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Universal Pictures Wanted is based on the graphic novel of the same name, but because only one issue had been published when the screenwriters began, they used it as an unique opportunity to develop their own story based on this setup:

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) works a dead end office job. His girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend and he's broke. One evening, a beautiful woman (Angelina Jolie) tells him that his father -- the world's greatest assassin -- was killed yesterday, and that the killer is now after him. That's where the all-new chase begins and the all-new mystery unfolds.

The star of period pieces like Atonement and political dramas like The Last King of Scotland, James McAvoy never thought he'd be an action hero. Now he's flying through the air, shooting guns, and walking in slow motion. He even sported his cool leather jacket to the interview.

"Hey, man, I have worn leather jackets in the past," McAvoy assured us. "That's the reason I did this film, so I could stop wearing suits."

He also dropped his cell phone on the floor, shattering the case and sending the battery flying across the floor. This was not the first time he'd fumble. "Ah, it'll be fine. It's a resilient thing. I've had it for a couple of years now."

Whereas in a movie they could have cut out any foibles, that's a glimpse of what makes the real James McAvoy a self-aware, self-deprecating action hero.

McAvoy talked to SuicideGirls about Wanted, American accents, and whether or not he will play Bilbo in The Hobbit.


Question: Were you worried about how this film would turn out?

James McAvoy: Yeah, I think I was. I did think, "I can't do an action film." Partly because of my own doubts about my appropriateness for the role. I thought I was probably bad casting for it, but I also thought the action movie can be just really seamy and bad. I like action movies when they're good but when they're bad they're such a waste of time. The thing that saved this one for me, there was a few things. First of all, the fact that they were willing to cast somebody like me was interesting. The fact that they were giving the job to somebody like Timur [Bekmambetov] whos [made] vampire films in the past. I've seen lots of vampire films but he made them very different. I thought, Well, he's going to be interesting. And also the fact that they weren't making this movie for all the family. They were making this a very violent R-rated film for adults and I've not seen that a lot lately. You can find it if you go to the straight to DVD market but in the mainstream with good production values and commitment and money spent on it, I don't really see that hard R-rated film for adults at the moment. They're all superhero movies that are incredibly violent actually, but just filmed in a slightly sanitized way. Like Indiana Jones. Ants crawling inside somebody's body and eating them from the inside, that's incredibly disturbing but done in a kinda slightly cutesy way so you can give it to 12-year-olds. This was never going to be like that and I thought, well, this is all quite cool and different. And even if it fails horribly, it was still trying to be something else.

Question: Was it a challenge working out for the role?

JM: I'm glad I did it. There were times where I just wanted to stop and do nothing else. But I had a great trainer called Glenn Chapman who was a proper drill sergeant for me. Nice guy but he made me do things that I didn't want to do and he made me sick quite a lot. And it's good though because apart from the physical aesthetic of they wanted their action hero to be a bit more buff and all that, I wouldn't have got through four and a half months had I not be fitter and more healthy and in better shape than I usually am. I think I was capable of doing all the things in the film but not consistently with the high level intensity being sustained over four and a half months. Because every day was like a 12, 13, maybe 14-hour day and a lot of it was taken up with stunts. That was quite grueling so I needed to be in better shape than I usually am.

Question: What were the most grueling stunts?

JM: There was a lot of wire stuff that ended up getting cut from the film. The whole ending of the film was different. There was a sequence where Morgan and I fall through like four levels of a building that is blowing up, fighting each other as we do it. That was four days on wires in a harness having your groin ruptured and that's never fun. That was probably the most grueling thing, and then to find out that it has been cut out of the film. "Yeah, yeah, it didn't work, wasn't very good. It was really boring." You're like, What? "Yeah, we're reshooting it. We're doing this scene that takes like 20 minutes to film. That will end the film." What? Is there going to be a harness? No. All right.

Question: Did they save that for the DVD?

JM: Pretty much everything's gone. The only stuff that got cut from the film that you could put on the DVD is stuff that they never finished the CGI for. Other than that, pretty much everything that you see is what we shot. Edited in incredible and very imaginative ways, though I have to say, he's very clever in the edit suite.

Question: Did you come up with a backstory as to how these assassins shoot from so far away?

JM: There was no science in it. It's completely science fiction. I don't know. I was dubious about that one as well but we have bullets that separate like shuttles. I was sold after I saw that.

Question: Since there's so much physical action, do you get excited to do emotional scenes like panic attacks?

