When I asked James McAvoy which film of his he’d guess was the most four-favorited by Letterboxd , I gave him a hint of “the library.” From 2007–2008, the Scottish actor was present in two very different libraries across two very different movies: the achingly romantic epic Atonement, and the action-packed, dark comedy assassin pic Wanted. Both were adapted from novels, with Wanted being a graphic novel by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones and Atonement being a beloved text from Ian McEwan. And both had library climaxes, literally and figuratively.

Jane Austen stans, don’t fret. Let the record show that while those were the two films on McAvoy’s mind in the interview above, we know that 2007’s McAvoy+wanted+library only brings up Atonement and Jane, not the one with shoot-outs.

Letterboxd would probably (correctly) guess Atonement as his feature in the most four faves. While Wanted wields an average rating of 3.0-out-of-five stars (an action badge of honor) Joe Wright’s Atonement takes the old with a whopping 4.0. However, perhaps because Wanted earned nearly $350 million at the global box office (over $200 million more than Atonement), the star was surprised by the answer.

McAvoy’s career shifted after his triple library visit, following that Wanted path itno the world of comic books with five X-Men movies between 2011–2019, alongside horror-thrillers both massive (It Chapter Two) and cultish (Split). The genre world has been kind to the actor, but the love for Wright’s interrupted romance touched him deep enough “to well up” when thinking back on the famous library scene itself. (Aya perfectly sums up Letterboxd’s obsession with Atonement when she writes “my heart???? absolutely shattered. my eyes????? looking respectfully at James McAvoy in that library scene.”)

With that icebreaker out of the way (seriously, get some ice), McAvoy takes us into his library of work across genres, all leading to his latest film, Speak No Evil. His co-star Scoot McNairy teased one of McAvoy’s most iconic characters when he told us, “He’s a beast of an actor with so many different facets of colors to his charisma. It was just as exciting for me to be in the scene as it is to watch a scene [with him]. I mean, it was a daily thing that it was really exciting to come to work to see what James was gonna end up doing today.”

Below are some excerpts from our conversation, ending on more of his Speak No Evil co-stars and director talking about the man everyone hopes to meet in a library, McAvoy himself.

The actor’s description of Wright’s direction parallels how Michael Mann explained to Letterboxd his observation of George Cukor directing a scene when Mann was in film school, where Cukor spent ten seconds talking to an actress and “the transformation was total” from the previous take. Mann then realized that’s what directing is: being able to communicate clearly enough to get exactly what you want. McAvoy lights up upon hearing this anecdote.

“Dude,” he says, “I’m about to direct my first film and I’m casting it at the moment, and I’ve learned that massively. Because I can take complex, long-form direction and know to do this here, and then underpin it here, and then maybe just undercut that here,” he says as he moves his body and facial expressions before returning still to check his methods. “Did I hit the [whole] checklist? Yes, I did,” he says contently. “I’m learning that I can’t give that kind of direction to every actor. Sometimes, you spend like two minutes talking to ’em saying, ‘I want you to do this here and this here’ and you spend too much time. It’s convoluted; you ultimately just realize that you need to step back and say, ‘Take more control.’ That’s it.”

X-Men: First Class (2011)

Directed by Matthew Vaughn, written by Vaughn, Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz and Jane Goldman from comics by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee

McAvoy played Charles Xavier across five films, starting with Matthew Vaughn’s prequel to the first X-Men films, First Class, in 2011. He would reprise the role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, as a cameo in Deadpool 2 and culminate (for now) in 2019’s Dark Phoenix.

So how closely did he watch Patrick Stewart’s performance in the original X-Men film? “It wasn’t about emulating anything that had come before,” McAvoy answers. “It was about presenting something different. Because if you’re going backwards in time to show a younger version, surely the interesting thing is to show the journey between the younger and the older and how different they were, and what had to happen to them to make them like the person we knew from the original films.”

He elaborates that “the role demanded of me to do something a little more similar [to Stewart’s Xavier], but with a few more character faults and fatal flaws that I think we’d assume that he might have had at an earlier time in his life… If he was selfless, I should be selfish; if he was wise, I should be foolhardy. So, it was about doing opposites, really.”

Another method was through the use of varying makeup: “Not that it would ever be evident,” McAvoy explains, “’cause we never wanted it to look like he was wearing makeup, but we would change a little bit of eyeliner for some characters, no eyeliner for another character. Covering of wrinkles, or covering of darkness under the eyes. We would let that come out again for some of the adult characters: finding a different way of walking for each character, a different way of sitting.”

He recalls that “the only difficulty we had was finding the voice for Hedwig,” referring to the childlike personality, who is most helpful to the captives taken by the dominant personalities. “At the table read, Night said, ‘I want him to have a sibilant ‘s.’ It just worked, and it helped make that character who he was.”

Speak No Evil (2024)

Written and directed by James Watkins, from a film written by Mads Tafdrup and Christian Tafdrup

With Speak No Evil, McAvoy returns to Blumhouse, the genre mainstay behind Split and its sequel, Glass. His new film is a remake of a 2022 Danish feature of the same name that concerns two couples—one American and one British—their children and a weekend getaway where all the signs point to something sinister occurring at the house where they’re staying. The catch is that the visitors can’t bring themselves to leave out of fear of being rude to their hosts.

Director James Watkins, however, takes liberties to make this one different. “I love the original movie,” Watkins tells us. “I love the themes of it in of how it explored social propriety as a shackle. I can take some of the themes, set them in my world in the UK, and then import these Americans [McNairy and Mackenzie Davis]. By having Brits and Americans, it suddenly changes the dynamic because they’re people with a different worldview.”

Different worldviews mean different ways of reacting, and Watkins recalls that “Scoot, who’s from Texas, said, ‘When the cat is out of the bag and confronted with overt violence, not covert violence, the agency of Americans is different.’ I think my characters would at least try to run, to hide, to fight.”

McAvoy’s secret? Must be all that time spent in libraries.