{"id":552217,"date":"2026-07-16T06:38:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T06:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/552217\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T06:38:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T06:38:09","slug":"anya-taylor-joy-is-grateful-james-mcavoy-replaced-method-actor-in-split","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/552217\/","title":{"rendered":"Anya Taylor-Joy Is Grateful James McAvoy Replaced ‘Method Actor’ in ‘Split’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anya Taylor-Joy confessed she was \u201cgrateful\u201d James McAvoy ended up her co-star in 2016\u2019s \u201cSplit\u201d over an unnamed \u201cmethod actor,\u201d suggesting it \u201cwould have been a different experience\u201d otherwise.<\/p>\n

In a Wednesday interview with Hits Radio\u2019s Olivia Marks, the actress reflected on M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s psychological thriller, in which she played a teen girl kidnapped by a man, named Kevin Wendell Crumb, struggling with dissociative identity disorder. While McAvoy\u2019s take on the antagonist received widespread acclaim, Taylor-Joy recalled that he wasn\u2019t originally intended to be in the movie.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so grateful it\u00a0was him, because originally it was supposed to be someone that\u2019s very known for being a method\u00a0actor,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd if I had been in Philadelphia with a method actor whose intention was to eat me, I\u00a0think that would have been a different experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Taylor-Joy went on, she praised McAvoy for being mindful of his young co-stars, which also included Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI was very grateful\u00a0to have James, who I think also understood that he had three young women with him,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd so, every\u00a0time after a take, he would just make it a little bit lighter and was very supportive and just a general great guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watch Taylor-Joy\u2019s comments below.<\/p>\n

Though Taylor-Joy didn\u2019t name her originally intended co-star, one might assume she was referring to Joaquin Phoenix, who reportedly backed out of the project mere weeks before filming began.<\/p>\n

McAvoy commented on replacing Phoenix in a 2024 episode of the \u201cHappy Sad Confused<\/a>\u201d podcast, where he praised the Oscar winner as \u201can amazing actor\u201d and noted he probably would\u2019ve given \u201ca very different performance.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes coming in last minute is the best way,\u201d he added at the time. \u201cI think he ditched it two weeks before they started shooting. It was really last minute. I had a couple of weeks [to prep]. Two weeks. The script was well put together so a lot of it was clear what I wanted to do straight away. A couple characters took a little longer to find. Patricia came quick. Hedwig took awhile.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSplit\u201d marked the second installment in Shyamalan\u2019s \u201cUnbreakable\u201d trilogy, which saw McAvoy reprise his Kevin Wendell Crumb character in 2019\u2019s \u201cGlass.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Tom\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anya Taylor-Joy confessed she was \u201cgrateful\u201d James McAvoy ended up her co-star in 2016\u2019s \u201cSplit\u201d over an unnamed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":552218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[7208,321,93,61,60,4965,6190,38795],"class_list":["post-552217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-anya-taylor-joy","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-james-mcavoy","tag-joaquin-phoenix","tag-split"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552217","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=552217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/552218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}