The Shameless actor has gone from a small-scale TV series set on a council estate to an Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie in two years. With his star in the ascendancy, is there anything James McAvoy can’t do?

I FIRST INTERVIEWED JAMES McAvoy two years ago. From his point of view, this must seem a lifetime away. Back then, he was one of a legion of young British actors just surfacing on the radar. He’d been a winning addition to Channel 4’s successful television comedy drama Shameless; he had played second fi ddle to Paul Bettany in a tennis rom-com called Wimbledon and won plaudits as the burningly ambitious journalist in TV thriller State of Play. Things were looking good. But he was still just that horribly uncertain thing levelled at all actors in their mid-twenties: `one to watch’.

A couple of years on from then and we’ve all seen James McAvoy. And seen him blossom. Soon after I spoke to him in 2005, Hollywood came knocking on his door with the role of the kindly faun Mr Tumnus in multimillion-dollar fantasy epic The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Then he took the lead role in Starter for 10, the quirky coming-of-age comedy set in the mid-1980s, where he played a working-class kid desperate to land a place on

Bristol’s team in University Challenge. If this low-key movie was still close to home, McAvoy’s next step sent his career into a spin: playing Nicholas Garrigan, an idealistic young Scottish doctor tangled up in the madness of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. The fi lm, of course, became a global hit. It claimed an Oscar and two BAFTA nominations, most notably for the American actor Forest Whitaker (who played Amin) but also one for its supporting star, McAvoy. Things have changed a great deal since our last conversation: his credibility has risen exponentially.

"Yeah, I guess my stock is up," he confi rms in his laid-back Glaswegian drawl. "It’s nice, I think. It’s weird, you know, man. When I was in Narnia people said the same thing, so I don’t know. It happens gradually. With Last King of Scotland, it was a long process. First, people said this fi lm sounds interesting; then people actually saw the fi lm and said this could be big ­ you could be going places. Then, it turns out to be really successful."

You can do 20 low-budget British fi lms, he says, and not only will none of them make any money at the box offi ce but culturally they’ll make no impact either. "But every now and then one of them captures the imagination. And thank goodness Last King did. Because I think it’s a thoroughly good fi lm. I’m very, very proud of it."

One of the biggest changes to have happened as a result of this movie is that now McAvoy gets offered parts without having to show up to the audition. Rather than wallowing in this change of fortune ­ that he’s deemed a safe pair of hands, capable of just delivering the goods ­ the young actor fi nds it unsettling. "Before, I had to fi ght to get the role. I only really got it if I proved that I was capable of doing it. Now, people are offering parts when I’m not convinced that I can do it myself. Or not until I’ve sat down in a room with them. I had to go through hoops before and, in a way, I preferred that.

He has enough self-awareness to recognise why this is. He’ll read a script and his ego will tell him: "This a great part; I can do this." But it’s only until he’s actually tried out the part with someone directing him that he’ll know whether it’s a role for him.

"That’s the thing," says McAvoy philosophically. "When you get a little bit of success, you need to keep your ego in check." He’ll certainly have to work hard at that now that his media coverage has grown out of all proportion, and the parts are rolling in.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I fi rst came across James McAvoy in the TV series Shameless. He played Steve, a Southern wheeler-dealer, in the Manchester-set comedy about the dysfunctional Gallagher family. Set on a crime-riddled council estate, it was an original idea for a comedy (written by Paul Abbot, who drew extensively on his own turbulent upbringing on a Northern housing estate for material) and was a huge critical hit. But the making of Shameless wasn’t the happiest of experiences for the 28-year-old actor.

"The script changed a lot every day," he explains. "It’s the same with loads of TV shows. You sign up to play one part and then the part completely changes. There was a lot of politics going on round that job. But you do something that you don’t enjoy and it turns out to be great ­ and you do something where you all had a really good laugh and it turns out to be crap. You can never really predict what’s going to happen." In spite of the tricky shoot, McAvoy always knew that there was really good work going on during fi lming and, anyway, as he confesses: "I’m just a moany bastard ­ I want things done in a certain way."

One unforeseen thing to come out of Shameless was that he met his future wife, Anne-Marie Duff, who co-starred as his girlfriend, Fiona. Looking back at what he said at the time about working with her makes it perfectly clear that the seeds of romance were being sown: "That was probably the best on- screen relationship I have ever had with someone," he gushed in one interview. "I would love to work with Anne-Marie again. She is just unbelievable."

Frustratingly, McAvoy will not speak and has not spoken about their relationship in interviews he has given (though the tabloids have done their fair bit of snooping). As his career fl ourishes as well as Duff’s (a well-respected actress, who turned in a bravura performance as Elizabeth I in the BBC’s drama The Virgin Queen), the media interest will, of course, intensify. He surely can’t expect to bat away all questions forever, I say, gently prodding.

