James McAvoy Just Revealed a Botched Lung Biopsy Nearly Killed Him, and His Other Confession Is Even Darker

Most celebrities use a press tour to talk about their movie. James McAvoy used his to tell the world he almost died, and to settle a score that has been sitting with him for more than two decades. Within 48 hours, the 47-year-old Scottish actor sat down for two very different conversations, and both of them left jaws on the floor.

On Tuesday, he appeared on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast and revealed something he had never told publicly before: a routine lung biopsy went so wrong that he spent weeks in a hospital bed, with doctors running out of options. A day earlier, on Monday’s Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, he named no names but painted a vivid picture of being bullied on his very first day as a professional actor, on the set of one of the most famous television shows ever made.

Two confessions. Two decades apart. And both of them explain something about the actor millions know as Professor X, as Kevin Wendell Crumb, and as Mr. Tumnus.

The Night His Lungs Collapsed

The medical scare started the way these stories always start: with something that was supposed to be routine. Doctors had spotted a shadow on McAvoy’s lung and wanted to take a closer look. The fear, he admitted on the podcast, was that it could be cancer.

The good news was that it was not cancer. The bad news, in his words, was that the biopsy itself was botched. Two days later, McAvoy was at home, alone, when his lungs collapsed in bed in the middle of the night.

“I was on my own as well, so it was crazy,” he told Shepard, still sounding a little stunned at the memory.

What followed was two to three weeks in a hospital, with doctors trying everything they could think of to get his lungs working again. Nothing worked. He remembered his team laying out their last resort: major surgery, cutting him open “big style,” and washing out his lungs, as if with dish soap. It is the kind of sentence that stays with a person forever.

He Was Supposed to Become The Beast

What makes the story even wilder is the timing. This was not happening to some anonymous patient with an empty calendar. McAvoy was supposed to be getting into the shape of his life. He had signed on to reprise his role as Kevin Wendell Crumb in Glass, the 2019 sequel to Split, and this time he would spend most of the movie as Crumb’s most fearsome personality: The Beast.

Unlike Split, where the character stayed mostly in the shadows, The Beast would be out in broad daylight. McAvoy knew he needed to look the part. So while still recovering, he told director M. Night Shyamalan to get him a trainer.

Shyamalan offered a normal gym trainer. McAvoy told him that would not cut it. He needed someone who could make him look like a figure from mythology. He needed the real thing.

The first four weeks were pure rehabilitation. McAvoy could walk, he said, but he could not run, could not cycle, could not jog. His trainer rebuilt him with functional movement work, then started piling on the muscle fast. Between the hospital bed and the weight room, he went from nearly dying to playing one of the most physically imposing characters on screen that year. He never told the full story publicly until this week.

The First Day That Started With Laughter

If the podcast confession was about his body, the Monday night confession was about his soul. On Watch What Happens Live, during a game called Spill the IMDb-Tea, Andy Cohen showed McAvoy an old cast photo from Band of Brothers, the legendary 2001 HBO miniseries about Easy Company in World War II.

McAvoy was 22 years old, fresh out of acting school, and this was his first day as a professional actor. He had been cast as Private First Class James W. Miller in the fourth episode, “Replacements.” His first scene was one of those big group moments, with tons of actors crowded into a bar.

Here was the problem. The rest of the cast had been filming for nine or ten months. Most of them had one line in one episode and one line ten episodes later. Then McAvoy walks in for a single episode and he has an arc, and scenes, and tons of lines. They were not thrilled.

“One of the guys in that picture decided to bully me,” McAvoy said. He described how the man gathered his buddies and they simply stood there, pointing at him and laughing, for about three minutes. Cohen called the moment “terrible,” and he was right.

The One Name He Would Not Say

The internet, being the internet, immediately started guessing. McAvoy knew that would happen, which is exactly why he played it smart. He refused to name the bully. He did, however, answer the one question everyone was silently asking: no, it was not David Schwimmer.

Schwimmer, the Friends star who played Captain Sobel in the miniseries, was not in the photo Cohen showed, and McAvoy confirmed he had nothing to do with it. Every other man in that picture is now a suspect in the court of public opinion, which is probably why McAvoy was so careful about the wording. He told the story, he told the truth as he remembers it, and he left the detective work to everyone else.

And here is the part of the story that redeems it. McAvoy was not alone for long. Two people on that set saw what was happening and acted. Dexter Fletcher, who has since become a successful director, and the Scottish actor Robin Laing pulled him aside that day and said, “Come hang with us, man.”

A small act of kindness, remembered 25 years later. McAvoy still talks about it like it happened yesterday. Asked to rate the experience, he gave that first day a two out of ten. The rest of Band of Brothers, he said, was a nine.

Why He Is Talking Now

Neither of these stories came out of nowhere. McAvoy is in the middle of a press tour for the most personal project of his career: his directorial debut, California Schemin’. The film tells the improbably true story of two aspiring rappers from Dundee, Scotland, who spent three years pretending to be a Californian hip-hop duo called Silibil N’ Brains just to be taken seriously by the music industry.

It is a story about two working-class Scottish lads faking it until they made it, and for McAvoy, a working-class kid from Glasgow who grew up to be one of the biggest actors in the world, it is clearly personal. The film premiered at TIFF, earned strong reviews, opened in UK cinemas in April, and just hit US theaters on October 9, with a wider expansion through late October.

Most actors would pick one of these stories for a press tour and save the other for the memoir. McAvoy dropped both in 48 hours. No pretense, no polish. Just the truth about the night he almost did not survive, and the day he almost quit.

Further reading: For more on McAvoy’s film work, see how Tom Hiddleston traded Loki for Everest in Tenzing. If comeback stories are your thing, Nivea’s cancer remission announcement is worth a read. And for another cast reunion story, check out the New Girl cast’s first red carpet together in eight years.

Sources: Page Six, Entertainment Weekly.