britain, and maybe beyond that. I’ve seen many of the young American actors as well, and I can’t think of anyone who even compares.”
Tim Bevan, who produced Atonement and Inside I’m Dancing, agrees that McAvoy’s acting chops were never in doubt. The real question was whether the five-foot-seven, slightly built, ghostly pale Scotsman had what it takes to be a true screen idol. “He’s one of those guys who was always going to be a fantastic actor but the worry was, is he going to crack it to become a movie star?” says Bevan. “Atonement has proven that he has that quality. He can get away with crying onscreen, and it’s very moving. He plays like a man, not like a wuss.”
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