James McAvoy and his wife, Anne-Marie Duff

Actor James McAvoy can play the Glasgow hardman or the cerebral thespian. Our correspondent enjoys meeting both

by Hugo Rifkind

Two things you should know about James McAvoy. He’s very clever, and he’s very, very Glaswegian. It makes him simultaneously loquacious and profane, and you can’t help but be reminded, much of the time, of the sort of surprisingly erudite mentalist you will sometimes find yourself next to on the nightbus.

“Dae ye want us tae f*** off?” he’ll offer cheerily when somebody wanders into the little office where we are having our chat. And then, once they are gone, he’s back enthusing about the “exacting f***in’ discipline” of theatre, as opposed to the “regulated serendipity of the film set”. It’s the sort of conversation with which I am fairly familiar, but not when I’m sober, and not at 9.15 on Thursday morning. It’s fun.

“When I first moved down to London,” he admits, “nine years ago or whatever, people really couldn’t understand me a lot of the time.” As he rarely played a Scot on screen, many found this surprising. He used to find it baffling when casting directors would ask him to sound Scottish, but less Scottish, so that people could figure out what he was saying.

“Casting directors are all, ‘Oh, Scottish accents are so hard to understand, they’re so impenetrable,’ ” he says, going a bit Morningside. “And well, maybe the reason they’re so f***ing impenetrable is because you keep making them so understandable. Know what I mean?”

Aye, James, I do. McAvoy is 29. Best known, recently, for The Last King of Scotland (2006), Starter For Ten (2006), Atonement (2007) and Wanted (2008), he is a rare example of somebody who has navigated the tricky waters between “next big thing” and “established talent” without picking up either a huge, defining, Oscar-nominated role, or an air of missed opportunity.

Now he is back in the UK, to appear in the West End. We meet in a rehearsal room, near King’s Cross. He’s come in on his scooter. What sort of Hollywood star do you find in King’s Cross at 9.15am on a Thursday?

“One who doesn’t live in Hollywood?” suggests McAvoy. “One who lives in North London?” As of next month, he will be appearing in Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, at the Apollo Theatre. The play has some showbiz pedigree having, in its Broadway incarnation, starred Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd (Phoebe’s bloke off Friends). For all that, it is hardly throwaway fluff.

It concerns three childhood friends, who meet in a Manhattan loft to divide up the contents of a will. Thereafter, the action jumps back to the 1960s, where their architect fathers plot and tussle over their emerging careers. It’s a richly written, word-heavy drama, and it was once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. McAvoy appears with Lyndsey Marshal (best known for playing Cleo-patra in Rome) and Nigel Harman (best known, poor lad, for EastEnders).

“It’s f***ing great,” says McAvoy. “The more you go into it, the more you realise how much work he [Greenberg] has done on it. Everything is relevant. Nothing is just . . . ‘That seems right, until we get to the next bit.’ And the characters! I mean, they’re not the kind of people you’d like to spend dinner with, maybe. But in a theatrical environment they’re definitely the kind of people you’d like to look at. ‘F***ing hell, should we feed them? Or should we, you know, go and see the penguins?’ ”

And why now? Why do a play at all? There’s no scheme behind it, he says, no five-year progress plan. It was just what he fancied doing. “My agent always says to me, ‘What do you want to do next?’ And I says what I tend to say to journalists, which must be hugely infuriating, which is ‘good work’. And they’re like, ‘I’m not a journalist, tell me the f***ing truth.’ And I go, ‘Aaaaaah, I really mean it!’ And they go, ‘For f***’s sake’. And then they go, ‘Look, you’ve attained this level of success’ and I go ‘But it might not be here for ever!’ and they go ‘f***ing shut up.’ ”

For somebody who has played leading man to Angelina Jolie, Keira Knightley, Anne Hathaway, Christina Ricci and Kerry Washington, he is studiously humble about all this. There is no Team McAvoy, and no five-year career plan.

“Maybe it will be like that one day,” he says. “I don’t see it coming. I can’t really live with that. And yeah, I suppose that’s partly why I’m doing a bloody play, as well.”

When you interview somebody, you throw out questions, and you watch the way they bat them back, trying to peek around the edges for a glimpse of soul. With James McAvoy, it’s hard. You don’t notice it at first, because he has so many good lines (I’m still in awe of the one about the penguins) but he treats himself as an entirely professional entity. Ask him if he’s ever thought about throwing himself wholeheartedly into the life of the Hollywood male (in the manner, say, of Colin Farrell) and it’s not surprising that he says no. It’s just a bit surprising how.

