{"id":379604,"date":"2026-04-03T07:37:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/379604\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T07:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:37:08","slug":"im-75-donegal-were-so-similar-yet-so-different-i-think-the-difference-is-independence-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/379604\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m 75% Donegal. We\u2019re so similar yet so different. I think the difference is independence\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

James McAvoy<\/a> blusters into the room with the same unpretentious energy I remember from 20 years ago. The agreeable Scottish<\/a> actor really has been on our screens for that long.<\/p>\n

I remember bumping into him at Cliveden House, the Buckinghamshire mansion where key incidents from the Profumo affair played out, as he helped launch The Chronicles of Narnia<\/a>: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe back in 2005.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a wild, wild ride,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cI actually had two experiences at Cliveden within a couple of years of coming down from a council estate in Glasgow. I did this Stephen Fry<\/a> film, Bright Young Things, about young, skint aristocracy. And he took us to Cliveden for three nights to just help us understand what it was like to be in that time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Things seem to have gone all right since then.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I have been having a nice time. It\u2019s been a good career. I\u2019m talking like it\u2019s over. Ha ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

Little chance of that. Possessed of a mischievous, sometimes subversive charm, McAvoy looks never to have been short of work. He broke through on telly with shows such as State of Play and Shameless. That extravagantly horned performance as Mr Tumnus in Narnia led on to a lead role opposite the Oscar-winning Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. He charmed in Atonement. He was the younger Professor Xavier in the X-Men films. He more recently played a kaleidoscope of personalities for M Night Shyamalan in Split and Glass.<\/p>\n

McAvoy is, perhaps, perfectly placed. He is a plausible leading man with enough eccentric grit to take on weirder character roles. If he will allow me to say so, he has grown comfortably into middle age.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I got to a point, maybe in my late 20s, maybe slightly earlier, where I felt like I\u2019d established a sort of handhold or a foothold in the business. Maybe two footholds. Maybe two handholds. But that doesn\u2019t mean, when you start trying to hang on for your entire life and your entire career, that you don\u2019t need to find new handholds. Right? There is always uncertainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which brings us neatly to his first feature as director. A new foothold, perhaps? California Schemin\u2019 tells the unlikely but true story of two Dundee lads who, constantly rejected when rapping in their own accents, eventually secured a record deal by pretending to be Americans. Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, performing as Silibil N\u2019 Brains, somehow managed to keep the act up for three years. What did the duo make of McAvoy\u2019s film?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019re actually fairly sympathetic to them in the film,\u201d he says. \u201cI think they\u2019re really happy with it and really proud of it. I\u2019ve watched them laugh watching it. I\u2019ve watched them cry watching it. I wouldn\u2019t speak for them, but I think they are satisfied. I\u2019m sure they get quibbles because we had to take licence. We\u2019re there to tell a story. We\u2019re not there to serve them as people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid all the larks, the film does have something serious to say about how others perceive Scottish people and how Scots perceive themselves. McAvoy finds prominent space for a mural quoting a famous line from Trainspotting: \u201cIt\u2019s s**te being Scottish.\u201d There is a sense that nobody will take the boys seriously unless they ape another less wind-blasted nationality. Did McAvoy have experience of that when starting out?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sound that comes out of our mouth seems to make people go \u2018Ahhhh!\u2019 sometimes,\u201d he says. \u201cNot all the time. I wouldn\u2019t even say it\u2019s the majority of my experience, but it is a significant percentage of my experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody not being able to understand is not their fault. I\u2019ve got no problem with somebody saying, \u2018I\u2019m so sorry, I don\u2019t understand what you\u2019re saying.\u2019 That is a completely acceptable reaction, as opposed to, \u2018Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God! What is that?\u2019 Something about porridge. Something about cabers. \u2018Have you seen Braveheart\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n

That sounds familiar. Something about leprechauns. Something about four-leaved clovers. Have you seen The Quiet Man?<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how it is in Ireland, but in the UK, outside of the main hubs in the south or the main narrative areas that are welcomed in the American industry, regionality is not embraced. It\u2019s not just a Scottish problem. It is a UK problem as well. <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe it\u2019s slightly different in Ireland because Ireland has its own government, has its own finance, has its own cultural output that serves itself. But in Scotland, like many parts of the UK, we are underrepresented.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JamesJames McAvoy in California Schemin’ <\/p>\n

He seems to have walked himself into an inevitable, possibly difficult question about the thorniest issue in Scottish politics. You could read his answer above as an implicit argument for independence. I can understand if he doesn\u2019t want to answer. That is an easy way to get into trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that I think I\u2019ll get in trouble,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just that I think that I\u2019m, professionally speaking, apolitical. Right? I think I\u2019m a storyteller. If I want to tell a story about independence I\u2019ll make a film about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s also a talker. After a bit of humming and hawing, he launches himself into the maelstrom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen speaking to somebody who is of Celtic extraction, somebody who, in particular, is Irish, there are so many similarities with Scottish people, even more so west-of-Scotland people. Not all of us, but with myself anyway. I am pretty much 75 per cent f**king Donegal. We\u2019re so similar, and yet we\u2019re so different. And I think the difference is independence. I\u2019m trying to phrase this in a way that isn\u2019t going to become the headline and just sounds negative. Ha ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

