James McAvoy is "Wanted"!

Ah, that dreamy Scot James McAvoy of the huge acting talent and big blue eyes. We know him as a college guy looking for love in Starter for Ten. He was a lovable goat-boy in the first "Narnia" film, came to Christina Ricci's rescue as her true love in Penelope and swept Keira Knightley off her feet in Atonement. Well, get ready for a whole new McAvoy! In the actioner Wanted, he plays an uber-nerd in an office cubicle turned super killing machine alongside Angelina Jolie in full butt-kicking fury! [Warning: This film is R-rated for strong violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexuality].

We're used to seeing the actor in spiffy suits with tie. When we chatted with Jim, this time, he was joyful to be wearing a casual/cute leather jacket over a black and white tiny stripe Polo shirt and dark jeans. McAvoy entered our interview room and promptly dropped his cellphone on the marble floor, smashing it into several pieces! There might have been some expletives uttered but we won't report those! Yikes! Let's just ask about his look, his film and what's up in future for this red-hot, ultra-talented cutie. Picture that sexy Scottish accent which he can turn off and on at will.....

TeenHollywood: Sorry about that! Hey, you've got your hot hitman look going on with the leather jacket.

James: Hey, I have worn leather jackets in the past. Do you know what? I'm just so pleased to be publicizing a film that doesn't require me to wear a suit 24 hours a day seven days a week. Because generally, the films that I've been publicizing over the last two years have been very serious and that's great and I love them, but I hate wearing suits. So that's the reason I did this film, so I could stop wearing suits.

TeenHollywood: Okay, let's get this out of the way. How was working with Angelina and having a kissing scene with her?

James: [smiling] It's great! She's cool. I was quite nervous when I got told that she was in the film because I was cast before anybody else. Then I got told Morgan [Freeman] was going to be in it and I was quite shocked and stunned and 'wow'. Then I was told Angelina was going to be in it and I thought, 'F*ck, man, I really didn't think it was going to be that big'. So I was quite nervous but within five, ten minutes, you quickly realize that she's cool and chilled out and fairly willing to have a laugh at her own expense or wherever else there's a joke.

TeenHollywood: She's done quite of few of these kick butt actioners. Did she give you any advice?

James: She was the one that, more so than anybody else probably, showed me the way to do these films. There's probably a part of me that was worried because I was in a new environment. But she was the one that kind of just reminded me, 'You know, you don't have to take it too seriously. We're not changing people's lives with a film like this. If you can't have fun when you make a film like this, what's the point in doing it?' And it was a really good point and that kind of kept me chilled out for the rest of the time after that. And she's got a great stunt double called Eunice Huthart who could rip my head off really. She's smaller than me but she could kick seven colors of sh*t out of me easily, and she's one of the funniest ladies in the planet. She's just so nice. So we had a good time, really, really good time.

TeenHollywood: Were you worried about how this film would turn out? I mean you aren't the first actor people think of for doing an intense action role.

James: Yeah, I think I was probably [worried]. I did think, 'I can't do an action film.' Partly because of my own doubts about my appropriateness for the role. I thought I was probably bad casting for it but I also thought, 'I like action movies when they're good but when they're bad they're such a waste of time'. The thing that saved this one for me; first of all, the fact that they were willing to cast somebody like me was interesting.

TeenHollywood: And the director Timur Bekmambetov was really only famous for the scary films Night Watch and Day Watch in Russia!

James: Yeah. He's making vampire films in the past. I've seen lots of vampire films but he made them very different. I thought, 'well, he's going to be interesting'. And also the fact that they weren't making this movie for all the family. There are superhero movies that are incredibly violent actually, but they're just filmed in a kind of slightly sanitized way. Like 'Indiana Jones'. Ants crawling inside somebody's body and eating them from the inside, that's incredibly disturbing but done in a kinda slightly cutesy way so you can give it to 12-year-olds. This was never going to be like that and I thought, well, this is all quite cool and different. And even if it fails horribly, it was still trying to be something else.

TeenHollywood: Fans should know that most films are not shot in the order they appear in theaters but all out of sequence. Sooo, one day you are office geek, next you are macho dude. Was that difficult for you?