“My private life is precious,” is how he puts it. “Much as it has probably suffered due to my work. So I wouldn’t be able to just abandon my life outside of work, here, to just go and make my entire life about work in another country.” You see what I mean? Obviously, you don’t expect him to say “Yes! God yes! I’d love to move abroad and just be a shagger!” Still, I asked a question that wasn’t about work, and he answered it as though it was. He does this a lot.

McAvoy moved from Port Glasgow (which isn’t in Glasgow) to Drumchapel (which is) to live with his grandparents when he was 7 after his parents split up. The tabloids dig out his Glaswegian roofer father – to whom he does not speak – whenever he has a new film out. He first wanted to act, he says, when the actor David Hayman came to give a talk at his school. Other kids mocked his actorly ways, not McAvoy.

“I’d seen him in A Sense of Freedom,” he says, “because my grandma had it on video. And we were doing work placement at the time, and I got a bank in Drumchapel which I knew was going to be either mind-numbingly boring or intensely difficult. So I just said, ‘Look. is there any chance of getting a placement with you?’

To which he said, ‘I’m not making a film at the moment.’ ” Six months later Hayman was making The Near Room (1995) and called McAvoy’s school to offer him an audition. “It was really jammy,” says McAvoy. “Most important encounter of my life, in terms of where I’m sitting right now. I’d never thought about acting. Not at all.”

After The Near Room, he went to youth theatre, landed a role as an accomplice in The Bill, and “a cough and a spit” in Regeneration (1997), the First World War film starring Jonathan Pryce. “I’m on the poster,” he says, “in silhouette. That’s me. Fifty quid.” Thereafter, things ticked along quite respectably – a little spot in Band of Brothers (2001), another in White Teeth (2002) – and then a flutter above the parapets with a decent role in Bright Young Things (2003). There was State of Play (2003) and Inside I’m Dancing (2004), and by then his face would ring a bell, even if you weren’t entirely sure why. Then came Shameless on Channel 4.

McAvoy played the car thief Steve in Paul Abbot’s Manchester grit-fest for the first couple of series. Even now, he doesn’t get recognised as much as he did back then. “You’re in people’s houses,” he says. “Once a week. They get to see you develop. Time passes, and they think about it. ‘Hey you got a haircut!’ ” Shameless fans, also, were perhaps not like other fans.

“The amount of people who’d go, ‘That’s my da, that is!’ or ‘See that character! That’s me! That’s my brother, that is!’ And it’s like . . . really? Jesus.”

His on-screen girlfriend in Shameless was the actress Anne-Marie Duff, and the pair married for real in 2006. In interviews the relationship is invariably off-limits. “Totally off the agenda,” he says, calmly enough, even though I’m only asking what it was like working with her in The Last Station, a Tolstoy biopic out this year.

It’s striking, as well, that she doesn’t turn up in conversation. In fact, almost nobody does. He mentions his grandmother, and at one point he chuckles about his grandfather calling him up after some tabloid had falsely linked him to the role of 007 (“Hi? Are youse doin’ Basildon Bond?”). That’s pretty much it.

As a professional entity, he’ll lay himself out for you on a plate, doubts and insecurities and all. He frets about keeping his career momentum going. He wonders why nobody bothered asking Angelina Jolie what it was like for her to kiss him.He jokes that the (false) rumour that he was going to play Scotty in Star Trek began because he is a) Scottish and b) cheaper than Ewan McGregor. And yet, as a human, with a life and a wife, and friends, he gives you nothing at all.

“I appreciate what you’re saying,” he concedes, sounding a wee smidge embarrassed when I accuse him of caginess. “Yes.

There’s probably an element of that. You do end up protecting yourself,” he says. “The slightest wee thing comes out and you’re like, oh f*** . . . I dunno. I think I’ve done all right, in keeping myself noninvasive into people’s lives.”

It’s a slightly odd thing to say, that last bit, and I chase it. “Look, I understand why you have to do interviews,” he says, “It’s the West End, we need to get bums on seats, and all that. But part of me that’s like, wait a minute, it’s DVD extras. You know? And, there comes a point where, you just can’t watch an actor without . . . I just know so much about them. So how can I accept them in a role? There are just some people . . . they’re not actors to me. They’re chip paper. Just . . . glossy paper.”

If he’s invited somewhere, he says, and its only happening because of the success that’s happening at that moment, he’ ll try really hard not to accept. “If I’m in a film, or a telly, or a play, then why should people come and see it? Because you know, they can just pick up some f***in’ rubbish magazine, and see me in that.”

In other words, he’s saying he doesn’t talk about his private life because he’s afraid that doing so might damage his professional life. And I think he means it. I’m not sure if that’s startlingly touching, or brutally mercenary. Either way, it sounds like soul to me.