McAvoy, who recently wrapped the action flick Wanted with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, admits to feeling a bit more pressure. “I won’t lie and say that I’m completely unfazed by it all. I am fazed by it all. I want the movie to do really well, and I want it to win lots of Oscars and BAFTAs, and I want it to win the adulation of every single member of the human race,” he says, only half kidding. “But at the same time I would hate to think that any of us should feel any less proud simply because it didn’t garner lots of awards. So it’s a strange conflict. There’s a part of me that wants to forget all of these things, and there’s a part of me that can’t.” It doesn’t help, he says, that he’s spent the past two and a half weeks being asked about how it feels to be an Oscar hopeful. “Journalists keep telling you, ‘Sooo, I hear Oscar!’ And you’re like, ‘Oh really? Great.’”
He finds sitting for interviews, it seems, just as tiresome as having his picture taken. “I had one guy, and I’m not going to tell you who it was because he’s quite well known, say, in a TV segment, ‘So, Atonement, it’s about as hot as a bucket of chicken with biscuits on the side!’ I don’t even know what that means,” McAvoy rants. “But I’m not going to moan on about journalists anymore. Sorry about that.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Knightley scolds. “You’ve talked your ass off quite enough already.”
