Craig McLean
James McAvoy is going cold turkey. We've snuck out the back of a café near his home in Crouch End into the deserted outdoor eating area, the better to indulge - but now the actor is denying himself. As I throw caution and health to the wind, he's hungrily eyeing me, battling his addictions.
"I'm off the bread," he reveals, "and I do feel better actually. I hit 30 and I thought, 'Wait a minute, I need to slow down a bit here…'"
That birthday milestone, plus the birth of his first son, have made the Glasgow-born star of Atonement take stock. He wasn't losing the pounds as quickly as he used to. This sweary, down-to-earth, proudly un-Hollywood A-lister won't be doing anything about his incoming white hairs and is forever asking make-up ladies to refrain from plucking his increasingly bushy eyebrows ("They're gonna be my f*****g passport to playing wizards in my Seventies!"). However, the 32-year-old does not love his girth. So, it's out with the bread.
"But, you know, I still crave. I'm looking at that roll going, 'Ooh'," he smiles, gawping at my individually baked, courgette-flecked bun - this stoutly middle-class 'hood is, after all, north London actor domicile central, so it's all posh artisan bakery products around these parts.
McAvoy, his actor wife Anne-Marie Duff and 18-month-old baby Brendan are regulars in the local Waitrose.
He's currently filming Trance with Danny Boyle. "Danny has incredible energy," he marvels of the shock-headed Slumdog Millionaire auteur and artistic director of the Olympics 2012 opening ceremony. "It's quite something to behold. He drinks a lot of coffee and he's about four feet taller when his hair's standing up. He's working on the Olympics Thursday and Friday and doing our film the rest of the time."
The schedule (a regular five-day week is family-friendly for the new dad), the locations (mostly London) and the budget (modest) suit low-key McAvoy. It's not always thus for in-demand actors.
We talk about Duff's role in the Old Vic's revival of Terence Rattigan's Cause Célèbre. His 41-year-old wife missed out on a nomination in this month's Evening Standard Theatre Awards but she was widely praised for her performance.
He admits that making X-Men: First Class, his well-received summer blockbuster comic-book prequel, was tough. "It was a really gruelling shoot. Six, seven months of indecision and not knowing what we were doing…" But was doing a play night after night even more tiring for his wife - not least because there was a baby needing Mummy?
"Definitely. I think doing plays is always knackering," he says firmly, recalling his last time on the London stage, in 2009's Three Days of Rain. "But especially when you're playing a part as emotionally taxing and dextrous as Alma in that play. And Anne-Marie was rarely off stage.
But one of the strengths of her work is that when she goes through something, she goes through it and she doesn't hold back.
"Danny said something to me the other day - we pay to see actors cry and go through stuff. Not just dramatic feats of action and derring-do but stuff that we wouldn't let ourselves do. We rarely cry or kiss our partner or devote the time and attention it takes to understand some of the things we're going through.
"But we pay to see actors f***in' go through it," he adds forcefully.
"I think Ann-Marie's always done that, and she manages to do it without taking up too much emotional space. I don't know how she does it," he concludes with an awestruck and, you might say, lovestruck shake of the head.
Diet, baby, blockbuster movie, chat about the missus - in every sense it's a long way from the last time I met McAvoy. That was in summer 2008.
He was in Germany filming The Last Station, a low-budget film about the final days of Leo Tolstoy. Duff was also in the film, the first time they'd worked together since meeting on the set of the Channel 4 series Shameless in 2004.
That night McAvoy smoked cigarettes like they were good for you and sank a few beers. He politely but firmly batted away any questions about Duff. The couple were sticking to their "no personal questions" line. When asked how it was to be acting together again, he shot back a pursed-lipped: "Fine. We didn't have much to do with each other."
Yet three years on, McAvoy is more relaxed. He's still no red-carpet regular, ducks the celebrity hoopla wherever possible and remains a plain-speaking, media-shy purist. We've met ostensibly to discuss his lead voice role in Arthur Christmas, the hilarious new family film from Aardman Animations, but even then he's doing barely any promotion for the film, and certainly no glossy magazine interviews. But age and experience - he's worked with everyone from Angelina Jolie (on 2008 action flick Wanted) to Robert Redford (on this year's The Conspirator) - have mellowed him. And the arrival of baby Brendan has helped McAvoy recalibrate, work out what it's worth getting stressed about.
"I've become much more practical," he says of his post-birth rejig. "And more efficient. But your world narrows, and the things you devote your new-found efficiency to are less… There are less things that you give a shit about.
"But the work that I do as well - and both of us do," he adds of Duff, "is so… I dunno man, the amount of time you spend doing it is unbelievable." What he is trying to say is that the McAvoy-Duffs both work in a profession that is generally anti-social and anti-family.
"We do," he nods, "we've really both got that going on. And it does make it difficult. The hours you work are incredible. But beyond that as well, Anne-Marie and I both seem to get the kind of jobs where you put yourself through the wringer. X-Men wasn't really like that - that was quite nice and chilled out. I just got to float about saying lines that Professor X thought were slightly humorous. But generally the work we get is quite emotionally demanding.
"So it is a hard thing. But," he smiles, "it's just the way it is, man. We're both quite proud of that as well. It's that thing that Danny said: you wanna see actors go through it. And I think we're both into going through it, ha ha!"
Arthur Christmas, he acknowledges, didn't demand too much: 15 voice- recording sessions over two years, some in the company of heroes and friends Bill Nighy (playing Grandfather Christmas) and Jim Broadbent (Father Christmas). He says he based his Arthur - second in line to the family Christmas throne - in part on Prince Harry. So does that mean Arthur gets hammered down a Chelsea nightclub?
"Unfortunately not," McAvoy laughs. "I think he's a more innocent Harry," he says with a twinkle, before adding: "I think I'd love Harry. He's a proper, man. He's like, 'I'm never gonna be the king, it's cool…'"
In his next film, Filth, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel, he has been asked to lose weight à la Christian Bale. 'I was like, "Aw, must I? Can't I just act it, darling?'" he laughs in his best Larry Olivier accent. "We start filming mid-January. Christmas is gonna be a f*****g nightmare, isn't it?"
The London Evening Standard
Arthur Christmas opens tomorrow
Nighy
