James McAvoy on The Conspirator and the Trick to an American Accent

Scottish actor/heartthrob/all-around nice guy James McAvoy returns to screens this weekend in The Conspirator, director Robert Redford's true-life tale of a Southern woman charged with conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. As her uneasy, Civil War-hero public defender Frederick Aiken, McAvoy navigates the scorched terrain of American life immediately after Lincoln -- an era of Washington paranoia, family ruin and, for Aiken, anyway, principles worth fighting for.

It's all very 19th-century Law & Order: D.C. -- period procedural meets courtroom intrigue -- while reflecting contemporary controversies around some of the indefinitely detained suspects implicated in the 9/11 attacks. Movieline briefly caught up with McAvoy this week to talk about finding a needle of a character in a historical haystack and making Frederick Aiken his own.

[For those unfamiliar with the story of Aiken and his client Mary Surratt, some minor movie spoilers follow.]

When we last spoke, for The Last Station, you'd mentioned the historical and cultural catching up you'd done in preparation for your role. What did you find yourself doing for The Conspirator?

I kind of embarked on a fruitless search to find information about my character, Frederick Aiken. And it was fruitless, unfortunately, because there's so little about him. At the premiere at the Ford Theater the other night, one of the historians that the American Film Company employed -- he's a lovely guy -- he gave me this sort of dossier with all the information he could find. And it was fairly substantial, but it took about two years to get all that. That was a little bit of a bummer. I ended up having to take the facts about him -- which were few -- and sort of serve the story instead of really trying to figure out who this guy was. You just couldn't figure that much out.

So what did you do?

Well, the facts of where he was, when, and what he did and what he said in the courtroom -- we know all that. And I was able to read the transcription of his final summary, which is about 5,000 pages long in real life, and of course last only about 90 seconds in the film. That was tremendously helpful. He kinda screwed up a lot throughout the entire trial, succeeding in incriminating his client almost every time he opened his mouth. But while this final summary, I think, is quite convoluted with all this legal jargon from 150 years ago, at the same time it's beautiful and poetic as well. It basically got her off. It saved her life -- until the president overturned the judge's [writ].

I tend to think of Robert Redford as more impressionistic on the set, whether in front of or behind the camera. How much did he actually want you to know for the role?

We both wanted me to know as much as I could, of course, but we ultimately accepted the fact that we couldn't know that much. The thing that we both really picked up on was that he left the law almost immediately after this trial. And he died very young -- he died in his 40s. We kind of thought, "Let's take what we can from that." This trial is momentous for him, and it changes him in a fundamental way. It kind of cripples his ability to fight in that system. He gave it everything he had, and he wasn't always the best at it. But he really threw his whole heart and soul into it, and it didn't work -- even though it should have. So I think he just wanted to get out of that system. And then he became the first editor of The Washington Post. He became a journalist. I think that speaks volumes about him.

But [Redford] was fairly free with me. He let me go the direction that I wanted to go, but he was always there to tell me when something felt superfluous. Basically his thing with actors is to simplify -- give you little notes or whatever.

You make an American accent sound easy here. What's your trick? How do you practice?

Literally, it's just listening to a lot of Americans and copy them and try to do it as well as you can.

But this happened 150 years ago. Are you accounting for that?

The accent of 150 years ago would be incredibly different that the one people in this film do, but you can't really help it unless you sit down with all the actors and say, "All right, listen: We're going to sound colonial, still." But the place that Frederick Aiken came from and grew up in was a heavily Scottish part of Vermont -- Aiken being a Scottish name and everything. I think his father was a first-generation Scottish immigrant. His accent apparently would have been quite affected by those roots and by that ethnicity, I suppose. But there was no real question about getting that in the film, unfortunately.

It comes through!

Well, it's always that question when you're telling a period story: Do you tell the story well, or are you so concerned with details that aren't necessarily helpful for telling the story. Do you know what I mean? Accent-wise, it was kind of general American of the modern day, if I'm being honest -- with a slightly more formal sentence construction.

Congratulations on becoming a father last year. How has fatherhood changed your perspective on work -- specifically your choices and the volume of work you do?

It hasn't, really. I still take work if I think it's good. If I like the script, I'll do it. If I don't, I won't. I don't know. I tell you what it has done: It's made me want to do a lot more animated films that I can show to my son one day. And maybe, when he's 8 years old, his friends will think his dad is really cool, perhaps. And I you think of your career slightly less. But that's about it, really.

[Top photo: FilmMagic]