James McAvoy: ‘I've been made to feel I'm not good-looking enough’

He’s giving off intense bolts of energy; Lloyd is calmer. “There’s this weird feeling as a performer that I’ve always had, which is when I get a job, if it’s movies or TV, I’m generally waiting for a scene where I get to prove why I got the job,” says McAvoy. “And quite often, that doesn’t come along straight away, and you can sense the producers and directors are like, ‘When’s he gonna bring it?’ And you’re like, give me a scene to f------ bring it, and I’ll bring it.’ In theatre, I’m just waiting to get a run at it.”

Both men are from working-class backgrounds. Lloyd grew up above his mother’s fancy-dress shop in the Dorset town of Poole; his stepfather was a clown called Uncle Funny, and they had a lodger who was a snake-charmer. McAvoy’s father was a builder who left his mother, a psychiatric nurse, when their son was seven; he was brought up mostly by his grandparents in the notorious Drumchapel area of Glasgow. Early in his career, McAvoy was known for having a hard edge. “I think I was always ready to fight, and ready to argue and always looking for injustice as a young man,” he says. “I sound like an absolute f------ nightmare…”

Does he still regard himself as working class? “I totally live my life as probably an upper-middle-class person, but it’s what I came from and it’s what formed me. And the lack of opportunity that I experienced as a young person is something that I will never forget, never stop recognising around me.”

Lloyd also bears the stamp of his childhood. “I absolutely feel that my background is a part of who I am and what I do as a director,” he says. “Not least, because I do believe that theatre and all of culture should be made open and inclusive and accessible to everybody, including those people who cannot afford it. And what’s absolutely motoring that is my experience from a low-income family, whose siblings do working-class jobs to this day.”

They started talking about doing Cyrano together more than two years ago. Lloyd asked playwright Martin Crimp to create a free adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s enduringly popular play (written in 1897 but set in the 1640s), which Crimp completed in a matter of weeks, working directly from the French. Its witty, swashbuckling hero – with the nose so big that no one dares mention it for fear of getting swashed – has rarely been offstage since the original Paris production ran for more than 300 consecutive nights. Notable performances in the role have included Ralph Richardson and Derek Jacobi. The cinema, too, has seen many Cyranos since it was first filmed for the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, Gérard Depardieu and Steve Martin (in Roxanne) among them.

Lloyd has directed the play before – on Broadway in 2012 with Douglas Hodge as Cyrano – garnering great reviews, but, he says, “it was a production of the play that you would expect… big prosthetic nose, big hat, big plume… there’s this whole performance legacy that we’re trying to strip away”. Whether the new production will feature a huge nose remains to be seen.

“It’s definitely in the collective subconscious, this play,” adds McAvoy, “it’s the touchstone for all love triangles and tragi-rom-coms.” It sets up a romantic bind, in which Cyrano loves the beautiful Roxanne, who in turn is smitten with a handsome young cadet. Out of love for her, Cyrano uses his poetic gifts to put words into the mouth of her would-be wooer.

Is this the best moment, I ask, to be staging a play about seduction by means of deception? “Yes,” says McAvoy instantly. “If that is something that is in the air – that one half of the two genders are fed up with the way they’re getting treated – I think that’s the best time to do a play showing somebody being manipulated.”

“Also, I don’t think that the men in the play are celebrated for that action,” adds Lloyd.

They have a noticeable tendency to back up and support one another’s arguments, although they tease each other a little bit. They’re mates offstage, too. Lloyd visited McAvoy on the set of the BBC’s His Dark Materials in Montreal. McAvoy is currently starring as the commanding Lord Asriel, while Lloyd’s eldest son, Lewin (he and wife Suzie Toase have three boys), appears as Lyra’s friend Roger.

McAvoy confirms claims that he took the part at very short notice, after two other actors dropped out, but refuses to name them. “It’s not nice when you start comparing, oh, what if so-and-so had done it? It’s not particularly nice for me and it’s not particularly nice for the other actor.”

