“We had to work hard to make him more of a dick”: the role James McAvoy wanted to be less likeable
How do you make a character seem unlikeable when they’re sharing a screen with a notorious dictator? That was the dilemma faced by the Hollywood team behind 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, an examination of life in Uganda under the totalitarian rule of Idi Amin.
Forest Whitaker stole the show in the lead role, scooping a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for his work bringing Amin to life, but spare a thought for James McAvoy, the actual Scot at the centre of the story. McAvoy plays Nicholas Garrigan, a foreigner who becomes close with Amin and is privy to the horrors of his time in charge. Garrigan is meant to be a very sympathetic character, especially during the parts of the film where he gets brutally tortured, but his actor was very keen to keep him three-dimensional.
McAvoy spoke with The Skinny whilst promoting the film, who brought up that, despite being the “hero” of the piece, his character wasn’t actually all that nice. “I think it was important for him to be a dick,” he agreed. “We had to work hard to make him more of a dick. He was too much of a good guy, he was too forgivable in the script, and my worry was that people wouldn’t accept the story because it was just another white hero figure in Africa.” While McAvoy was quick to acknowledge that not all white people in Africa are there to do harm, he added that “if you look at our presence in the continent over the last 500 years, you definitely couldn’t sum it up as being positive so it was important for me to give an idea of that side of things.”
In the film, Garrigan is taken on as Amin’s personal doctor and witnesses first-hand the horrors of his regime, which included a mass expulsion of Asian people in 1972. Though Garrigan himself never existed, he is based on a number of real white people who lived and worked in Amin’s Uganda, including the soldier Bob Astles and Wilson Carswell, an actual Scottish doctor.
When asked if he spoke with Carswell whilst creating the character, McAvoy said that he didn’t. “We kept it very separate,” he said, before revealing, “Not many people who had anything to do with Amin wanted to talk about it.” When discussing other inspirations for Garrigan, the star also name-checked prominent British journalist Jon Snow, who spent time working in Uganda as a teenager. He also mentioned somebody “whose name I probably shouldn’t tell you”, adding that “if my character was a little bit bad, he was incredibly bad, a normal average guy from England who became the kind of guy who made a lot of people disappear.”
Getting to play a character from his own part of the world was something McAvoy enjoyed immensely, especially as he’d gotten very used to playing characters who were either English, American, Irish, or from anywhere else that wasn’t Scotland. “It was weird at first,” he confessed. “But I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad I was able to do it. I talk in my own accent, and I feel fine, but when I started to act in it, I got all tongue-tied and thought that surely I should be doing some silly English accent.”
The Last King of Scotland was more than just a critical darling; it took almost $50million from a $6million budget. Whittaker’s was the only Oscar nomination it received, but it was named Outstanding British Film at the 2007 BAFTAs.