"It would be harder to keep our lives private if we lived our lives in the public eye," he says, "but other than doing our jobs, we don’t really. Even if we’re pictured in magazines, it’s probably just the same picture, reprinted 40 times."

So why not offer up just a few titbits: you know, what they think of each others’ performances, what fi lms they like watching at home, how they help each other to learn lines.

"Keep the special things secret, keep them safe," he reasons. "Don’t give yourself to everybody. When you want to tell somebody special, like a friend, something important about yourself, then, fi ne, do that. But don’t tell everybody."

But is there ever much competition between them, given that they are both young, ambitious actors who are both achieving critical acclaim? It’s clear McAvoy isn’t comfortable talking about the specifi cs of his relationship with Duff and instantly clams up: "Och, I don’t know," he mutters. And there’s silence.

WITH HIS FLOPPY hair and expensive, trendy clothes he looks very Notting Hill, but McAvoy actually grew up in the working-class area of Drumchapel in Glasgow ­ and initially trained as a baker at Sainsbury’s. What might he have been if he hadn’t become an actor? He answers that whatever he would have done, he certainly would have got out of baking because he was "pissed off with that". Perhaps he might have gone back to college, or even have joined the Navy. "But I’ve always been gobby," he says with a smile, "so it would have probably been something to do with talking."

When he was seven his parents separated, and he and his sister moved in with their maternal grandparents. His mother, a psychiatric nurse who was very young when she had her children, only lived with them and her parents off and on. And McAvoy’s father, a builder, completely disappeared from their lives at this point. In spite of the absence of both his parents, McAvoy insists: "I had a brilliant upbringing, really. It wasn’t conventional, but then ­ although this sounds like a bit of a cliché these days ­ I think that’s fairly normal now."

His grandparents have followed his career keenly and even made it down to London for the premiere of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was "hysterical, seeing them sitting beside the great and the good". Afterwards, apparently, they came up to praise him. "They said `very good, son, very good’," recalls McAvoy, though it sounds like they may have been a bit bemused by all the ceremony. I wonder if he ever thinks about his father, whom he has had no contact with for years. Any regrets about losing touch, I ask? Again, he parries the question, saying he doesn’t want to talk about it. Fair enough; so we move on.

ONE OF THE things that McAvoy (who had a small part in World War II mini-series Band of Brothers at the beginning of his career) has said in the past, was that when he started out as an actor he felt like a fraud. What did he mean by that?

"When I fi rst started out," he explains, "most people I came across had wanted to be actors all their life. I didn’t feel that way. I felt that I was in this just because I ended up doing it and people were throwing work my way. It took me a while to realise that that didn’t make me a fraud ­ that I didn’t have to have wanted to be an actor from the age of three and got myself an agent at the age of seven to be a credible actor."

Now he feels he’s constantly trying to improve as an actor. Recently, he’s developed new skills under the direction of Joe Wright, the young British director who made Pride and Prejudice and now Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan novel, in which McAvoy plays the part of the hero Robbie Turner, the working-class lad made good.

"Joe helped me develop a new understanding of the human experience, the human psyche," he says, without meaning to sound pretentious. "It’s probably the most diffi cult part I’ve ever played. For the fi rst half of the story he’s incredibly good ­ angelic, in fact. But the thing is I don’t know anybody like that. So I found it very hard to get a wedge into the character. Then halfway through the story something happens to him and he becomes much more complex, the kind of character that I feel I understand a lot more."

His co-star in Atonement is Keira Knightley. Of her he says: "I was really impressed by Keira. She was brilliant, actually. She has an amazing work ethic and she’s a great actress. She’s going to knock a lot of people’s socks off with this fi lm."

McAvoy is currently in Prague fi lming a "weird, action-adventurey" fi lm called Wanted (he’s taken time out from the shoot to do this interview). This movie has seen him brush shoulders with bona fi de Hollywood aristocracy. Meeting them has made him realise that although he’s an actor much more in demand now, he’s still just that ­ an actor.

"I’m working with Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie," he tells me, "and they’re `stars’. Not like me, I’m an actor. My life is nothing like theirs. I really enjoy being an actor and enjoy knowing that for ­ at the very least ­ the next few months, I’m employed. But it’s different with people like that. When you’re in their presence you realise why they are stars."

How come? What do they radiate? "Being with Morgan in a fi lm, you just feel that you’re in the presence of your dad the whole time," McAvoy reveals. "He’s incredible. He can make anything sound good. He really can. And with Angelina as well, of course. You just know she’s a movie star."

He might be hobnobbing with the Hollywood glitterati now, but it sounds as if appearing in multimillion-dollar Hollywood juggernauts isn’t any more glamorous than the set of Shameless. "Today I was up to my neck in rats," he says with a sigh. "It was pretty surreal, man."

Atonement is released in the UK on 14 September