James McAvoy’s first job out of acting school was HBO miniseries Band of Brothers – and he’s now claimed that one of his co-stars bullied him on the day filming started.
The Scottish actor recalled the experience in a chat show segment called “Spill the IMDb-tea” after being shown a photo of himself alongside an ensemble of actors in the acclaimed HBO miniseries.
He said that his co-stars, who had been shooting for almost a year, were angry when he arrived to film his episode, in which he had many lines, as they themselves had only had a little bit of screen time each.
Upon seeing the image, McAvoy, appearing on Watch What Happens Live, leaned in and said: “Hold on, let me just see, is he in there? No, I don’t think he is in there. Ah, yeah, he is.”
He then explained: “All right, so, I’m not going to tell you who it was, but one of the guys in that picture decided to bully me, on my first day as a professional actor out of acting school. So he got him and his buddies to just stand and point at me and laugh at me, for like three minutes.”
McAvoy said they were shooting “one of those scenes with everybody in it”, with “a ton of actors” in a bar, adding: “I had a scene, and all these guys were, like, in it for nine, 10 months, and you get one line in one episode and one line 10 episodes later. They were all pissed.
“And I come in for one episode, and I’ve got an arc and scenes. I’ve got tons of lines.”
After being humiliated by the actor, he said that Dexter Fletcher and Robin Laing told him: ”Come hang with us, man.” McAvoy also confirmed that the actor he was referencing wasn’t David Schwimmer, as he wasn’t in the photo.
The image that was shown featured McAvoy alongside co-stars – from left to right – Donnie Wahlberg, Kirk Acevedo, Scott Grimes, Philip Barantini, Neal McDonough, Adam James, Frank John Hughes and Ross McCall. The Independent has contacted these stars for comment.
Band of Brothers, a 10-part depiction of the journey of a parachute regiment – Easy Company – across the Western Front and towards Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest outpost, was released in 2001, and is considered a landmark moment in television history.
It was produced by the powerhouse Hollywood duo of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, with key collaborators including Gary Goetzman and John Orloff binding together a singular vision of American military history, based on Stephen E Ambrose’s non-fiction book of the same name.
After appearing in Band of Brothers, McAvoy went on to star in the UK version of Shameless (2004-05) before his big film break arrived as Mr Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2007).
He followed that up with The Last King of Scotland, Starter for 10 (both 2006) and Atonement (2007) before being cast as Charles “Professor X” Xavier in the X-Men prequels.
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