James McAvoy, star of stage and screen, has a secret anxiety. The Scottish actor has revealed to the Observer that his confidence has been dented in the past by criticism from a pair of well-known British writers, both of them behind stories he has starred in on screen. “It is not nice. I’ve had that with two writers, actually.”
It happened first when he played the lead in the award-winning 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. McAvoy says the author suggested he was too slight for the role. “He said I was a bit small – because my character, Robbie, was meant to be this 6ft tanned Adonis, and I was a 25-year-old pasty Glaswegian who’s 5ft-nothing,” the actor recalled, grimacing at the memory. The incident, he adds, left him “a bit devastated”, although he admits that McEwan, one of Britain’s most successful novelists, “wasn’t disparaging. He just gave me … nothing.”