He makes a few more qualifications.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0‘Inside I’m Dancing’ wins Audience Award at Edinburgh film festivalOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout weighing in too heavily on independence and having a political opinion, I think there is something to explore culturally in the independence topic for my nation. There are many things to explore in my nation culturally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Make of that what you will.<\/p>\n

McAvoy was born in 1979 to working-class parents. His parents split up when he was young, and he ended up living with grandparents in the Drumchapel quarter of northwest Glasgow. <\/p>\n

He briefly considered becoming a priest before an encounter with David Hayman led to a role in The Near Room, that tireless Glaswegian actor and director\u2019s 1995 film. McAvoy tells me he had never been in an acting group. He had never done youth theatre. He didn\u2019t know anyone in his neighbourhood who had acted. Nonetheless, he made it to what is now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and, following graduation, was thrown straight into work.<\/p>\n

Looking at that list, I don\u2019t see any obvious big breaks. He attracted attention opposite David Morrissey and Kelly Macdonald in the excellent BBC drama State of Play. He won acclaim as a man with cerebral palsy in Damien O\u2019Donnell\u2019s Irish drama Inside I\u2019m Dancing, from 2004. By the mid-2000s he looked to be with us for the duration.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, I feel there are a lot of actors who go straight from zero to 90,\u201d he says. \u201cI worked with a lot of them in my 20s. But it wasn\u2019t like I had to wait until I was 35 to suddenly get a place in the industry. I remember feeling like I was allowed to work a lot, between 20 and 25, without being the poster-person on whom it all rested. So if it didn\u2019t succeed, you weren\u2019t f**ked. That didn\u2019t happen to me. I got to play interesting, small roles: playing a guy with f**king horns. Ha ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

Playing the \u201cguy with f**king horns\u201d in Narnia was a handy earner, but the move up to Professor X in X-Men: First Class placed him among blockbuster aristocracy. We think of those colossal projects as being in a whole different medium from independent film. You are part of a vast army, a sprawling nation, a mighty species.<\/p>\n

\"JamesJames McAvoy and Patrick Stewart in the 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past. Photograph: Alan Markfield\/Marvel\/Twentieth Century Fox <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you take away the machine of it, which is four and a half months or six months, as opposed to four and a half weeks or six weeks, you\u2019ve got more time between takes, because there\u2019s big set-ups and you\u2019ve got a whole technical train, as opposed to a guy with a camera on his shoulder,\u201d McAvoy says. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s actually the same stuff. It\u2019s actually the same thing. When the scripts aren\u2019t good, and when it feels like there\u2019s more money than storytelling, then it can be really tricky. But otherwise I\u2019ve had really good experiences of what you\u2019d call bigger films.\u201d<\/p>\n

McAvoy, who was married to his fellow actor Anne-Marie Duff from 2006 until 2016, now lives with his wife, Lisa Liberati, assistant to M Night Shyamalan on Split, in London and (less often) her home city of Philadelphia. <\/p>\n

It hardly needs to be said that he remains a supporter of Celtic FC and an unreconstructed Scot. Not a syllable of his accent sounds altered. Like so many actors, McAvoy long harboured a desire to get to the other side of the camera and take control of his own destiny \u2013 he plays a ruthless record executive in California Schemin\u2019 \u2013 but it has taken longer than he might have hoped. Maybe a quarter of a century.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Anne-Marie Duff: \u2018I have the second half of my life to go. So, what am I going to fill that f**ker with?\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been a lucky-bastard actor who has had nice offers of acting work for which you get paid a lot more than being a first-time director,\u201d he says with impressive honesty. \u201cI felt a strong impulse to do it in my 20s, and I worked with a lot of first-time directors who were brand new at it and not very good. And I thought, \u2018Oh, no. I know how to do this.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd learning things from other people\u2019s mistakes is not as positive an outcome as it is trying to unpick the magic of masters that you can\u2019t even f**king recognise. As soon as I started to work with some really good people I realised magical stuff was happening and I couldn\u2019t f**king see how. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people are doing beautiful art it\u2019s very hard. Sometimes you\u2019re going, \u2018I don\u2019t even see how you\u2019re doing this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyhow, McAvoy worked it out and delivered an enjoyable flick that premiered noisily at Toronto International Film Festival in 2025. Life ticks along. He has two sons, one from either marriage. He has another two films coming out this year. If he is not comfortable with his lot then he is doing a very good impersonation of seeming so. But he accepts this profession is hard to predict.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do feel like I\u2019m all right,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t do 30 years in the business if you don\u2019t make peace with the fact that you don\u2019t know what\u2019s next. Well, you might last 30 years, but you\u2019ll be a f**king nervous wreck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sage advice.<\/p>\n

California Schemin\u2019 is in cinemas from Friday, April 10th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James McAvoy blusters into the room with the same unpretentious energy I remember from 20 years ago. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379605,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[169617,1485,93,61,60,4965,169616,9036,37146],"class_list":{"0":"post-379604","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-anne-marie-duff","9":"tag-donegal","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-james-mcavoy","14":"tag-kelly-macdonald","15":"tag-scotland","16":"tag-stephen-fry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}