LOS ANGELES -- How gifted an actor is James McAvoy? He makes kissing Angelina Jolie sound like the most depressing, least enticing part of an already dreary day.
"She's a married woman -- well, she's not married but she kinda is -- and I'm a married guy, so you just get on with it and do your job. And as usual, it's the least intimate moment of your day. I was probably more intimate with my makeup artist than I was with Angelina," insists the Glasgow-born McAvoy, who stars with Jolie in the graphic novel adaptation Wanted.
"There are technical demands and people watching you and you're usually more worried than enjoying the kiss because you just had the garlic pasta for lunch and maybe your breath stinks."
Seriously, somebody give him an Oscar already.
Still, even if the understated 29-year-old Atonement star managed to resist Jolie's sex appeal, he couldn't help but be swept up in her celebrity mystique. After all, he's only super-human in the movie.
"I'm an actor and I should know better, but you can't but help but be informed by the media about people you've never met. She's completely different from anything I expected. She's a nice lady. I've got a lot of respect for her."
Opening Friday, Wanted stars McAvoy as Welsey Gibson, a white collar office drone so utterly anonymous and unexceptional that a Google search of his name doesn't even elicit an entry. His bleak, heavily medicated life gets a sudden blow to the solar plexus, however, when Jolie's Fox -- a sultry, tattooed assassin -- introduces him to a heightened world in which near-mystical warriors work as "weapons of fate." Eventually he is, as McAvoy says, "made to look cooler than I could ever possibly be."
As directed by the Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch), the movie is ridiculous, stylish, hyper-violent and often hilarious. If it can survive the Hancocks and Wall*Es of the summer, it could prove a sleeper hit with hipsters and action aficionados alike, propelling McAvoy toward potential superstardom. It's something he's not thinking about -- or prepared for. Even the mention of a sequel doesn't so much excite as perplex him.
"It'd be nice if (the movie) had a life after all this, but it has to make some money first ... (Also) the fun of the movie is watching him change, so do you do another film when he's already there?"
McAvoy gives it some serious thought for a moment, concluding, "He's probably messed up psychologically. Maybe it's got somewhere darker to go, but I'm probably talking for the studio when I shouldn't be."
More than just be able to wield a weapon or lock lips with one of the world's most desired sex symbols, the role also demanded that McAvoy reshape his physique -- if only for one scene in which he appears shirtless.
"Going to the gym really isn't my bag," he says. "But there was a lot of that before the movie and I maintained that throughout the entire shoot ... But I was never Conan the Barbarian. There's no point to cast me then because that becomes something else. The strength of casting me is that you do look at the character and, hopefully, for the audience that instills some sense of dramatic tension -- 'Is that guy really going to do the things we've seen in the trailer?' It was also important for me that I didn't become one of those actors who at the first opportunity takes his shirt off to show his body. I was quite happy to go through the entire movie fully clothed."
In the end, he was satisfied just to be able to put pants on.
As he notes of the torso-baring scene, "There was no real reason to have any clothing on. The fact that I find a pair of jeans is stretching reality a little bit. But I was supposed to hug Terence Stamp and I so didn't want to do that naked."
kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca
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