X-Men: Days of Future Past Won't Close the Gap Between McAvoy and Stewart

In a new interview, X-Men: First Class star James McAvoy told The Huffington Post that his [...]

In a new interview, X-Men: First Class star James McAvoy told The Huffington Post that his character is in a very different headspace than Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier is in the upcoming sequel X-Men: Days of Future Past, and that if he's going to evolve into the version of Professor X that Stewart played in the first three X-Men films it won't be for at least another movie. "Not yet," McAvoy said. "I think that may come. I mean, who knows? Who knows where it's going to go? That may come in the third movie but definitely not in this movie. We're not in the same place that we were in the first movie with Charles -- a very different place from there. But we're also still on a very different place from where Patrick was in the other movies." In the same interview, he discussed the intentional choice to differ from Stewart's take on the character, describing the previous iterations of Xavier as inaccessible and selfless and saying that he wanted to humanize the mutant leader somewhat in his portrayal. "There's a little element in the script in the first couple of pages of Charles' character where he seems like he's sort of picking up a girl in a bar. And I thought, Let's take that and run with it," McAvoy said. "I kind of pushed and pushed -- to really try to take him as far away from the Professor X that we've seen before in the comics and the cartoon and as portrayed by Patrick in the movies as well -- he's kind of like a monk. He's a sage. And he's wise and he's very in control of himself and sort of selfless. I wanted to take him the opposite way -- without making him a bad guy. But, make him selfish and a little bit egotistical and all of those things. I think that helped -- the fact I wasn't actually trying to do Patrick Stewart in the body of a 30-year-old man. I think if I would have done that, people would have rejected me."

0comments