JM: I love doing that. It was also, I felt that the character arc and his journey provided a lot of drama in this as well. I didn't feel like it was just a genre movie. I didn't feel it was just a comic book movie. I felt there was a sufficiently interesting character and someone in a very truthful and actually quite sad place to begin with in the film. So it was scenes like that that made me think, "Well, I think the actor in me is not going to be unemployed for four and a half months while I do action." Do you know what I mean? I did feel that there was enough to do there to satisfy my acting urge as well. All the panic attack stuff I loved. I love really physicalizing, I don't just mean by doing action scenes, but playing Mr. Tumnus in Narnia. It was such a physical role even though I wasn't doing stunts. And doing all the panic attack stuff, doing anything thats emotionally instigated but physically manifested is just really, really interesting I think. It's a complete emotional response, isn't it? A panic attack. I loved all of that.

Question: Was it hard to go from geek to assassin day to day?

JM: Kind of, yeah. Also because I'd never done a film that took four and a half months to film. Well, Narnia took five months or something like that but I was hardly in it. So when you shoot out of sequence, as you always do, say for two months, it's less spread out because you've only got two months of a shoot. And the film's still going to be the same length as Wanted is, but when you spread it out over four months, there's even more opportunity for it to become disparate and become disjointed. So you really have to be on top of your continuity and your script. You have to really ride the directors and the producers to kind of go, "Wait, wait, wait. While you're making that decision, what happens before, can I do that actually?" And sometimes you make an ass of yourself because you question them on everything, but sometimes you save stuff that could have gone really badly and really screw up your character's arc. And the story of the character and the story of his metamorphosis and why he changes is really what underpins I suppose the whole film and makes it something more than just action. So it was really important that we got that right.

Question: Is it easy for you to go in and out of the American accent?

JM: It is. There's a couple of words that I found hard. "Girlfriend" I found quite hard. Other than that, it was fine. I've got a voice coach that I use when I do American accents. She works with me. She worked with everybody on Band of Brothers but she also did Penelope with me as well. She wasn't available for this but she's so good, I just couldn't imagine working with anybody else, so I didn't. I just thought I'd wing it. It worked out all right in the end but the one word that I had to fix in looping was "girlfriend."

Question: Had you read the comic book before?

JM: No, no. It was weird because the guy who wrote it's from my hometown of Glasgow but no, I hadn't read it. I read it after I got the script.

Question: Did you base any of your character on it?

JM: Not really. Visually, he's physically and visually based on Eminem, which is kind of weird for a start-to-start reading it going, "That character really looks like Eminem. And wait a minute, Angelina's character is so clearly physically, visually based on Halle Berry. This is so strange. It was really strange. I think Eminem and Halle Berry were a bit annoyed about the graphic novel. The character has nothing to do with Eminem but I think it's a marketing ploy, really, more than anything else. So I don't know, that turned me off immediately. But the script is incredibly different from the graphic novel. So the first 30 minutes of the film, they share a real common genesis and then they kind of go off in tangents. But the guy who wrote the graphic novel, Mark Millar, is really pleased with the film; he feels it does still have the sensibilities of the graphic novel, I think. Slightly less nihilistic but not that much.

Question: Can you confirm or deny your involvement with The Hobbit?

JM: I can completely deny it. It just seems to have all been rumors.

Question: Nobody talked to you?

JM: No, not at all. Neither Peter Jackson nor Guillermo Del Toro have got in contact.

Question: Would you want to play Bilbo if it's offered?

JM: I think I'd need to see the script first. From what I hear them saying, they don't even have a script. So you'd have to see if you're right for the part, although I'm sure if I was wrong for the part, they wouldn't even bother asking so who knows. We'll see.

Question: Was there a movie that changed your life when you were young?

JM: No, not really. I loved films when I was a kid. I watched a lot of films when I was a kid. We had a VHS video recorder and we used it a lot. But no, I never really considered acting. There's no like glass ceiling that I thought I just can't get through, I can't make it. I just never really considered it a possibility. It was something that happened to other people, really. I didn't really think about it. It wasn't until someone gave me a job in a film that I kind of went, "Wow, this is an option? All right. Okay." Then it took me about two or three years to decide, Yeah, I'll give it a bash, and I went to theater school.

Question: What is your greatest fear?

JM: Oh, god. Uh, The Exorcist. That film really terrifies me. I think it's just the Catholic in me coming out.

Question: Are you looking forward to more superhero roles coming your way?

JM: No, I don't think so. I hope not. I hope it doesn't become all I get offered. I did this film for a challenge and something different, something new and so hopefully, the next thing I do will be again an example of that and something different, new and challenging. But again, not just different from Wanted, hopefully different from the other stuff I've done as well.

Question: Are you playing Young Tolstoy in Last Station?

JM: No. I'm in The Last Station but I play the secretary, Valentin Fedoravich Bulgako. Tolstoy is played by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren is playing his wife and Paul Giamatti's playing his cohort. It's a bloody brilliant cast.

Wanted is in theaters now. Check out the website www.wantedmovie.com.