James: Kind of, yeah. Also because I'd never done a film that took four and a half months to film. When you spread it out over four months, there's even more opportunity for it to become disparate and become disjointed. Sometimes you make an ass of yourself because you question the [producers and director] on everything, but sometimes you save stuff that could have gone really badly and really screw up your character's arc. And the story of the character and his metamorphosis and why he changes is really what underpins I suppose the whole film and makes it something more than just action. So it was really important that we got that right.

TeenHollywood: And you went in and out of American accent between shooting your scenes. Is that easy?

James: It is but there's a couple of words that I found hard. 'Girlfriend' I found quite hard. Other than that, it was fine. I've got a voice coach that I use when I do American accents. She works with me. She worked with everybody on Band of Brothers but she also did Penelope with me as well. She wasn't available for this but she's so good, I just couldn't imagine working with anybody else, so I didn't. I just thought I'd wing it. It worked out all right in the end but the one word that I had to fix in looping was 'girlfriend'[sounds good to us when he says it].

TeenHollywood: You look pretty buff in this film. Was it a challenge working out for the role?

James: I'm glad I did it. There were times where I just wanted to stop and do something else. But I had a great trainer called Glen Chapman who was a proper drill sergeant for me. Nice guy but he made me do things that I didn't want to do and he made me sick quite a lot. And it's good though. They wanted their action hero to be a bit more buff and all that, but I wouldn't have got through four and a half months had I not been fitter and more healthy and in better shape than I usually am. I think I was capable of doing all the things in the film but not consistently with the high level intensity being sustained over four and a half months. Every day was like a 12, 13, maybe 14 hour day and a lot of it was taken up with stunts. That was quite grueling so I needed to be in better shape.

TeenHollywood: The stunts and action are amazing. What was the most difficult stunt for you? We understand that you insisted on doing a lot of the stuntwork yourself.

James: There was a lot of wire stuff that ended up getting cut from the film. The whole ending of the film was different. There was a sequence where Morgan [Freeman] and I fall through like four levels of a building that is blowing up as we fall through the levels, fighting each other. That was four days on wires in a harness having your groin ruptured and that's never fun. That was probably the most grueling thing, and then to find out that it has been cut out of the film. 'Yeah, yeah, it didn't work, wasn't very good. It was really boring.' You're like, 'what'? 'Yeah, we're reshooting it. We're doing this scene that takes like 20 minutes to film. That will end the film.' 'What? Is there going to be a harness'? 'No'. 'All right' [he laughs]. But, I did a lot of my own stunts, probably 50 or 60% of my own stunts.

TeenHollywood: Did you get hurt?

James: I was really lucky. I never broke a single thing. I had a couple of sprains and a couple of twisted knees and ankles and stuff but nothing more than I'd get playing football. I got lots of bruises. I was bruised to hell all over but yeah, I was fine. Some of my favorite fight scenes were where Angelina was beating me up.

TeenHollywood: Was there a stunt you were kind of afraid to do?

James: Jumping on the bonnet [hood] of the car but that also was the most enjoyable. There's a car coming along at 30 miles an hour and I kind of rendezvous with it in the middle of the road and jump on the bonnet and then it hits the breaks and I go flying off, and another car smashes into the back. That was all real! No wires, no mats. I was padded up but that was all real. I can't believe they let me do that because they wouldn't let me jump through a pane of sugar glass window which would scratch my face at most but they'd let me jump on a moving vehicle. I just thought I'd give it a bash. But then just before they'd say action, you are kind of like, 'I can't believe they're letting me do this. I'm slightly terrified now.'

TeenHollywood: When you shoot a gun the bullet travels like...forever. Was there a backstory as to how you could shoot so far?

James: There was no science in it. It's completely science fiction. I was dubious about that one as well but we have bullets that separate like shuttles. I was sold after I saw that. I prefer the fight scenes to the gunfights actually. If you've got a gun, there's no drama in it. There's nothing better than seeing two people physically touch each other. That's great fun. A gun's like pyow pyow!. [indicating a gun with his hand and he's ducking and shooting at me] I'm behind this table and you're behind that wall. 'Pyow pyow'. How exciting! [I laugh].

TeenHollywood: You must have enjoyed getting to change from a sweet, very nerdy office worker who has panic attacks into super-assassin, right?

