“Absolutely not, don’t do that”: James McAvoy and the £40,000 crossroads that changed everything
Now that we know what most of the characters in the new HBO Max retelling of the Harry Potter books are going to look like, we have a few months to get used to a new Harry, Ron and Hermione, among others, but the original actors from the eight movies are the best, and I won’t have it otherwise.
Even if you ply with me polyjuice and set Snape on me, or even if you say that 47 is too old to be watching Harry Potter films, which it probably is, that cast is simply too beloved and too good, although the idea that James McAvoy could have joined them is admittedly an intriguing one.
That’s because the Glaswegian actor is one of Britain’s finest talents of the past 25 years, and you only need to see the 2016 M Night Shyamalan movie Split to know that: a dizzying, fully committed display in which McAvoy takes on 23 distinct personalities in terrifying fashion. And actually, had things gone differently, that kind of multi-brained versatility is something he could have displayed several years earlier in the Potterverse.
As McAvoy himself said a few years ago, “I was nearly in Harry Potter. Almost”. The Scotsman had originally auditioned for the role of creepy teenager Tom Riddle, the Hogwarts boy who (spoiler alert, come on its been about 15 years now) eventually becomes Potter’s nemesis Voldemort, and went as far as being offered a deal to play the part, but several things just didn’t add up.
The actor explained to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “They wanted to put me on a retainer. They offered me something. It was crazy. I’d hardly done any work at that time. Me and maybe ten other actors, they wanted to put us on retainer so they could hold us and keep us to choose later who it would be. It was a really strange thing. They offered quite a lot of money for me at the time. It was a ton of money. It was like £40,000 pounds or something like that. I’d done very little work.”
The movie was likely Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the 2002 sequel, and the role eventually went to English actor Christian Coulson, who then went on to have a career in television, but McAvoy gave it plenty of thought, though, until outside forces knocked sense into him. He added, “I wouldn’t have been able to do any work for about seven months, I think it was. I said to my agent, ‘What do you think?’ She was like, ‘Absolutely not. Don’t do that’.”
Much as it would have been fun to see him knocking about with Harry Potter and causing all manner of mischief at the Wizarding School, in context it was probably the right choice, as although he had to pick up theatre jobs for a few hundred pounds at the time, it wasn’t too long until he landed a major role in 2005’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe which earned an insane $745million at the box office and set him on the path to Hollywood greatness.
Less than a year later, McAvoy won global acclaim for his work on Forest Whitaker’s historical drama The Last King of Scotland, winning a Bafta nomination for ‘Best Actor in a Supporting Role’ while Whitaker himself would go on to claim ‘Best Actor’ at the 2007 Oscars for the film.
McAvoy finally got to join in on the fun and games at Hogwarts, though, when he took on the voice of Professor ‘Mad Eye’ Moody for Audible’s ongoing Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Edition.
