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James McAvoy on Atonement
By Fred Topel | Image property of Focus Features.
Atonement
McAvoy Talks Atonement
"I don’t know if anybody’s ever ready for another award season," he said. "It’s kind of like Christmas. It seems to get earlier and earlier every year and I’m ready for whatever happens. If it gets a lot of nominations, fantastic. If it doesn’t get any, then I hope we wouldn’t be any less proud of the experience we’ve had. I know we’re all very proud of this film."
Based on the Ian McEwan novel, McAvoy has the juicy role of Robbie Turner. Sent to prison, and later war, based on a false accusation, Robbie is separated from his lover Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley).
"His angelic kind of character was something I didn’t identify with because I’m not an angel. I kind of found him difficult to recognize as a member of society and therefore play him truthfully because he was so good. It wasn’t until I really kind of accepted the potential that someone like that could exist and I started kind of identifying with the character and falling in love with the character, and that took about a week of rehearsals of me playing it quite badly I felt. That was one of the biggest challenges also to play someone so good, what he is as an actor is he’s not going to be interesting enough so you keep trying to make him more interesting and that’s when you kind of fuck up because human beings are interesting and bad acting is people trying to make them more interesting, you know. That’s one example of bad acting anyway and that was something I had to watch I didn’t fall into doing."
Robbie does have a naughty side, which is part of what leads to the misunderstanding. Typing up a dirty love letter humanized Robbie. "I don’t think that’s dirty though. I think we’ve all got that. I think the best thing in the world is the fantasies of doing things like that, so I don’t see that as anything that taints him in any way. I think that makes him more human. It makes him more like us, but I know what you mean. I think the letter that he writes to her is shocking but it’s not bad. It’s not untrue and it comes from a desire to communicate love and that’s a good thing. At least he has a d*ick, you know what I mean? Saints apparently don’t have appendages."
The challenges did not end with establishing the character. As life's hardships wear on, the lovers' reunion proved to be a major scene too. "The scene in the tea room where they see each other for the first time in six years, that was incredibly difficult. Also the scene where we lambaste middle Briony and we really give her a tailing. That was quite difficult actually because we could have gone further or I could have gone further but you don’t want to take up all the emotional space. You want to leave some of the emotional space for the audience to feel something. If you’re just standing on stage crying the whole time, you know the audience kind of just goes f*ck. Actually that was the same thing with the big Dunkirk tracking sequence, the big five minute short. Very easy to get carried away with the emotion of the recreation, the evocative nature of something like that is very easy to get carried away with. It would have been wrong for the actors to get carried away with that, I think because soldiers at that time in the middle of that experience some of them would be but not all of them would be crying their eyes out and all that kind of stuff and then it was quite hard as an actor to not to feel the loss, to feel the pain, to feel the waste of what happened on those beaches in 1940-1941. It was just incredible for me. It was just about holding back and being a bit like a soldier in one way and going 'This is war. This is madness,' but at the same time going, 'This is my job as well' and somehow holding back that distance from your character."
Atonement is now playing.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Focus Features.
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