James McAvoy names surprising decade-old film that still earns him money: ‘The first cheque was bonkers’ - The Independent

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Award-winning actor James McAvoy has starred in several tentpole movies across his decades-long career, but the one film that earns him the most money in residuals may surprise you.

The Scottish star, 47, spoke about the most lucrative roles of his 30 years in the business during a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

Speaking to host Josh Horowitz, McAvoy named the 2016 horror film Split as “the only” film in his oeuvre that pays “consistently.”

Released 10 years ago, the M Night Shyamalan-directed movie saw McAvoy play a man with dissociative identity disorder who abducts three teenage girls, including Casey (played by Anya Taylor Joy), from a mall parking lot and imprisons them in an underground space.

The film, which was released by Blumhouse Productions, was made on a modest budget of $9m, but went on to take $278.5m at the box office.

“You get the odd check for, you know, a couple 100 quid here or sometimes you get checks for 25 cents, and you’re like, ‘It literally costs more to post this than it did for me to cash it,’” explained McAvoy. “But the only one that really consistently pays for me is Split.”

Speaking about how the film went on to become so profitable, he added: “I think it was made for like $6m or something like that? And let’s say they spent 30m advertising it.

“In our first weekend, we made 40m, so we were in profit. Our first residual check came at the end of the first weekend. It was bonkers.”

That fact may surprise fans of McAvoy whose career is filled with other arguably more illustrious and notable roles such as The Last King of Scotland, for which he won a Bafta, Atonement with Keira Knightley, The Chronicles of Narnia, It: Chapter Two, and five films in the X-Men franchise, in which he played Professor X.

That said, upon release, Split did earn generally favourable reviews from critics who praised McAvoy’s mutable performance as a man living with 23 distinct identities for several years, including that of a nine-year-old boy Hedwig and a terrifying superman entity called The Beast.

The film, which attracted some criticism from people who accused it of stigmatising mental illness, currently holds a 79 per cent rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Although not advertised as such, the movie was a sequel to Shyamalan’s 2000 superhero film Unbreakable, starring McAvoy, Bruce Willis, and Samuel L Jackson. Split was followed by the 2018 sequel Glass, the final instalment in the trilogy, which combined the casts of its two predecessors.

McAvoy said he learnt a lot from Shyamalan when working with the director on the franchise, stating: “The thing I took away from him is his preparedness.

“He made that film [Split], and Glass, on incredibly modest budgets, and very focused on how he would maximise his day and maximise his shots and maximise what he got out of the story by just being incredibly well-prepared and being able to share that and communicate that with the crew.”

McAvoy may well have implemented those lessons as he made his directorial debut with last year’s California Schemin’, a biographical film about Scottish rap duo Silbil N’ Brains.

More recently, the actor joined the cast of Almost You, a sci-fi comedy film about AI also starring Juno Temple and Joey King.

Directed by Ted Lasso’s Matt Lipsey and currently filming in Glasgow, the film follows Phoebe, a robotics engineer who, grieving the death of her younger sister, Edie, creates a lifelike AI replica of her deceased sister.