James: [beams] I love doing that. I felt that the character arc and his journey provided a lot of drama in this as well. I didn't feel like it was just a genre movie. I didn't feel it was just a comic book movie. I felt there was a sufficiently interesting character and someone in a very truthful and actually quite sad place to begin with in the film. So it was scenes like that that made me think,' well, I think the actor in me is not going to be unemployed for four and a half months while I do action'. I did feel that there was enough to do there to satisfy my acting urge as well. And all the panic attack stuff I loved. Doing anything that's emotionally instigated but physically manifested is just really, really interesting I think. I love really physicalizing. Even playing Mr. Tumnus in 'Narnia' was such a physical role even though I wasn't doing stunts, it's still incredibly physical.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever have a mundane job you hated like your character who is in office cubicle hell?

James: I had a very mundane job. I don't know if I hated it. There were nice people working there and stuff. I worked as a baker for two years. I was a training confectioner, so the guy standing beside me who was the grand master confectioner, he would in a very kind of Zen fashion make big wedding cakes and birthday cakes and things like that. I'd happily jam my sponge then cream a thing. I did that and that was like a conveyor belt of cream cakes and jam cakes. It was very banal.

TeenHollywood: So you could identify with your character's boredom and frustration with his job?

James: Yeah, I totally can identify. He's a proper sufferer of postmodern depression and apathy. I think that's a condition that's all too evident amongst young men and women. They can't bring themselves to smile or feel better about their horrible existence and I thought that was quite an interesting place for your everyman to start from.

TeenHollywood: Had you read the comic book/graphic novel the film is based on before?

James: No, no. It was weird because the guy who wrote it's from my hometown of Glasgow but no, I hadn't read it. I read it after I got the script.

TeenHollywood: Did you base any of your character on it?

James: Not really. He's physically and visually based on Eminem which is kind of weird to start reading it going, 'That character looks like Eminem'. He really looks like Eminem. And 'wait a minute, Angelina's character is so clearly physically, visually based on Halle Berry'. This is so strange. It was really strange. I think Eminem and Halle Berry were a bit annoyed about the graphic novel. The [Wesley Gibson] character has nothing to do with Eminem but I think it's a marketing ploy really, more than anything else. So I don't know, that turned me off immediately. But the script is incredibly different from the graphic novel although it does have the sensibilities of the graphic novel I think.

TeenHollywood: Did you have fun in Prague where you weren't shooting the movie?

James: I'm a veteran of Prague. I think I've spent 15 months of my life in Prague. And I love it very much but I was in every day of this job and I couldn't afford to go out really too much. We were doing 12 to 14 hour days, six days a week. I mean, there's a couple of scenes I'm not in so I was there every day. But yeah, we got taken out, we got to blow off some steam. The makeup girls particularly and one of the wardrobe ladies and the stunt team were kind of my support network on this job. They were great. And Common was particularly good fun to hang out with. He was a nice guy.

TeenHollywood: There are some really funny lines in the movie. Was it difficult balancing the drama and humor?

James: That was totally fun. I mean, I'm guilty of trying to find the humor in even the most serious of films that I've done and it always gets edited out so it was kind of a joy to be in an environment where the director and producers were saying, 'No, no, no, try. You have an idea? Go for it. You want to fall down? Great, cool. There's a rubber chicken over there if you want to get it in the frame. Here's a banana skin.'

TeenHollywood: What did the wax bath Wesley "heals" in feel like?

James: Kind of groovy. It was kind of weird. They put a board over me to lock me into the bath so that my hands went through and my head went through but it was flat against me and I couldn't move. That was horrible. I was in there for a couple hours at a time and then they just poured hot wax over the entire thing.

TeenHollywood: Ouch! Real hot wax?

James: It was real hot wax. It would go over my hands, it would go over my face which was really uncomfortable and it got very, very hot and it went in your ears and stuff. The most annoying thing about it is I got an ear infection for about two weeks because of that hot wax.

TeenHollywood: Are you looking forward to superhero roles coming your way now that you've done this film?

James: No, I don't think so. I hope not. I hope it doesn't become all I get offered. I did this film for a challenge and something different, something new and so hopefully, the next thing I do will be again an example of something different, new and challenging. Not just different from Wanted, hopefully different from the other stuff I've done as well.

TeenHollywood: Hope your phone works.

James: [he fiddles with the pieces] Ah, it'll be fine. It's a resilient thing. I've had it for a couple of years now.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.