James McAvoy on why he loves to play mad men

“It’s been a strange few years,” reflects James McAvoy. “There have been a lot of mental people.”

It’s not what you expect to hear from the genial Scottish actor who made his breakthrough as the gentle faun Mr. Tumnus a decade ago in the big-budget adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. But change has been afoot for McAvoy both on screen and stage, ever since he played the memory-addled auctioneer in Danny Boyle’s tricky 2013 thriller Trance.

Since then, he’s played the sordid cop Bruce Robertson in an adaption of Irvine Welsh novel Filth and a rather depressed Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the theatre, he’s taken on Shakespeare’s murderous Macbeth and a (possibly) paranoid schizophrenic in a revival of Peter Barnes’ comedy The Ruling Class.

“A lot of them are manic and delusional and have god complexes... so it’s been three, four years of being in quite a strong, mentally unwell vein.” He cuts a big smile. “And I’ve really thoroughly enjoyed it.”

McAvoy’s latest to fit this mould is the title role in Victor Frankenstein, a film loosely inspired by the classic Mary Shelley gothic novel about a scientist who plays god.

This latest version is a Frankenstein’s monster in itself – a stitching-together of everything from Shelley’s text to the Universal horror movies from the 1930s. Or as the script’s title page put it: “Inspired by the collective subconscious zeitgeist experience responding to the original Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley.”