James McAvoy

McAvoy's early career was built almost entirely on television. Through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, he accumulated credits in British TV productions — including the thriller State of Play, the science fiction miniseries Frank Herbert's Children of Dune, and the Channel 4 BAFTA-winning series Shameless (TMDB). Solid work. Not yet the stuff of international profiles, but the kind of foundation that holds up later. His feature film career shifted into gear in 2003 with a lead role in Bollywood Queen, followed by another lead in Inside I'm Dancing (2004), and then the role that introduced him to global audiences: Mr. Tumnus, the faun, in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) (TMDB). It's a supporting part, technically, but it's the kind of role that sticks — warm, melancholy, morally conflicted in a way that kids sense even if they can't articulate it. The Last King of Scotland (2006) and Atonement (2007) then confirmed what the industry had started to suspect: that McAvoy wasn't just a character actor filling space around bigger stars, but someone who could anchor a serious film and hold his own against anyone. The X-Men franchise gave him a decade-long throughline — First Class (2011), Days of Future Past (2014), Apocalypse (2016), Deadpool 2 (2018), Dark Phoenix (2019) — while he kept taking detours into riskier material (TMDB). Filth (2013), the Jon S. Baird adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel, won him Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards (TMDB). Then Split (2016) arrived and recalibrated how people thought about him entirely. Playing 23 personalities isn't a gimmick if you can actually pull it off — and the critical response suggested he did. He reprised the role in Glass (2019) (TMDB). Since 2019, he's been Lord Asriel Belacqua in the BBC/HBO fantasy series His Dark Materials (TMDB), a long-form commitment that's kept him in prestige television alongside his film work. Hard to say if there's a more versatile working actor in his generation right now.