James McAvoy’s years-long quest to cry-wank in a movie: “I’ve been trying for quite a long time”
Most actors are pretty ambitious types who want to be recognised for their work, to make movies loved by millions, to feel creatively fulfilled by the months and years spent honing their craft, so it’s refreshing to hear that one of James McAvoy‘s priorities is to properly further the portrayal of people knocking one out in tears on the big screen.
And why would he not? Let’s face it, while the amount of actors enjoying a bout of self-pleasure in movies has increased exponentially as the years have gone by, thanks to a relaxation of censorship and the fact that the act itself is seen as far less impure than in days of old, not enough of those scenes have involved the actor in question crying at the same time, which always adds some interesting emotional depth.
McAvoy, though, took on the challenge in fine style, although admittedly it was only in 2013’s crime comedy Filth, because many of his others, such as The Chronicles of Narnia from 2005, don’t really have room for such tear-streaked masturbatory antics; for one thing, the big lion would probably just run straight back into the wardrobe in disgust, and there are kids involved.
Filth was the Irvine Welsh adaptation that featured McAvoy as a bipolar Scottish detective called Bruce, who, when he isn’t trying to solve the murder of a Japanese student, fills his spare time drinking, taking drugs, having sado-masochistic sex, bullying his police colleagues and generally being a complete menace to everyone he knows.
But it did allow him to tick off one particular ambition, as he proudly told Digital Spy, “I’ve been trying to get a man masturbating while crying into a movie for quite a long time”.
Well, job done.
The film got reasonably good reviews, especially for a movie based on a book that, for a long time, was considered basically unfilmable due to the insanity of its content. But much as he loves running around Edinburgh causing carnage and bursting into tears while getting himself off, McAvoy is a proper movie star, and so quickly had to go back to doing blockbuster stuff like the following year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.
While it did give him the opportunity to play Charles Xavier, one of the world’s most powerful mutant telepaths, it sadly didn’t allow him to repeat his bawling onanism in Filth. McAvoy admitted, “I don’t have a cry-wank in X-Men, unfortunately. [But] I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think there was a little bit of Bruce in the latest incarnation of Professor X. We find him in a very bad place, a very abused place and a very mentally messed-up place, a self-abusing and self-harming kind of place. So yeah, he’s a bit more like Bruce”.
Days of Future Past certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of McAvoy tugging himself off in agony, although given that the director was Bryan Singer, it may not have been off the table completely, because it brought in $745million at the box office and got fantastic reviews.
McAvoy returned twice more as the wheelchair-bound mastermind, in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse and 2019’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but it doesn’t appear that he’s going to pop up in the Russo brothers’ Avengers: Doomsday at the end of the year, despite the world and its mother being asked to be in it.
Instead, the producers are going with the franchise’s original Professor Xavier, Patrick Stewart, who is also far less likely to suggest the inclusion of any moments of superhero self-gratification.
