NEW YORK, NY.- In a cozy upstairs bar at the Harold Pinter Theater here, actor James McAvoy was talking about ritual sacrifice. The offering in question was him.
Night after night, on the stark set of Jamie Lloyds Olivier Award-winning production of Cyrano de Bergerac, McAvoy has no period plumes or prosthetics to hide behind as he plays the title role. Hes even shaved off his floppy hair, buzzed close to the scalp in a sculptural fade a sleeker look than the smooth bald pate of his X-Men character Charles Xavier, and a lot more military.
Ive always felt like theater is slightly sacrificial, McAvoy, 42, said in his Scottish burr. I think the first plays were probably some kind of sacrifice, be it animal or food-based or human even. The community coming together to watch somebody give of themselves I feel like theater has its roots in that somewhere.
Such ferocity might not seem to apply to playing Edmond Rostands gargantuan-nosed, love-struck poet, a role long trapped in the fusty amber of theatrical tradition. But in Lloyds lucid, funny, intimate modern-dress production, from a new adaptation by Martin Crimp, McAvoys verse-spitting Cyrano is like no Cyrano youve ever seen, pugnacious and gentle and explosive and still, with a profound well of tenderness just beneath his skin.
Its an astonishingly counterintuitive performance, and when the audience falls into rapt, pin-drop silence during the balcony scene as happened at the packed show I saw this month, and as McAvoy told me, without evident vanity, happens generally it is the kind of thing that can occur only when an actor has an entire room perched in the palm of his hand.
If, a few days after the West End opening, he looked fatigued around the edges when he sat for an interview, well, ritual sacrifice will do that to you, apparently. The thing is, though, he believes in its necessity.
Thats when I think theater is really, really thrilling, he said. You can do it physically; you can do it emotionally. But youve got to leave something on the stage and never get it back.
This Cyrano de Bergerac, whose original West End run ended in February 2020, was meant to come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music that spring. Deemed ravishing by critic Ben Brantley, and long delayed by the pandemic, it will arrive there at last on April 5 for a seven-week run, after more than a month in London and a week-plus in Glasgow, McAvoys hometown. The BAM Harvey engagement will be his New York stage debut.
Captured on film for National Theater Live before the industry shutdown, Cyrano is the fourth stage play in McAvoys long collaboration with Lloyd, which started with Richard Greenbergs Three Days of Rain in 2009, followed by Macbeth in 2013 and Peter Barnes The Ruling Class in 2015.
After the many pandemic months when McAvoy stuck close to home in London, acting in the BBC lockdown dramedy Together and the Audible audio adaptation of The Sandman (We did about a thousand episodes, it felt like, from my bedroom), returning to Cyrano is what he wants right now.
I do think I am at heart a storyteller, he said, and I think I get to tell stories better onstage. The work I do in film and TV is more interested in capturing moments of truthfulness that some other storyteller then edits together and puts music on and changes the story, or doesnt, or chooses how I tell the story, cuts my bit of that story out. I still love film and television acting; dont get me wrong. But onstage, its just a purer form of storytelling.
And in Lloyds Cyrano stripped back to center the actors, their voices, Crimps text its purer still. Elements like props have been jettisoned, so that savagery happens with words, not swords, while the costumes are based on what the actors wear in their regular lives.
Well, not Cyranos jeans, which McAvoy called way too weird and engineered for me. But the shiny down jacket is a tighter version of his own, the T-shirt is like one he used to wear to rehearsals, and the brown biker boots are duplicates of the pair he had on as he spoke, extending his left boot for inspection. So the line between actor and character blurs.
Were sort of bringing ourselves, he said, and in a nearly hourlong interview, it was the only time when his assertive posture turned a little recessive, with a touch of a slouch. Im bringing a much lonelier, sorrowful and violently angry version of myself, but it is myself.
That body language might have been a flicker of shyness. Or maybe he was just feeling comfortable in himself.
McAvoy and Lloyd had already agreed to do the play, and the Jamie Lloyd Company had already commissioned Crimp to write the new version, when Lloyd who directed a conventional Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway in 2012 had a brainstorm that he ran past McAvoy.
I remember it very vividly because it was actually on the set of His Dark Materials, said Lloyd, whose son Lewin played missing child Roger Parslow on the HBO fantasy series opposite McAvoy as Lord Asriel. We were in this freezing cold, very, very dark TV studio, in a tent one of those kind of pop-up tents they put people in when youre waiting. I go, By the way, I have this idea about Cyrano de Bergerac. We have to scrap the nose. I cant bear the thought of you being in a big prosthetic nose. And he just totally got it.
