James McAvoy reveals how he prepared for his many parts in M Night Shyamalan’s (2017) film Split in an exclusive interview.

Split, if you haven’t seen it, is a psychological thriller. It stars James McAvoy as Kevin, a guy who kidnaps three adolescent girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula), who discover that Kevin is one of McAvoy’s 23 personalities, who suffers from severe Multiple Personality Disorder. However, as the film progresses, we learn that a 24th identity is on the horizon. This identity is known as “the beast,” and it craves the flesh of the pure and unbroken as “sacred food.” Betty Buckley plays Kevin’s psychiatrist in the film.

That acting challenge was enjoyable for McAvoy since “he’s mental.”

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“It was a low-budget movie on a short schedule, so I didn’t have that luxury of doing one character a day – sometimes I was doing four, five characters a day. But I enjoy acting.

“Getting to do nine times the amount of what I usually do is nine times the work, but it was nine times the fun.”

Split is an angry, frightening nightmare, and McAvoy revels in it, playing an unsettling, threatening presence even among the ostensibly more innocent characters. He was worried when he first started reading the script that it would be another ugly genre exercise, given the psychological complexity that was to come. “That worried me,” he says, “but then as soon as Kevin came in the room as Patricia, I was like: ‘Ah, right! I’m gonna have fun with this.’ It’s not just sensational, but something that could be hopefully intriguing and compelling in a way that isn’t just edge-of-your-seat nerves.” Not to mention, for an actor’s ego is a film like this a dream gig? “Yeah, I guess so,” he laughs. “It is for me! There was the opportunity to flex many muscles and employ all the dexterity you can muster.”

McAvoy has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most diverse actors in the 12 years since his breakthrough performance as Steve McBride in the hit British series Shameless. He is best known as either Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men in one of Marvel’s biggest comic book franchises, or Robbie Turner, the tragically mistreated hero of Ian McEwan’s World War I love story Atonement, depending on the audience.

He co-starred with Forest Whitaker in the Oscar-winning film The Last King Of Scotland as a young Scottish doctor who was enslaved by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. As gutter-skimming Glaswegian cop Bruce Robertson, a graduate of the Bad Lieutenant police academy, he set fire to his reputation as a decent young man in Filth, based from Irvine Welsh’s novel, and traded Turner’s cut-glass English vowels for his own vernacular.