ROUND-TABLE: 'The Last Station' star James McAvoy

James McAvoy enters the room right after Paul Giamatti leaves and his third sentence contains a joke about blowjobs. This should give you a good idea about the sort of person with whom we're conversing. He stars in The Last Station as Valentin Bulgakov, secretary for Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) toward the end of the great writer's life, alongside Giamatti, Helen Mirren, and his wife Anne-Marie Duff; in this article he discusses Scotland's curious predilection for Tolstoyism, his experience co-starring with his spouse, and... well, he makes loads of pseudo-inappropriate comments and it's great fun. Enjoy!

Paul was just saying some very nice things about you.
He’s very nice, Paul. I pay him a lot of money to do that. [laughter] And I’m very good at oral sex, so he enjoys that.

Can you repeat that? [laughter]
Oh, god. [laughs] He’s lovely. We had such a nice time working with each other. He’s so amazing.

He said you kept him on his toes more than did working with Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.
That’s very nice. That’s because I was standing on a chair and he had to be on his, uh, tiptoes to be the same height as me.

He said that you had an interesting line to walk with the character of Valentin.
Yeah. It was quite… I don’t know, actually. Yes, I suppose I did. He’s that figure that you can project onto, a little bit, and so you need to leave enough space for the audience to get inside but you also need to do something with it as well, so that’s kind of a fine line in itself, but also between comedy and drama—I think everybody had to walk that line. That’s another fine line that we all had to walk, and that’s one that’s always enjoyable to balance and risk falling off of.

Yeah. He’s so naïve, but you have to see him grow by the end of it.
Well, I hope so. I mean, my favorite movies and my favorite stories are the ones where people change because it’s about things happening and changing. In the interesting stories, I think, you need to have one character who has a different point of view or a different opinion or a different haircut, at least, by the end of the movie. So, yeah, it’s nice to play that, and I always look for a bit of an arc or change for the character. Even bloody Wanted had one, d’you know what I mean? I like that a lot.

Were you a fan of Tolstoy?
Eh… I’d be lying if I said I was a humongous Tolstoyan fan. I never got through War and Peace when I read it. I got nearly the way to the end, but I read it when I was… what was I? I read it because I thought I should, not because I wanted to, either. I think I’m finally probably ready to read it, maybe, in five years. [laughter] And get to the end. But what I didn’t know was all about his political and spiritual sort of leadership that came after his fiction writings. And that was just such an eye-opener. Also to learn that my country, Scotland, had the largest concentration of Tolstoyan communes outside of Russia. I know, it’s kind of strange. We got him in Scotland, we really dug him in Scotland, it seems. So hopefully, on a subconscious genetic level or something, that made me love him.

Your wife is also in this movie.
My life?

Your wife—
Oh, I thought you said my life. My life! [laughter] My life is in my performance! Every minute of it is—yeah.

So what was that like, being on set together?
It was fine. It was nice. We’ve done it before; we met on a TV show, so it was no new shakes, really. It was nice to be together. We didn’t actually work with each other that much, which allowed us to accept the job together, because if we had lots and lots and lots of scenes with each other that could maybe get difficult. But we didn’t actually do much acting together, so it was nice.

Can we go back to something you said about Tolstoy and Scottish people? What is that?
No idea. But I do know that we are both from very cold countries. Maybe that’s something. And we have a left-wing-leaning country that leans toward socialism and socialist democracy; we were a socially democratic country for… up until Thatcher came, really, we were quite a socialist democratic country. But, before that, I believe the Scottish people were quite up for communism at some point. I mean, not all of us, and Tolstoy wasn’t a communist, but I think his movement really helped cultivate an environment in which communism could be born. And we really liked that, I think. The idea that the disenfranchised Scots could—somebody was saying, “This land doesn’t belong to the English; the land belongs to you. It belongs to nobody but everybody.” That was hugely interesting to Scottish people, Irish people, Welsh people—anybody who was part of a union that they didn’t want to be part of.

With a role like this, where the source material is so dense and there’s so much of it, how do you go about preparing? Because, obviously, you didn’t go back and reread War and Peace or anything, so how did you get into the skin of this guy?
It’s not about… I think it would have been a total waste of time to go and read War and Peace as preparation for this film. It wouldn’t be a waste of time; it would be a wonderful time spent reading an excellent book, obviously. [laughter] However, this was about a different time in Tolstoy’s life, and my main source of information was unparalleled in anything I’ve ever had as an actor. It was incredible. I had a direct link to exactly what my guy thought. He was a real person, and in the film we show that he kept… five thousand diaries, and he did keep a lot of diaries but he did keep one that was the—I know how he felt when Countess Sofya Tolstoy climbed along the balcony. And I played it, because I knew exactly—I just knew, because ten minutes after it happened he wrote down how it made him feel! I mean, I’ve never had that kind of connection to a character before. It almost made it too easy; I was just like “Pppfft.” [laughter] “Okay, I really just have to try and execute what he says he felt. Okay, my imagination doesn’t have to be engaged to connect to it all that—” I mean, my imagination was engaged, but it was so different to have that direct link to somebody. I don’t think I’ve ever played a real person before. Maybe I have; I’m not sure, but this might be the first time I’ve played somebody real.

So, now that you’ve gotten to do that, how do you like it as opposed to playing a fictional character?
D’you know what, it wasn’t that different. The only difference was I had, like I said, this link to how he felt about things, but other than that it wasn’t that different. You’re playing scenes that actually happened; whether we’re playing them exactly how they happened or not, we’ll never know—so you’re still engaging your imagination completely. But it wasn’t any harder. The only thing is, I suppose, when you’re playing a real person you’re bound by reality, although sometimes that’s a very freeing thing. Maybe you can’t make some bigger dramatic choices, and a story could maybe use them to make it more interesting or something like that, but you don’t do it. But playing Valentin—he was so strange anyway. The guy did sneeze when he was nervous! Like, hugely! I mean, it sounds like a kind of Chekovian device, but it’s true. He was a bit of an odd fish. And I didn’t feel constricted at all, but I imagine you can be constricted by reality sometimes. But yeah.

The Last Station is in theatres now.