He’s touchy, too, when I ask how it was acting with his ex-wife, Anne-Marie Duff, who also appears in the drama – “I’m totally not talking about that!” They first met when they played a couple in Channel 4’s Shameless, early in their careers; both were ablaze with brilliance in it. They were married for 10 years before their divorce in 2016, and have a son, Brendan, who’s nine. McAvoy doesn’t comment on reports that he has recently got remarried in secret, to his girlfriend Lisa Liberati, who also works in the film industry.

He will talk about the paucity of working-class dramas – and comedies – on TV since Shameless… “Comedy seems to want to exist, on TV and film, in a place free of any social realities. It’s almost like we can’t be funny if we’re worrying about how we’re going to pay the gas. Friends is like that. They never had to pay rent. Comedy’s middle class, and it drives me bonkers. When was the last time you saw a working-class rom-com?”

And even though McAvoy won’t talk about those close to him, he can be very frank about himself. When I ask if he can relate to Cyrano’s acute self-consciousness about a body part, McAvoy shows me a scar he has on his nose from trying to self-operate on the worst of his teenage acne – “I was like, well, I’ll just cut it out with a razor blade. F------ disaster! …everybody made fun of me” – then he starts to delve into how being an actor inevitably entails being objectified.

“Sometimes you’re made to feel like you’re not good-looking enough to get a role,” he says. “I was told once by an actress that it was an interesting choice, my casting, because nobody would usually believe that I would be with somebody like her. That was a kick in the nuts! I was like, ‘All right, now I’ve got to pretend that I really like you for eight more weeks. This is going to be really tough, because you’re so far up yourself.’ It got really interesting, that relationship.

“And,” he continues, “as a shorter man” – he’s 5ft 7in – “I sometimes get told I’m too short for a role. Or even when I get a role, I’m made to feel like, well, of course, we’re going to have to do something about that.” Cyrano’s three central characters are all objectified, he says, which makes them “incredibly lonely and isolated”.

“Clearly the play has endured because everybody does have a particular insecurity,” Lloyd notes, “and that’s amplified [in it].”

I wonder if Cyrano is naive when he turns down the prospect of a patron for his poetry: all artists have to compromise with the commercial world, don’t they? By way of an answer, McAvoy rather satisfyingly quotes a line from Braveheart – “Uncompromising men are easy to admire” – adding: “They’re the people we write plays and films about… it’s thrilling to watch them burn. The energy around that type of person is electric.”

I want to know how Lloyd views the question in relation to theatre’s need for marquee names to sell a production. (His Pinter season featured Danny Dyer, he’s worked with Tom Hiddleston, Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael.) “Actually, I think that’s probably changing,” he says, pointing out that a lot of plays have been transferring to the West End recently without big names. McAvoy adds that cinema has also broken free from its dependency on stars, suggesting that “the only two genres that are really guaranteed to get an audience are superhero movies and scary movies, where having a huge star is paradoxically not helpful sometimes.”

As someone who has played Professor Charles Xavier in three X-Men films and is thus a part of the Marvel Universe – “formerly,” he interjects – is he insulted by Martin Scorsese saying that superhero films are as far from his conception of cinema as Earth is from Alpha Centauri, and essentially not an art form? “I would hope he’s watched every single one of them to make that statement,” he says. “Some of them are s--- and some of them have really moved me. I think that you’ve got to take it on a film-by-film basis.

But, he adds, “I’m not offended by it. He’s Martin Scorsese – he can say what he likes. And he’s not going to break the machine by saying it.”

Would Lloyd ever put a Marvel comic strip on stage? “Er… no.” He laughs.

So is the theatre the best place to experience what Scorsese describes as “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger”? “I’ve talked about this with actors quite a lot,” says Lloyd of the way that “sometimes you can feel the audience breathing with you. That’s what I’m trying to search for, that absolute connection between an actor and an audience member. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”

McAvoy makes the point that “you can go and see a star in an ‘easy play’, and you’re like, ‘Anybody could do this. Why am I coming to see you, the star, in this play? You’d better do something.’ ” Expect fireworks.

Cyrano de Bergerac opens at the Playhouse Theatre, London WC2, on Dec 6