The best and biggest new shows hitting the London stage this month.
Make no mistake: James McAvoy is a straight-up ‘His Dark Materials’ stan.
‘I fucking love it!’ enthuses the Scottish actor, who plays Lord Asriel in the BBC’s blockbuster adaptation of Philip Pullman’s fantasy novels. ‘I’ve read the trilogy three times, I’ve watched the film, I’ve listened to Philip read the audiobook twice and I’ve listened to the BBC radio adaptation three times.’
The two of us are sat in a slightly ramshackle south-east London rehearsal room to talk about his return to the stage in a radical new production of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’. But with ‘His Dark Materials’ still the must-see show of the season, the loquacious, sweary, extremely *nice* Hollywood star is happy to talk through his first major TV role since ‘Shameless’.
‘A sort of posh, English, Indiana Jones type is what we were going for,’ he explains of Asriel, enigmatic aristocrat and secret father to heroine Lyra, who pursues him to the frozen north as he becomes dangerously obsessed with the magical substance dust. ‘He comes from a rigid aristocratic society. He’s been fucked by it so hard that he’s now outside of it, but he can’t just suddenly get rid of his manner.’
When McAvoy heard that Pullman’s books were being adapted for the telly, he contemplated both Asriel and American airman Lee Scoresby but assumed people wouldn’t see him as either. ‘I thought: What character can I play? There’s fucking nobody!’ Then he was hanging out with his friend, ‘His Dark Materials’ casting director Kahleen Crawford. She told him that a couple of actors had let them down and they needed to fill the role of Asriel, pronto. McAvoy enthusiastically shared some thoughts on the character. A few days later, he received a phone call: ‘She said: “Do you want to play Lord Asriel on Monday?” This was Friday. And I said yes.’
Thus was launched not only the definitive take on Pullman’s brooding lord, but also numerous think pieces extolling McAvoy’s new silver fox look and, above all, Asriel’s knitwear. I raise this half-jokingly but actually it turns out that McAvoy really does dig his woollies.
‘Recently I got very into tucked-in knitted jumpers with a shirt and tie and [‘His Dark Materials’ director] Tom Hooper thought Asriel should be somebody who always wears a shirt and tie. I was like: I’m up for that.’
