After taking his acting game to new heights in the Oscar nominated film Atonement in 2007, it was a foregone conclusion that we'd be seeing a lot more of Scottish born actor James McAvoy. The same year, McAvoy was voted one of People Magazine's "Sexiest Men Alive," which made the mushroom cloud of fame and celebrity surrounding the young actor even bigger. Although McAvoy will next be seen in the upcoming historical drama The Last Station, the first stop after Atonement was shooting the action packed graphic novel to film adaptation Wanted with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman in which he plays a reluctant assassin trained to seek bloody vengeance.

With Wanted set to bow in theaters on June 28, James McAvoy sat down with journalists at the film's recent press junket to talk life after Atonement, being forced to kiss Angelina Jolie, how he's perceived in Hollywood, and whether the rumors of his involvement in The Hobbit are true.

James McAvoy on training to become Wesley:

"You know, there’s a lot of physical training that went into it, the kind of usual stuff that I suppose always happens in these movies, where you go to the gym, which isn’t really my kind of bag at all. But I did that for quite a while and we maintained that throughout the entire shoot. There was a lot of fight training with the stunt team. And my stunt double was a three-time world kick-boxing champion and he took me for kick-boxing sessions every morning, and that was exceptional. To be able to be trained by a champion in anything is cool, whether it’s chess, checkers or kick-boxing, but I was lucky enough to have the latter. And then on top of that we had gun training and stuff, which I was completely new to and that was probably the hardest thing for me because I found it very hard not to blink when I was shooting, which I hear a lot of people do when they start shooting. That was the toughest one for me, I‘d say, and that took the most time."

McAvoy on the satisfaction he gets from a movie like Wanted:

"The satisfaction I get out of watching it is different, because I find watching something like Atonement very difficult to watch, partly because I’m very emotionally attached to that character still and what happens to him is so incredibly awful. Whereas watching something like this, as much as some of the things that happen to him are incredibly awful, it’s a piece of entertainment. And it’s kind of hilarious watching myself do those things and being made to look much cooler than I could ever possibly be. But also, watching myself be sadder and more depressed than I could ever possibly be and, even that as a piece of drama, would be very upsetting. But it’s almost comedic his depression at the beginning, so it’s fun. It’s a much easier experience watching a film like this definitely, without a doubt."

On doing an American accent:

"I think my country has only got five million people in it and we have a TV show called Taggart and we have a TV show called Take the High Road, which was discontinued very recently and it was replaced by a show called River City. Other than that, we don’t produce very much TV or film, actually, anymore in my country. So we watch a lot of American film and television, an epic amount of that, and we watch an epic amount of English film and television. And I just think that’s it. I think that’s why we can do you and people find it hard, you don’t hear us all of the time. But I’ve grown up listening to your accent everyday and you don’t grow up listening to mine, so that just makes it really easy to kind of - not easy, it wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve had to do. Doing an American accent, it still presented challenges of course. I find the word "ghetto friend" really hard to say in an American accent and I ended up having to fix that in ADR, if I’m being honest. But I think that’s why we can do it. That’s why some of us can do it anyway, you know.

Wanted: Dodging Bullets with James McAvoy Page 2