It’s the final night of the Glasgow film festival and James McAvoy is a wee bit out of breath. His directorial debut, California Schemin’, is playing across all three screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre in the city centre, taking the festival’s prestige closing slot.
Usually, a big name would say a few words of introduction in the main cinema then bask in the glory. Not McAvoy. Getting in among it still comes naturally 25 years after he left this city to pursue a career that has blazed from his award-winning Cyrano de Bergerac in the West End of London to playing Professor X, the founder of the X-Men, in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise.
He bounces into every screen in turn to explain why he cares so much about the film he’s made: a wild ride based on the true story of two talented chancers from Dundee who posed as Los Angeles rappers and conned a major label in London into signing them. He wanted, he tells the audience, to make a film “for people from the kind of council estate I grew up on”. He’s nervous; he puffs out his cheeks, as if this all might have been a terrible mistake, before finally sinking into his seat.
The home crowd loves California Schemin’ – a pacy underdog tale with a banging soundtrack and layered performances from its young leads, Séamus McLean Ross and Samuel Bottomley. They play the real-life skateboarding, freestyling pals Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, who ditch their Scottish accents after snooty talent scouts dismiss them as “the rapping Proclaimers”.
In McAvoy’s hands, what could easily wind up as a cautionary tale about trading authenticity for commercial success is a more subtle examination of friendship, the limits of circumstance and who gets to tell our stories. This is what he wants to talk about when we meet the day before the premiere.
It’s a bright spring morning, but the bite of winter is still in the air. He is sensibly attired in a thick cream jumper, his peppery hair pulled back, a half-drunk coffee in his hands.
In hip-hop, as in acting, we’re told that voice is all about authenticity – but what happens when that voice is considered by the people with the power to be ugly or risible or just wrong? “It’s that thing that stops you being regarded as a person and makes you something smaller,” McAvoy, 46, says of bias, whether that’s about your face, your language or your accent.
“With my accent, I’ve had that experience where I’m suddenly no longer a person with infinite possibilities and potential – I am ‘that Scottish person’. I’m reduced to a noise that comes out of my mouth.” He reaches hurriedly for a stack of caveats: “I’m a white northern European male, so I’m aware that me going on about bias and prejudice is potentially quite treacherous territory, because there are people who’ve suffered much worse. Also, I’m quite successful,” he adds with gentle understatement, “so what have I got to complain about?”
McAvoy is one of Britain’s most prolific and consistent actors and a favourite of celebrated directors of stage and screen, including Joe Wright, M Night Shyamalan and Jamie Lloyd.
Memorable roles include his international breakthrough performance as Robbie in Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s tragic wartime love story Atonement; a man with superhuman abilities and multiple personalities in Shyamalan’s Split; and a visceral Macbeth with Lloyd, who also directed him in the acclaimed revival of Cyrano.
He was the kindly faun, Mr Tumnus, in The Chronicles of Narnia; a morally ambiguous Lord Asriel in the television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials; and an unforgettable antihero – the corrupt Edinburgh cop Bruce Robertson – in the movie of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth. But he says he has played “four or five Scottish people in my entire 30-year career”.
McAvoy’s experience as an A-lister could seem light years away from Bain’s and Boyd’s humiliation, which happened in 2002. But nearly two decades later, the Sunday Times slated McAvoy and fellow Glaswegian James McArdle for their “whining Scottish accents” in a National Theatre reinterpretation of Peer Gynt. At the time, McAvoy challenged the reviewer to a post-show discussion “about why you think it’s OK to label the sound of an entire nation in such a derogatory fashion”.
It was after their initial knockback that Bain’s and Boyd’s epic deception took shape. By 2003, the pair had reinvented themselves as the West Coast rappers Silibil N’ Brains. They talked, rapped and even had sex in American accents, according to Bain’s memoir, with a backstory about their sun‑kissed California youth prepared to satisfy any doubters.
This time, the London scouts weren’t laughing – they were lapping up the lyrical abilities of this hot US import. Silibil N’ Brains were swiftly signed by Jonathan Shalit, the manager who discovered Charlotte Church, and by early 2004 they had a deal with Sony UK.
The con always had a shelf life, as Bain later explained – the plan was to go on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, reveal they had never even been to the US and then make their killer point: “We always had talent; why did we need to do this?” Except it didn’t work out like that. As the film progresses, McAvoy captures the ugly unravelling of the boys’ partnership, as Bain’s desperate cleaving to the lie and Boyd’s alienation from it become impossible to reconcile.
The movie, which is based loosely on Bain’s memoir, features Bottomley and Ross – the son of Scottish rock royalty, Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh – in their first starring roles. Billy’s girlfriend, Mary, the moral centre of the movie, is played with luminous charm by Lucy Halliday. McAvoy’s sister, Joy, who stars in the comedy sleeper hit Two Doors Down, also makes a cameo appearance. In real life, Bain and Boyd – who is now married to Mary, with three kids – no longer work together, but still make music.
For McAvoy, the crossover between Bain and Boyd and his own experience pivots on the question of who gets to tell which stories. “The music label representatives who laughed at them for deigning to rap with Scottish accents – the inference was: ‘Folk music or maybe a guitar band, that’s all we want from people that sound like you.’” McAvoy says he was getting told the same sort of thing: “These are the films that you can make in Scotland.”
He had wanted to direct for a while, he explains, detouring through yet more caveats acknowledging how fortunate he is as a first-timer to be offered so many scripts and opportunities. (If I included all his caveats, this interview would be twice as long: McAvoy comes across as scrupulously fair to the point of tying himself in knots and wearily aware of a publicity machine intent on compressing his nuance.)
