James McAvoy opened up about a life-threatening health scare that left him hospitalized for several weeks after what he described as a botched medical procedure.
During a recent appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, the 47-year-old actor recalled how he pushed his body to its limits for his transformation into the Beast in 2019’s “Glass” after first recovering from a serious infection and collapsed lungs.
“I’d actually been in hospital and I had a lung puncture because… they saw a shadow in my lung, so they wanted to biopsy it to see if it was cancer, which it wasn’t, which was great,” McAvoy said.
“But that was botched, and I nearly died,” he continued. “I was at home two days later and my lungs just collapsed in bed one night, and I was on my own as well, so it was crazy.”
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The “X-Men: First Class” star said he spent two or three weeks in the hospital while doctors worked unsuccessfully to clear his lungs.
“They tried everything to clean out,” McAvoy recalled. “Nothing was working. So, they were like, ‘We’re going to need to cut you open big-style. Go in with like soapy, like dish soap basically, and just like clean you out, scoop it all out.'”
McAvoy recalled that after his medical ordeal, he underwent an intense process for the next four or five months as he bulked up to reprise his role in “Glass.” In the M. Night Shyamalan-directed movie, the actor portrayed Kevin Wendell Crumb, who suffers from severe dissociative identity disorder (DID) with 24 distinct personalities.
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McAvoy first played Wendell in 2016’s “Split,” which was the sequel to 2000’s “Unbreakable.” In “Split,” Wendell’s 24th personality “The Beast,” who possesses superhuman strength, speed, durability and pain suppression, became the central threat after emerging toward the end of the film.
“Unlike ‘Split,’ I was the Beast, like most of the movie,” McAvoy recalled. “So I was like, ‘I’m really going to need to do the real thing. I’m going to need to go for it.'”
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“I remember saying to [Shyamalan] like, ‘You’re going to need to get me a trainer,'” he said.
McAvoy explained that Shyamalan offered to hire a trainer from “the local gym,” but he rejected that idea.
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McAvoy said he had worked with trainers from local gyms before but needed someone who could transform his physique into that of a figure from Greek mythology.
“The guy that worked with me was amazing,” he added. “He didn’t move in with me, but he was just with me a lot and kind of regulated what I ate and trained me just right.”
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“For the first four weeks, he rehabilitated me. I could walk, but I couldn’t run, couldn’t cycle, couldn’t jog,” McAvoy recalled. “So he did a lot of rehabilitation and, sort of, functional movement, and then put the pounds on me really fast.”
McAvoy recently claimed that he was bullied on the set of the hit HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers.”
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While recently appearing on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen,” McAvoy was asked to rate his experience working on different projects, and when he was shown a picture of the show’s cast, he recalled that one of his co-stars organized a group to mock him on set.
“On my first day on set, there was a ton of actors,” he began. “It was one of those scenes with everybody in it, and we’re all at a bar, and I had a scene. And all these guys were in it for nine months, 10 months, and they get one line in one episode, and one line 10 episodes later. They were all pissed. I come in for one episode, and I’ve got an arc and scenes. I’ve got tons of lines.”
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When the photo, which featured many of his co-stars from the show, flashed on the screen, McAvoy confirmed that a specific actor was in the photo.
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“So, one of the guys in that picture decided to bully me on my first day as a professional actor out of acting school,” he said. “He got him and his buddies to just stand pointing at me and laugh at me for like three minutes.”
While he didn’t name names, the photo featured Donnie Wahlberg, Kirk Acevedo, Scott Grimes, Neal McDonough, Adam James, Frank John Hughes, Philip Barantini and Ross McCall.
McAvoy added that not everyone on set participated in the bullying, saying Dexter Fletcher and Robin Laing “took me aside, and they were like, ‘Come hang with us, man.'”
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He went on to say that he would give the overall experience on the show a nine out of 10 but noted “that day felt like a two.”
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“Band of Brothers” was a 10-part miniseries that aired on HBO in 2001 and told the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army. The show’s storylines were based on interviews with real-life survivors of Easy Company, in addition to letters and journals of real soldiers.
After his one episode on the show, McAvoy shot to stardom with roles in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” “Wanted,” “Atonement” and in the “X-Men” franchise.