Hey kids, *le sigh* your ever luvvin’ LMD had her third-times’-the-charm interview with the lovely and wonderful James McAvoy (Or as he’s been referred to on this site for years, MmmcAvoy).  Charming, down to earth and potty-mouthed as ever, MmmcAvoy, along with the brilliant Paul Giamatti, sat down to chat about their latest film, The Last Station and bring up Star Trek, Wanted 2 rumours and the joys of oral sex along the way.

 Dig it!

 The Last Station

Paul Giamatti

The Lady Miz Diva:  The Last Station boasts a dream cast of actors, including Christopher Plummer and Dame Helen Mirren.  Can you tell us about working with them?

Paul Giamatti:  Yeah, the two of them are amazing. I think they’re both great.  He – I’ve always particularly had a thing about him; I’ve always thought he was great in everything.  Anything that he’s in he’s great in it.  I went off at him about being the guy in Star Trek with the patch on the eye {Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – 1991}.  He’s so great in that movie, though.  And what’s great about him is he’s completely unpretentious, you know? I mean, he does goofy stuff like that and he’s clearly having such a good time.  It’s so great.

I think McAvoy is actually kind of amazing in this movie.  They’re great, but I really think he’s kind of remarkable in it.  You know, he’s an incredibly charming, really good actor and what he does in the film is really hard, to play kinda the innocent guy like that and not seem stupid or vapid or something like that.  He’s really good in it, I think.

LMD:  Your character, Chertkov, could easily have read as a really one-dimensional villain, how did you give him some depth?

PG:  Hopefully, he doesn’t read as a complete bastard, but hopefully that element’s there so that you’re confused about whether he’s a complete bastard or not.  But I tried not to make him a total dick and give him some actual soul.  Make it seem believable that he really believed what he was doing for whatever twisted reasons he believed what he was doing.

LMD:  Was there a lot of information available on him to use for research?

PG:  Not a ton.  I mean, the biographical facts are known about him.  He lived for a really long time; he died in like 1938, or something like that.  The one thing that was most useful is he wrote an account of Tolstoy’s death, which is really strange because it’s written in the third person and it’s written like one of the Gospels or something and it’s really peculiar.  It definitely tells you a lot about what a weird guy he was.  Some of the other people’s diaries talk about him and he was definitely a peculiar, strange man.

James McAvoy

The Lady Miz Diva:  That fellow who just left was saying some very nice things about you …

James McAvoy:  He’s very nice, Paul.  I pay him a lot of money to do that and I’m very good at oral sex.  So, he enjoys that.

He’s lovely.  We had such a nice working with each other.  He’s so amazing.

LMD:  One of the adjectives most used to describe your acting is “everyman.” Valentin, the character you play in The Last Station is an “everyman.”  Have you ever felt pigeonholed playing these approachable, nice characters, even when you’re doing an action hero part like in Wanted?  Do you ever want to play a one-dimensional bad guy?

JM:  Totally, totally, course I do one day.  No, I don’t feel pigeonholed.  Getting to play everyman, that’s great, that’s wonderful I think. You get great parts.

LMD:  Or is it that your style of acting brings a sympathy that a character might not have had with another actor playing him?

JM:  I don’t know, really. Maybe, maybe, I don’t know.  I think I just look at the script and see what the story needs and try and do it, and if the story needs an everyman that you can understand and sympathise with, I try and get your sympathy. {Laughs}

LMD:  Are those roles you gravitate toward?

JM:  The last three films I did, The Conspirator, Wanted and The Last Station, I gravitated towards them and I chose to do those films.  Everything before that I was at the mercy of fate.  That’s where I got it, didn’t get it, or, as much as I’m glad I did those films, I just did them because I got offered them and they were the best of the bunch, y’know?  So, I didn’t gravitate too much.  I haven't structured my career.  It’s been really lucky. And now I’m starting to structure my career because you have choice.  But really, I just took whatever I got.  So maybe they gravitated to my ability to find pathos in the audience, or themselves, or the ether.

LMD:  What’s coming up for you?  You mentioned The Conspirator which is directed by Robert Redford; tell us about working with him.

JM:  He’s great, really, really good.  Really nice guy, as well.  Makes you call him Bob. Justin Long kept calling him Mr. Redford and he was like, “Call me Bob. Call me Bob,” and Justin would just be like, “I don’t think I can.  He’s Sundance or Mr. Redford, that’s it.”  He was great, really good.

Nothing else coming out, I’m about to go up to Vancouver and do a film called I’m With Cancer.  That’s in February, during the Winter Olympics which is a bold stroke, or idiotic, I dunno. Wish us luck.

LMD:  I keep hearing these rumours about bringing Fox back from the dead for Wanted 2.

JM:  Yeah, those rumours…  I don’t know any of it. I got a phone call from Timur {Bekmambetov, Wanted’s director} just after New Year’s Eve past and that was it.  He didn’t even talk to me about the film.  He just said, “I’ll talk to ya in a couple of weeks about the film,” so God knows what’s happened.

LMD:  Well, now you’re an award-winning “serious” actor and official action hero, but a lot of people first saw you in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as the faun, Mr. Tumnus.  How was that received by your friends back in Scotland?

JM:  Oh man, that never ended, that.  That was just like … When one of my particular friends saw that, he phoned me up - and I was away, I was in a different country - at three o’clock in the morning just to rip me about it.  And the guy was in fits of hysterics.  He walked out the cinema halfway through the film just to tell me I looked like a dick.

It wasn’t really his genre, was it?  He was a 24 or 25 year old man, but yeah, I loved it.

~ The Lady Miz Diva

January 11^th, 2010

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