James McAvoy
☼ Born on 21 December 1979, in Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Biography
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 Wa
(click to expand)
rdrobe (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.
In the role of actor
IT Chapter Two (03/09/2019)
The now-adult Losers Club returns to Derry to finish what they started as kids in IT Chapter Two. It has been 27 years since the Losers Club faced off with the demonic clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) and most have moved away and forgotten their life in Derry. However, when horrific deaths begin to reoccur in […]
Dark Phoenix (09/06/2019)
The X-Men have to face off against one of their own in Dark Phoenix. It is 1992 and Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his X-Men team of Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) have gained some level of […]
Glass (17/01/2019)
M. Night Shyamalan returns to the world of Unbreakable two decades later in Glass. For the past 19 years, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has been working as a vigilante superhero the media has nicknamed “The Overseer.” With the help of his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), David has been tracking down Kevin Wendell Crumb (James […]
Rokuroku: The Promise of the Witch (22/07/2018)
Multiple individuals are tormented by supernatural creatures emerging from a haunted hotel in Rokuroku: The Promise of the Witch. One day out of the blue, Izumi receives a call from her old friend Mika, who she arranges to meet-up with. Meanwhile, Izumi’s grandfather is disturbed by a supernatural force that no one else can see. Elsewhere, people from […]
Atomic Blonde (29/07/2017)
An undercover MI6 agent tries to locate a list of double agents in cold war Berlin in Atomic Blonde. In 1989 Berlin, MI6 operative James Gasciogne is killed by the KGB, who steal a watch containing a microfilm list of every field agent in the Soviet Union. Top agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) is assigned by her […]
Split (22/01/2017)
Three girls are kidnapped by a man with dissociative identity disorder in Split. As they are being driven home from a party, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are kidnapped by Kevin (James McAvoy) and locked in a basement in an unknown location. The girls quickly realize that Kevin has […]
X-Men: Apocalypse (29/05/2016)
The X-Men face their greatest foe in X-Men: Apocalypse. En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) is the world’s first mutant, who was worshiped as a god in ancient Egypt, before he was betrayed and entombed for thousands of years. Upon awakening in 1983, En Sabah Nur decides to destroy the world and remake it in his own image. […]
Filth (30/05/2014)
Indie Spotlight is a series focusing on reviews of independent films Based on the novel by Irving Welsh (Trainspotting), Filth focuses on Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy), a chauvinist Scottish police officer, who is determined to get promoted to inspector. With his young partner Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell), Bruce sets off to solve a […]
Trance (14/04/2013)
After playing the awards game with the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire and Oscar-nominated 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle returns to dishing out his unique take on genre films. In the case of Trance, what starts off as a fairly ordinary heist film, turns into psychological thriller in which the main protagonist begins to doubt the reality […]
X-Men: First Class (04/06/2011)
It’s been a little over 11 years since X-Men became the first successful adaptation of a Marvel comic property and spawned a decade long craze in comic book films. X-Men: First Class can be both described as a prequel and reboot to the original series. For people who only know X-Men from the previous films, they would only really […]
Wanted (03/07/2008)
I didn’t really decided to see Wanted until just a few weeks ago and I was really expecting more than what I got. The first five minutes showed some Marix-like action scenes that made me excited, but with the exception of the climax, it was a fairly standard action film. I’d say that I probably […]