Cinema

Posted on 06:29 PM, December 08, 2011

BY ZORIANNA KIT, Reuters

McAvoy delivers in Arthur Christmas

HOLLYWOOD -- James McAvoy knows firsthand how important Santa Claus is to children. As a youngster growing up in Scotland, he wrote to St. Nick two years in a row asking for a harrier jump jet for Christmas.

McAvoy wasn’t interested in a toy aircraft; he wanted the real thing.

“I could have parked it in my garden,” he recalls thinking as an eight-year-old. “That’s what I needed. I thought I could land it in my backyard.”

Frustrated by Santa’s response -- or lack of one -- McAvoy became angry and confronted his parents about it.

“They were very honest with me,” he recalls, “and I just went straight to them for my requests thereafter.”

The 32-year-old is now a parent himself to one-year-old Brendan (with actress-wife Ann-Marie Duff).

“He’s still too young to understand Christmas,” he says by phone from London where he is filming Trance, the latest from Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire).

“Maybe next year will be the year for that for him,” he adds.

Meanwhile, McAvoy is playing Santa, or at least the son of Santa, in the new animated feature Arthur Christmas. Made by Aardman Studios, makers of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run, Arthur Christmas is a holiday movie for the entire family.

First-time feature filmmaker Sarah Smith directs from a script she co-wrote with Peter Baynham.

Arthur Christmas tells the story of how Santa manages to deliver all those toys to millions of children around the world on Christmas Eve, without missing a single one. He flies around in a starship-like sleigh which flies around the world in warp speed, and employs what appears to be thousands of elves in a FedEx-like North Pole warehouse operation. The Santas have been delivering toys for centuries to good little children and the current Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent) is slowly being made obsolete by his efficient but somewhat soulless son, Steve (voiced by Hugh Laurie). Meanwhile, younger son, Arthur (McAvoy), is a bit of a klutz but truly cares about the inquiries that pour in from children around the world asking for toys for Christmas.

When one little English girl is overlooked, Steve is willing to forget it, but Arthur is not. Against Steve’s wishes, he makes it his mission to deliver the bike the child has asked for, enlisting Grandsanta (Bill Nighy), his grandfather, who has stored away his old-school sleigh and eight reindeer, to help him deliver the gift before daybreak. Grandson and grandfather run into a few hitches on their way to the child’s house, but they are committed to keeping Santa’s promise.

McAvoy says he didn’t have to audition for the part. The filmmakers made a short film using various actors’ voices from other films for the characters and they liked the way he sounded for Arthur, a sort of nervous but sincere fellow.

“They gave me a call and said, ‘would you like to come in? We want to offer you a part,’” he recalls. “So I’d really done my audition really without having to be in the room.”

McAvoy, who speaks with a Scottish brogue, is no stranger to voiceover work. He provided the voice of the lovestruck garden gnome in the animated feature Gnomeo & Juliet, released earlier this year.

“It was quite different actually,” he says. “There was a bit more freedom on Gnomeo & Juliet to play around. The script for (Arthur Christmas) was so tight and they were so keen to get it made quickly so it was more important to make the material on the page work.”

The characters were also quite different. Gnomeo was cool while Arthur is “a bit of a loser,” he says.

While most of his recording sessions were solo, McAvoy was lucky enough to get to work with some of his co-stars a few times.

“Jim, Bill and Imelda (Staunton, who plays Mrs. Santa) and I go get together for one whole session and then Bill and I got together for a couple of sessions,” he recalls. “Bill and I have the bulk of the relationship story, which is great.”

McAvoy says giving voice to Arthur required a lot of energy.

“It was a lot of jumping around inside the recording booth and bouncing off the walls trying to get the reality, the physical reality, of all the fantastical and ridiculous things my character is going through,” he says.

His favorite scene is where Arthur and Grandsanta are discussing the logistics of their secret mission and he says “this is impossible, Grandsanta,” and Grandsanta responds, “they used to think it was impossible to teach women to read.”

“I kind of like that because it’s slightly risky and not (politically correct),” says McAvoy.

Having voiced lead characters in two animated feature films, McAvoy is an old hand.

“If I get offered another animated film and it’s as good as the scripts on these two then, yeah, I’m definitely up for it,” he says. “It’s very fun for an actor to do.”

Meanwhile, the popular and versatile actor is excited to be wrapping up the crime drama Trance, due out next year, and looking forward to spending some quality time over the holidays with his family.

“We’re having the families come over and stay at our house [in London] and we’ll do the whole turkey and ham thing with the trimmings so I’m very excited about that,” he says.

McAvoy also plans on taking his wife and son up to Scotland to visit his relatives for a few days.

“When you have kids, you have to give them some stability,” he says.

“You can’t be running around the world all the time.”

Next up for the busy actor is Filth, which is slated to begin production in January.

“We have a very fine young director called Jon Baird who also wrote the screenplay,” he touts. “It’s a fairly full-on film and a role for me as well.”

Having played the younger Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class earlier this year, the big question fans want to know is whether he will reprise the character in a sequel.

“The truth is I just don’t know,” he says. “What they’re doing is making sure they get a good script. If they don’t get a good script, they might not do another one. But I think (X-Men: First Class director) Matthew (Vaughn) has some good ideas that are very interesting and quite dark. But it will be a long way away, I think.” -- Prometheus Global Media

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