As McAvoy recalls, his initial response was puzzlement, because isnt the play about a nose? But once Lloyd explained his take, that it is truly about people who are objectified for their appearance and isolated as a result, McAvoy was all in even if fake Cyrano noses had never much bothered him, and even if it had never completely made sense to him that an outsize nose would be an obstacle to love.
The truth is, I think even if he did have some big old conk like its described in the play, there would be somebody out there that would find it desperately attractive, he said. Man, theres kink for everything.
Still, McAvoy hadnt been interested in doing a standard-issue Cyrano.
One of the things that I really like about this version, he said, is that its less about the flamboyancy of these gallivanting, panache-crazed musketeer poets, and its more of a study of masculinity and at times toxic masculinity, a soldiering culture almost, and its still about a poet. Its still about somebody whos obsessed with words. I loved that I was finally seeing a production that was examining people who are beautiful and light and whimsical with words, and they kill people.
In an inadvertent overlap of star-powered productions, the Lloyd-McAvoy version first opened in the West End in the autumn of 2019 during the off-Broadway run of the stage musical Cyrano, starring Peter Dinklage. The return of Lloyds production coincides with the release of the big-screen version starring Dinklage, which swaps a large nose for a short stature as Cyranos marginalizing physical feature.
The movie is directed by Joe Wright, who directed McAvoy in his breakthrough role in the 2007 film Atonement. When McAvoy said he planned to see Wrights Cyrano soon, I asked if it would get in his head.
No. No, no, no. Not at all, he said.
McAvoy by now is so seemingly secure in his performance that he wasnt even thrown by getting mild COVID-19 in January and missing the whole second week of rehearsals.
If we hadnt done the show two years previously, I think Id be [expletive] panicking, he said. But as it was, it was OK.
He does have an understudy, Joseph Langdon [expletive] brilliant, according to McAvoy, who is casually sweary. But having had the virus so recently, McAvoy may be less likely to get reinfected in the near future.
Im triple-shotted, he said. So yeah, there is a sense of relief almost that, at least for the run of the show anyway, I think I might be all right. But you never know.
He is the main box office draw, the primary reason people unfamiliar with Lloyds work, including his chic 2019 revival of Harold Pinters Betrayal in the West End and on Broadway, would take a chance on the production. And in a large company, McAvoy is the sole star.
I was pretty interested to see how that would be, said Evelyn Miller, a new cast member who plays Roxane, the bookish beauty whom Cyrano loves unrequitedly. Hes so famous, and you kind of think that that must affect him to some degree. But honestly, hes just so normal and kind and down to earth, and Im fully aware that he has a huge amount more pressure on his shoulders. You know, lots of people are buying tickets to see him.
Eben Figueiredo, who plays Christian, Roxanes handsome yet ineloquent beloved, said that by doing things as simple as asking castmates about their lives and, prepandemic, going along to the pub with them, McAvoy stood out from other big-name actors he has worked with.
I think sometimes theyre super aware of the gap that theyve created in their own mind between us and them, Figueiredo said. Its harder to, I guess, bridge what seems like an air of superiority, and that has never, ever come into play with James.
Giving interviews is another part of an actors job, and McAvoy dispatched that duty agreeably enough. But he has a global film stars wariness of the media and hyperawareness that the slightest personal detail given away for public consumption could come back to bite him.
That happened this month when he confirmed to The Guardian the fact of his recent marriage to Lisa Liberati, an American he met while filming M. Night Shyamalans 2017 horror movie Split. (Liberati was an assistant to Shyamalan.) Numerous other outlets then picked up the news and spun it into headlines about McAvoys secret nuptials a distortion that he sardonically batted down.
We didnt get secretly married, he said. We just didnt rush to tell the newspapers as soon as we got married. I feel like everyone gets secretly married, dont they? Because they dont tell the papers. If thats what secret means.
On the professional front, McAvoy did let one worry bubble up that this Cyrano, with its range of British accents, his included, wont be legible to audiences in Brooklyn.
My accents quite strong, he said. You just go, I hope they can hear through that and not go, What is this strange noise coming out of this mans mouth?
So he also hopes that the rhythms of the piece and the rhymes of its verse will help unaccustomed ears to adjust.
Because it would be a shame, he said. Its the clearest storytelling Ive ever been involved in, bar none film, TV, theater, whatever. I just hope that isnt a barrier, do you know what I mean?
For what its worth, I did. Onstage and off, I understood him just fine.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.