James McAvoy is an actor who’s best known for playing the younger version of Charles Xavier (Professor X) in the X-Men movies. What some might not know is that he’s actually a huge RPG fan, and there’s one title in particular that resonated with him so much that he became addicted and had to take drastic measures to keep it from affecting his job.
Speaking in an interview to Forbes about the release of Annapurna Interactive’s new top-down thriller, Twelve Minutes, in which he has a starring role, McAvoy revealed that he was utterly obsessed about the fourth installment of Bethesda’s popular RPG series, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
McAvoy explained how he received an Xbox 360 version of the game, which turned out to be so addicting that he’d stay up until 4 in the morning playing it. The actor admitted that he ended up turning on the stove and burning the game disc because it had started affecting his duties as an actor.
“My partner at the time bought me an Xbox 360 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” McAvoy began. “That was a kind of game I’d always been into as a kid: role-playing games, Zelda, Secret of Mana, all that kind of stuff. Like, I love fantasy role-playing games.”
“So I’m over there in Dublin. I’m, like, having to go to bed at 10pm, because I’m getting up at 6am every morning, and I’ve got tons of lines, and all that kind of stuff. And I’m just staying up until four in the morning just playing Oblivion. And I was thinking, ‘This game is sending me to Oblivion.'”
“I went to bed at 5:35am,” he continued. “My car beeped its horn outside at, like, 5:45. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I need to do something.’ So I got up and I got the disc out of the Xbox 360 and I turned the gas hob on.”
“I just put the disc on it and just watched it sort of, like, singe and melt a little bit. And I was like, “Right, we’re done, we’re over, never again!'”
The experience led to McAvoy taking a decade-long break from gaming, but he got sucked back in thanks to his young son, who got him into EA’s FIFA games. McAvoy has also been enjoying Call of Duty: Warzone and playing battle royale with his friends as of late.
“During the pandemic, me and my boys, we’re all 40-something dudes with gray hair, bald spots, and all sorts of shit,” McAvoy said. “We now talk every two or three nights, playing Warzone and we talk about life, love, everything while getting absolutely annihilated by 12-year-old children from other countries.”
“It’s been a bit of a lifesaver during the pandemic when we couldn’t hang out. We’ve been actually spending way more time than we ever did before the pandemic. It’s been amazing.”
McAvoy didn’t say whether he had tried Skyrim yet.
While speaking to me during an interview about the release of Twelve Minutes, McAvoy remembered a moment in 2007, when he was in his late 20s, when filming Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway.Â
Source: Forbes