“The perfect condition for an actor to have to portray,” he told the press. After breakthrough roles in a pair of award-winning dramas aimed at art houses - The Last King Of Scotland and Atonement- the 29-year-old said Wanted, which is adapted from a violent comic book series, spoke to his inner boy. “I got to satisfy the 16-year-old boy’s yearning to break things and jump up and down and beat people up,” McAvoy told the press. “It was a very physical film and I had to get fit and go to the gym, which I don’t really enjoy.” McAvoy’s character Wesley is a sloped-shoulder slacker who wallows in the misery of a cubicle-bound job, an overbearing boss and a cheating girlfriend.

Then Fox (Jolie) shows up to tell Wes that greater things await him and he must take over for his long-lost father, killed while working for the Fraternity, a centuries-old league of supersensory assassins. Fox and Fraternity leader Sloane (Morgan Freeman) whip Wesley into shape by beating him nearly to death so he can avenge his father’s death. The beatings are brutal, as is the emotional toll on Wesley, and McAvoy said he had to dip into his reserves to pull it all off. “You are crying your eyes out because you’ve just discovered who your father is, but you have just done 12 hours of stunts before it,” said McAvoy. “I have never quite had to balance physical stamina with acting stamina.”

McAvoy said he did around half the film’s stunts, but since filming ended 10 months ago, he hadditched the gym for the pub and substituted protein shakes with rich German food. McAvoy does a convincing American accent in Wanted, set in Chicago, but in real life the native of Glasgow doesn’t let up on his Glaswegian accent. He says he had to get “fet” (fit), enjoyed the challenges of the “scrept” (script) and worried about the “kess” (kiss) with Jolie. Much of his modest Glaswegian origin seems intact. McAvoy and his British actress wife Anne-Marie Duff are said to lead simple lives in London without celebrity trappings. “It’s not that I am interested in being grounded, I just am,” McAvoy said. “I am not wearing it like a fashion, but I get asked about it all the time.” In nine years of theatre, TV and film, McAvoy said he has had a “humungously varied career and long may it continue.”

“I hope my next movie is not an action movie, but equally I hope it is not another Atonement,” said McAvoy, who starred opposite Keira Knightley in the World War II era romance as the housekeeper’s son who is betrayed by a young girl’s lie. McAvoy has finished filming The Last Station in which he plays the secretary of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Then there’s nothing else ahead, he said, not even the rumoured role of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit by director Guillermo del Toro. “My name seems to be put in the hat by people,” he said adding, “I won’t be chasing it, but if it ever became a reality, I would let you know. I realise that’s a big one.”