James McAvoy Shaved His Head For A Hilarious Reason
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James McAvoy has had a long and storied career, but the Scottish actor will forever be tied to the X-Men after portraying Professor Charles Xavier in four films. As the actor revealed during an interview, and reported by ComicBook, he took the role of Professor X a little too seriously and jumped the gun when returning for X-Men: Days of Future Past. Naturally, McAvoy thought he would be bald, fitting for the classic Professor X look, but upon reading the script for the first time, he quickly realized that he made a horrible mistake.
James McAvoy explained his new hair style as “Very close to the sides and like a jarhead.” One problem, McAvoy played the young Xavier during the 70’s, which meant instead of a bald head, he needed long, shaggy locks. Reacting to his small mistake, the star explained “At first, they were like, ‘We’ll make this work.’ I was like, ‘You can’t make this work.”
A critically and commercially successful film, Days of Future Past adapted the classic Chris Claremont storyline from Uncanny X-Men by doubling down on the involvement of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. The film’s time-travel plot wrote out the events of the Patrick Stewart led X-Men movies while laying the ground work for James McAvoy’s First Class series to take over the franchise. The following films, Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, were neither critically nor commercially successful, and now that Marvel has the rights back to the X-Men movie franchise, no one knows what’s next for the merry mutants.
When James McAvoy was asked if he will ever be coming back to Marvel, the answer was very noncommittal, “So if my time is done, I’m happy with the time that I spent and the time that I was given and if good writing comes in and people want to do stuff with me, I’ll always be open to that, but it’s got to be good.” McAvoy expressed pride in his first two films as Charles Xavier, while throwing a little shade at the second two, “I’m always going to be excited, but I do feel like I’ve had a good ending with Charles and I got to explore some really good stuff, particularly in the first two movies that I did for him as a character.”
On how Kevin Feige and the team behind the MCU might bring back the X-Men, the James McAvoy added “They’re so good at putting their stuff together. They’ll figure out where to do it, but that might not involve people who’ve done it before.” An exmaple that supports his point came in Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, when Patrick Stewart returned for a cameo as an alternate universe version of Professor X, based off of the 90’s X-Men cartoon. If the upcoming mega-crossover Secret Wars could somehow get both Stewart and McAvoy on the screen at the same time, as the same character, decades of fan anticipation will explode in theaters around the world.
James McAvoy, with hair, is currently filming The Book of Clarence, a historical film about a man in 29 A.D. trying to capitalize on the rise of Jesus Christ. Other than that, the actor has not publicly disclosed any future projects, though future involvement with the MCU at some point, is likely to happen. As it stands now, the word “Mutant” has been uttered twice, once in Ms. Marvel and again in Wakanda Forever, slowly laying the groundwork for bringing back the superheroes that protect a world that hates and fears them.