Nonetheless, he felt the industry had decided: “This is what Scottish things are like – and it’s unemployment, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, all the fucking abuse …” But at least it clarified his quest: “I do want to tell stories about working-class people with backgrounds that I recognise and limited horizons. But I don’t know why they can’t be entertaining. I don’t know why they can’t be adventures.” Then the script for California Schemin’ came through. “I was like: ‘This is actually about that thing that winds me up!’”
That challenge – to find the juice in all the abuse – is seeded throughout the film. After a career-making gig at the storied Barrowland Ballroom, followed by a catastrophic fight with Boyd, Bain stands beneath the blazing neon sign, howling: “Don’t leave me here in Scotland.” It’s a sweet and silly moment many Scots who moved away to follow a dream will empathise with.
“I always wanted to travel, get away and see the world,” says McAvoy, before qualifying: “I didn’t hate where I grew up. I had a really good childhood.” He and his sister were raised by his grandparents in Drumchapel, a housing scheme in north-west Glasgow, after his parents split up when he was seven and his mother was experiencing chronic ill-health. “My grandparents were fairly strict about my movements because it was a bit dicey, I guess.” (“Dicey” is a generous word for Drumchapel in the 80s.) “But I loved where I grew up and I had a really good time.”
A couple of teachers at his secondary school inspired him to perform, a debt he repaid with return visits to talk to pupils as he built his career in London. He also funds a bursary at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, formerly the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he enrolled after school while working as a trainee confectioner in the early mornings and weekends at a Sainsbury’s bakery.
It was there that he learned the fine art of scone-making, which he called upon 25 years later when he appeared in a charity edition of The Great British Bake Off. The scone challenge “was a bit of a skive”, he tells me. “I used to make them all the time in the bakery as a teenager, so I knew all the wee hacks.” When Paul Hollywood lavished his scones with praise, McAvoy felt he had to come clean. “But they cut that admission out of the show,” he says, sounding mildly aggrieved. “I don’t know why they did that.”
After he graduated, he moved to London, attracting attention for his early stage work as well as TV roles in Band of Brothers, State of Play and Shameless, where he met the actor Anne-Marie Duff; they married in 2006. Although the pair announced their divorce in 2016, they continued to share a home in London to co-parent their son, now a teenager. In early 2022, McAvoy confirmed he had married the American producer and womenswear entrepreneur Lisa Liberati. The couple have a son and are based in London, “but a wee bit in Philly”, where Liberati’s family live.
“Having a kid at 42 is definitely easier in some ways,” McAvoy says. “I worry less. I’m a bit more philosophical. But it’s also harder, because you’re just older and tireder.” Age has an impact on his professional life, too: “I’m getting all that first-timer stress in my 40s. When we were shooting the film, I’d wake up at 2.30am with the film buzzing in my head.” Starting a career is a young man’s game, he suggests. “That’s the time that you work your socks off, burn the midnight oil, run the extra mile – and usually when you’re doing that, you’re in your 20s.”
Collaborators over the years have talked about McAvoy’s work ethic, so I’m not convinced that if it weren’t for this new passion, he would have his foot off the gas. What other Scottish stories would he like to bring to the screen? There are amazing stories to be told about the Highland clearances, he says.
Beyond what he might make himself, he’s still troubled by the conviction that Scotland doesn’t get a sufficiently varied cultural diet. “We make art because we need to see ourselves reflected, so that we can interrogate ourselves, laugh at ourselves, love ourselves, hate ourselves, examine the experience of being alive,” he says. “And we don’t see everybody get examined. There are certain pockets of society that are allowed to be represented and there’s people that get left out of the equation completely. Scotland’s part of that – the north of England, Ireland, Wales, as well.”
He’s been banging on about art and education for years, he says, but this is an adjacent problem. “If I was making this film set in Boston about the exact same age group, there’d be two movie stars [rather than relative unknowns] playing those roles. There’s maybe five actors in Scotland who could get stuff greenlit – and not definitely, if it’s set in Scotland: Gerry [Butler], Ewan [McGregor], Karen Gillan, me, Richard Madden.” I offer his X-Men co-star Alan Cumming for the list. “And we’re all over 35 and only one of them is a woman. I don’t know why that is, because it’s not like we don’t make actors. So where’s that 21-year-old movie star?”
It’s no coincidence that, in one scene, the boys plot their escape from Dundee in front of a mural of Ewan McGregor as Mark Renton, the hero of Trainspotting, one of the last great Scottish movies with global reach. You can train all the actors, McAvoy says, but then they don’t get to do anything in Scotland, “because nothing’s getting made”.
The issue is investment, he says, which he had to find in Hollywood, although he’s quick to acknowledge the contribution of Screen Scotland, which recently made its own funding plea to the Scottish government to realise ambitions for the country’s film and TV industry, which hopes to be worth £1bn within five years.
“You need an industry behind you,” he says. “And I’m not saying that we don’t make enough for me or we don’t make enough to compete with America. It’s not about that. I don’t think we make enough to be able to satisfy the cultural needs of the 6 million people that live in this country.”
A few days later, I catch up with Boyd, who first saw a cut of the movie with Mary and their two younger sons. I’m intrigued to learn McAvoy asked him to write part of the final scene, a reconciliation between the pair that didn’t happen quite so neatly in real life.
Boyd says he saw the pressure McAvoy put himself under as a first-time director: “This wasn’t just a star doing something on the side because he’s Scottish – he was trying to make this the best possible film he could.” He was such a genuine guy, adds Boyd, “so you forget he’s a Hollywood A-lister. And sometimes I think he’s forgotten as well.”
• California Schemin’ is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10 April
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