Welcome to Hollywood: a perilous, crazy, demanding and harsh place, where the price is high but the rewards are higher. A place where performances, ticket sales, good looks and acclaim are scrutinised, evaluated and tabulated. Want to make the transition to major-league leading man? A Bafta Rising Star award, Golden Globe nominations, GQ Leading Man Of The Year, magazine front covers, the faith and approbation of film-makers such as Kevin MacDonald (The Last King Of Scotland) and Joe Wright (At"After they screen-tested me for Wanted, I didn't get the part for about six months," James McAvoy is saying. "I think they were off trying to hire more butch people."
It is summer 2007, and the Glaswegian actor is in Prague, where he is filming the wham-bam adaptation of Scots writer Mark Millar's wham-bam's comic-book. In this, his first Hollywood role, McAvoy plays Wesley, a nine-to-five schlub in Chicago. Wesley discovers that he is actually a member, via his absent father, of a secret order of super-powered assassins called The Fraternity. If he is licked into shape by two mysterious mentors, Fox (Angelina Jolie, in full, tattooed, gun-slinging tough-chick mode) and Sloan (Morgan Freeman, playing the gravitas-laden, Buddha-with-a-bullet philosopher-cum-killer), Wesley can tackle the evil powers that killed his father and now threaten the world order.
It is, then, the kind of role that we associate with 'butch' people. Which, in Hollywood terms, normally means a buff American. Josh Hartnett, probably. Whereas McAvoy is that wee Glaswegian guy who played a faun (The Chronicles Of Narnia), a flash cockney geezer (in Shameless on telly), a self-indulgent and reckless young doctor (in The Last King Of Scotland), a quiz geek (Starter For 10) and a sensitive and doomed servant-turned-soldier (in Atonement).
Ultimately, though, McAvoy's very ordinary-Joe-ness gave the Wanted producers exactly what they wanted: the actor could, with the right training, undergo the metamorphosis from zero to hero.
"I think they came to the realisation that it could only work if they hired someone who could believably be a pleb," he says. "Kinda like Tobey Maguire is such an unlikely hero in Spider-Man – it's not the first time we've seen it, I'm not saying that at all. So they were getting me all pumped up and wanted me to put on muscles." But he adds that Wanted director Timur Bekmanbetov was concerned that "we didn't do it too far so that I could still believably be nothing: not be good in a fight, not throw a punch.
"And the metamorphosis that Wesley goes through is very important to the film – it almost makes you go, how could you do a second film?" McAvoy adds, which suggests that Wanted's producers may see this as the beginning of another comic-book/movie franchise along the lines of Spider-Man and Batman. "Because most of the fun in this one is seeing him change."
Fox and Sloan tell gormless – and disbelieving – Wesley that he doesn't need the medication he takes to deal with the debilitating panic attacks from which he's suffered all his life.
The attacks, McAvoy explains, are the outward sign of a rare gift that only he, his father "and a few others in history have had, in which your heart can run at 500 beats per second. And that enables you, for a short period of time, to operate on a higher level than most people. So your senses are increased, and your reaction time is increased, and you can dodge bullets. But you can only do it for a certain amount of time before it f***s you. And because I'm my father's son and I have this ability, I'm one of the few assassins who, if they train me, could possibly take this guy out."
Meet James McAvoy: action hero.
Fast-forward. It is 11 months since the Wanted shoot in the Czech capital. In the interim, Atonement was released to worldwide acclaim and box-office success. The performance skyrocketed McAvoy's profile all over the world, a scant seven years after the actor, now 29, left the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and moved to London.
McAvoy is now in Leipzig in Germany, making another film. He still hasn't seen the finished version of Wanted – a film stuffed with extraordinary superhero feats requires a lot of special effects, which are being worked on right up to the opening date. As we drink beer in his hotel, he says he took this unlikely action role precisely because it was so unlikely. A new professional adventure for an actor who likes to push himself in myriad directions.
"Wanted also plays into all these ideas of systems of control, which are really interesting to me as well. It's all a big old excuse for a good old action film, don't get me wrong," he says. "But there are nice themes in it, like manipulation, and systems of control in the family unit, high school, the work place, college, the government. The whole idea of being told the world is a certain way and that you have a place in it. A certain amount of emancipation from that happens in the film. But ultimately is Wesley emancipated from it? Or is he still a pleb at the end? We play with all these things."
Here in Germany, McAvoy is making The Last Station, about the events leading up to the death of Leo Tolstoy. He plays the author's secretary. He's come straight from set, and sports the 1910-vintage, pre-Russian Revolution 'soft beard' of his character (albeit with a distinctly Scottish ginger hue). He's not nearly as muscled as he was in Prague a year ago but still packs a bit of heft for his 5ft 7ins height.
After the leading man thrills of Wanted, he has enjoyed being part of an ensemble cast, albeit one that features Dame Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer as the author and his wife. In the role of Tolstoy's daughter is Anne-Marie Duff, McAvoy's wife. Since meeting on the set of Shameless, they have never been in a project together. So how was it acting with the missus?
"It was fine," he replies evenly – McAvoy is not one for discussing his private life. "We didn't really have much to do with each other: we're in a lot of scenes together, but we don't really say much to each other. It might have been a different decision if we were playing lovers or something like that. But we weren't, so it was easier for us."
In one scene, he has to rescue Duff's character from an icy pond, before turning back to save her mother. A fun day on set?
"It was f***ing baltic!" McAvoy says with a laugh. "It was all right. But weird too. At one point there was a high-ranking member of the crew taking pictures of us on his mobile phone. And I'm trying to keep afloat with the lady of the realm Dame Helen Mirren underneath my shoulder, trying to make sure she doesn't swallow any water. We'd managed to get in a part of the lake where it was too deep and I was trying to paddle away, and I was getting cramp in my legs. Then I saw this guy (taking pictures] and I was like, "ho! F***ing don't!". Other than that, it was brilliant."
But now McAvoy has something he wants to show me. He whips out his mobile phone. "I'm very proud of this…" On Wanted he performed maybe "40 or 50%" of his own stunts.
He's particularly chuffed with a shot they did in Chicago in which he jumps on the bonnet of a car driving along the road at 30mph before sliding off to continue the pursuit of a bad guy. Even on his mobile phone footage of the rehearsal, "which is about 70 % of the speed we did it at", it looks amazing. And scary.
From empathetic everyman to muscled-up assassin and knight in dripping armour saving a dame: James McAvoy has come a long way. And what a long and thrilling way he has ahead of him.
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Wanted is released June 25
www.wantedmovie.com