James McAvoy (born 1979) is the Scottish actor who played Kevin Wendell Crumb in Split and the adult Bill Denbrough in It Chapter Two.
Quick Specs
| Born | April 21, 1979, Glasgow, Scotland |
| Raised | Drumchapel, Glasgow, by his maternal grandparents |
| Training | Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), graduated 2000 |
| Horror | Kevin Wendell Crumb in Split (2016) and Glass (2019); adult Bill Denbrough in It Chapter Two (2019); Paddy in Speak No Evil (2024); Victor in Victor Frankenstein (2015) |
| Also | Mr Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia (2005); Robbie Turner in Atonement (2007); young Charles Xavier in four X-Men films (2011 to 2019); Bruce Robertson in Filth (2013) |
| Honours | BAFTA Rising Star Award (2006); Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Atonement; British Independent Film Award for Filth; four Olivier Best Actor nominations |
Who He Is
James McAvoy was born in Glasgow on April 21, 1979, the son of James McAvoy Sr., a bus driver who became a builder, and Elizabeth (née Johnstone), a psychiatric nurse who died in 2018. His parents separated when he was seven and divorced when he was eleven. Because of his mother’s poor health, he went to live with his maternal grandparents, Mary and James Johnstone, in Drumchapel, a housing-estate area of Glasgow, with his mother living with them on and off.
He was raised Roman Catholic, went to St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School in Jordanhill, and as a boy briefly considered the priesthood, a child’s route to seeing the world as a missionary. During his schooling he worked in a local bakery.
He came to a real fork in the road. He applied to the Royal Navy and had already been accepted when the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama offered him a place. He took the drama school, graduated in 2000, and moved to London.
The Work, and What He Did in It
Acting found him first. The actor-director David Hayman visited his school and offered him a part as Kevin Savage in The Near Room (1995), when McAvoy was 15 turning 16. He enjoyed it without yet treating it as a career, and kept acting with PACE Youth Theatre. The working run before fame took in Regeneration (1997), State of Play (2003), Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (2003) as Leto II Atreides, and Inside I’m Dancing (2004). The role that made him a familiar face on British television was Steve McBride in Shameless (2004 to 2005).
International notice came under prosthetics. In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) he played Mr Tumnus, at 26: the faun who befriends Lucy, Narnia’s first emotional contact, gentle and frightened and compromised, the White Witch’s would-be betrayer of the child who cannot go through with it. In The Last King of Scotland (2006) he is Dr Nicholas Garrigan, the young Scottish doctor who becomes personal physician to Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin. The film’s moral slide is measured on his face, and he drew a BAFTA supporting nomination. He won the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2006.
The critical breakthrough was Atonement (2007), Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. He plays Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s Cambridge-educated son, falsely accused by Briony (Saoirse Ronan), the younger sister of Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and destroyed by the lie: prison, then the army, then Dunkirk. He was 27 during filming and 28 at the September 2007 release, and the role brought Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Actor. Wanted (2008), opposite Angelina Jolie, made him an American action lead as an office drone turned assassin.
From X-Men: First Class (2011), when he was 32, he was the young Charles Xavier, Patrick Stewart’s role before the certainty set in: charming, reckless, still walking, and losing his hair and his friend, Michael Fassbender’s Erik Lehnsherr, across X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019), with an uncredited cameo in Deadpool 2 (2018) along the way. That makes four starring films and a cameo, not a trilogy.
Filth (2013) was the bridge to horror. In Jon S. Baird’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel, McAvoy, then 34, plays Bruce Robertson, a corrupt, drug-fuelled Edinburgh detective sergeant scheming for promotion while he falls apart. He plays the scheming directly to camera and makes a repellent man compulsive viewing. It won him Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards and at BAFTA Scotland, and it was proof, three years before Split, that his speciality was charm curdling into menace inside a single face.
In Paul McGuigan’s Victor Frankenstein (2015), written by Max Landis and told from Igor’s perspective, he is Victor, a manic, brilliant medical student driving his experiments toward life from death, with Daniel Radcliffe as Igor, the hunchbacked circus performer Victor rescues and remakes. He was 36 and threw himself at the part as an obsessive showman-scientist, the energy even the film’s detractors singled out. The film itself failed: reviews were generally negative, and it took about $34.2 million worldwide against a budget of about $40 million.
Split (2016; US release January 20, 2017) is his horror centrepiece. M. Night Shyamalan wrote, directed and produced it on the Blumhouse model, and, unknown to opening audiences, it was a stealth sequel to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000), revealed only by Bruce Willis’s closing cameo as David Dunn. McAvoy is Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with dissociative identity disorder who has shown 23 personalities to his psychiatrist, Dr Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley). Among them are Dennis, the obsessive-compulsive kidnapper who opens the film; Patricia, the poised, severe woman who rules the group; Barry, the flamboyant front personality; Hedwig, a nine-year-old boy; and Orwell and Jade. A 24th identity, the Beast, a superhuman, wall-crawling cannibal, remains submerged, and Dennis, Patricia and Hedwig, who call themselves the Horde, are preparing for it. Kevin abducts three teenagers, Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire and Marcia, as offerings.
What McAvoy did was build each identity the film shows as a separate physical instrument, with its own posture, jaw, voice and gaze, and switch between them inside single scenes and single takes. The horror is watching one body be re-inhabited in front of the camera; the performance is the film’s special effect. He plays the rotation as a war for “the light,” control of the body, so every handover is legible. As the Beast he transforms physically, bulked, veined and animal in movement, for a climax in which the Beast kills Dr Fletcher and two of the girls, then spares Casey on seeing her self-harm scars and declares the broken more evolved. He did all of it after joining the film weeks before shooting, replacing Joaquin Phoenix; McAvoy put it at two weeks. Reviews called his performance a tour de force and welcomed Shyamalan’s return to form, while some mental-health advocates criticised the film’s portrayal of the disorder. Split grossed $278.5 million worldwide on a $9 million production budget. He was 37 at its US release.
Glass (2019) closed the Unbreakable trilogy, holding David Dunn (Willis), Elijah Price, Mr Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), and Kevin together in a psychiatric facility under Dr Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who tries to convince them their powers are delusions. McAvoy, at 39, expanded the rotation under clinical observation, the facility scenes playing like auditions of identities, the Beast held back as the film’s weapon until a climax in which Kevin is killed. Reviews were mixed to negative, the trilogy’s weakest, though the performances were praised. Commercially it was a success, $247 million worldwide on a $20 million budget.
The same year he led the grown-ups in It Chapter Two (2019), Andy Muschietti’s sequel to It, from Gary Dauberman’s screenplay of the adult half of Stephen King’s 1986 novel. Twenty-seven years after the Losers’ Club first fought Pennywise, Mike Hanlon summons them back to Derry. McAvoy, 40, is Bill Denbrough, the Losers’ leader, now a successful novelist and screenwriter whose endings are famously unsatisfying, sharing the role with Jaeden Martell as the young Bill. Around him are Jessica Chastain as the adult Beverly, Bill Hader as the adult Richie, James Ransone, Jay Ryan, Isaiah Mustafa and Andy Bean, with Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise. He carries the film’s guilt engine: adult Bill has repressed even the memory of his brother Georgie’s death, and McAvoy plays the remembering, a man recovering his childhood in pieces as the film cuts between his face and Martell’s. Bill’s stutter returns under Pennywise’s pressure, and Bill’s refusal to take the exit drives the Ritual of Chüd and the final confrontation in the lair. Reviews were mixed, with the adult cast praised and the runtime debated. It grossed $473.1 million worldwide on a budget of about $79 million, the biggest horror film of his career by gross.
He played Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials (2019 to 2022). Then came Speak No Evil (2024), James Watkins’s English-language remake of Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Danish film. On holiday in Italy, the Daltons, Ben (Scoot McNairy), Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and their daughter Agnes, meet Paddy, his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their silent son Ant, and accept an invitation to the family’s remote West Country farmhouse, where hospitality curdles into coercion and then violence. McAvoy, 45, built Paddy as charm-first menace, a big-laughing, boundary-testing host whose small aggressions his guests keep excusing out of politeness, so that manners themselves become the trap. When the mask drops in the final act, the threat has been pre-sold for ninety minutes. His performance was widely praised as the film’s engine, and the remake’s more combative ending, against the Danish original’s bleaker close, was the main point of debate.
On stage, his partnership with the director Jamie Lloyd is the spine. He earned Olivier Best Actor nominations for Three Days of Rain (2009), Macbeth (2013) and The Ruling Class (2015), as Jack Gurney, the earl who believes he is God, and a fourth for Cyrano de Bergerac (2019 to 2020), in Martin Crimp’s version, performed at microphones without the traditional prosthetic nose. Cyrano won the Olivier for Best Revival and transferred to BAM in New York in 2022, and also played Glasgow. Earlier stage work included Privates on Parade (2001) and Breathing Corpses (2005).
Cool Verified Facts
- He had been accepted by the Royal Navy when drama school offered him a place.
- Kevin Wendell Crumb has 23 established identities, and the Beast is the 24th.
- During Split, McAvoy punched a door off camera to arrive in a scene “full of beans, full of adrenaline.” He missed the padded section, broke two knuckles, and carried on “white as a ghost.” Within hours, he said, the hand was “the size of a boxing glove.” Shyamalan later pointed out the shot that survives in the film, a profile of Dennis putting on his glasses with the swollen hand in frame, which some viewers had taken as Kevin beginning to turn into the Beast.
- He is the young Charles Xavier across four starring films and a cameo.
- His Cyrano was a rapping, nose-less one, and the production won the Olivier for Best Revival.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
The fortnight is the best production story in his record. Recalling Split in 2024, he said Phoenix left “like two weeks before they started shooting. It was really last minute.” He went on: “The script was well put together so a lot of it was clear what I wanted to do straight away. Patricia came quick. Hedwig took awhile.” Asked whether replacing Phoenix felt strange, he said: “I’m confident enough to think that I will do it better anyway. I’m joking… He’s an amazing actor… Sometimes, coming in last minute is the best way.”
McAvoy tells the Atonement casting story against himself. Ian McEwan, he said, “wasn’t disparaging. He just gave me… nothing. And I was a bit devastated. Then 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 age in that line is his joke, not the chronology. In the same breath he said Irvine Welsh “loved” him in Filth and Stephen King was “really nice” about It.
It scared him as an adult. Re-reading King’s novel to play Bill, he said he “actually had nightmares about Pennywise in a way that I never did as a child.”
His instrument is the switch: warmth and threat in the same face, changed by posture and voice rather than makeup. Faun, saint, assassin, telepath, monster-cop, 23-plus-one identities in one body, grieving leader, charming predator.
Why He Matters
For horror, James McAvoy’s record is three deep. Split revived a dormant universe on a $9 million budget, Glass closed the trilogy, and the same year It Chapter Two put him at the head of the Losers’ Club. Speak No Evil then rested on his performance. He is the actor horror calls when the monster has to be played, not worn.
He also collapses the line between prestige and genre: a BAFTA Rising Star, a Golden Globe nomination for Atonement, a BIFA for Filth and four Olivier nominations, from the same actor headlining Shyamalan, King and Blumhouse. And Split’s role belonged to someone else until a fortnight before the cameras rolled. That no one can now imagine Kevin any other way is the measure of what he did with two weeks.