Hollywood actor James McAvoy has no regrets about not being a screen sex symbol.

The X-Men star said his average looks saved him from being typecast as a heartthrob.

The 39-year-old will next be seen on screen in two superhero movies – Glass, playing a man with multiple personalities, and as mutant leader Professor Charles Xavier in Dark Phoenix.

McAvoy, who also starred in Atonement and Last King Of Scotland, said he’s not bitter about not having won an Oscar yet.

He said: “I’m not in the league of the better-looking actors. However, I think I have done pretty well with what has been given to me.

“Not everybody can be, or should be, the most attractive example of humanity. We need every single grade. It allows me to play a wide variety of roles.”

McAvoy, who made his film debut at 15 in the Near Room, said he is resigned to missing out on big awards.

He added: “I’ve been acting for 20 years and I’m used to people telling me I should have been nominated for this or that. What matters is getting exciting work and wanting to do it every day.”

In Glass, McAvoy returns as Kevin Wendell Crumb with Samuel L Jackson and Bruce Willis. He previously played the role in psychological horror Split.

Awkward! An interview with Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy and ITV’s Lorraine Kelly went viral over its painfully cringeworthy exchanges.

The TV host, 59, spoke to the men from central London via live satellite on Friday, January 11. She kicked things off with a question about whether it was important to watch Unbreakable and Split before seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s latest release, Glass, in which Jackson and McAvoy reprise their characters of Elijah Price and Kevin Wendall Crumb, in order for it to make sense.

“No,” Jackson quipped before McAvoy shook his head and gave an emphatic, “No.”

“It’s a wonderful standalone piece,” the Pulp Fiction star said. “Not a bad idea, but not necessary.”

Things only got worse from there, with both men taking an uncomfortably long pause before answering the host’s inquiry about the film being “not your usual sort of big, action-packed story.”

“There’s a lot going on, isn’t there?” she asked.

“It’s cerebral,” Oscar nominee Jackson finally said.

The most awkward moment of all, however, came later on, when Kelly remarked that she couldn’t believe Jackson’s age of 71 (“Thank you. I’m not sure what that means, but thank you,” he replied) and that she appreciated both his and McAvoy’s lack of vanity.

“What I love about you two, in all the movies I’ve seen you do, there’s no vanity. There’s nothing like that, you just go for, and you, whatever the part requires, it doesn’t matter how bad you have to look, how horrible you have to be, you just go for it,” she said.

McAvoy, 39, lost his cool at that point, doubling in over in laughter as Jackson turned to his costar and said: “She talking to me or you? Which one of us are you talking to, are you talking to both of us?”

“I’m talking to both of you,” Kelly said through laughs.

“You talking about our dual commitment to, we don’t care how we look?” Jackson clarified.

“Yeah, I think that’s really good ’cause it means it’s really honest,” the journalist replied.

“Oh, OK,” Jackson said, with his castmate laughing. “Thanks, love. We’ve just got really good sense of humor; that’s the only reason we’ve got love in our lives.”

Fans couldn’t handle the clip, flooding the now-disabled comments section with remarks such as, “Thank God that conversation is over, even my dogs were cringing,” and “This interview reminds me of my grandma talking to naughty children who just want to laugh at her.”

One fan stuck up for Kelly, however, tweetingOpens a New Window., “Awkward interview with Samuel L Jackson and James McAvoy on #Lorraine great when actors really sell their films during junkets…this isn’t one of those times.”

James McAvoy is synonymous with many things; Scottish actor, Hollywood superhero film star and now expert McCoy crisp sniffer.

Dom’s known for heading down to junkets and spicing them up a little, so it was no surprise that when he met Glass actor James McAvoy, he got him to see if he could tell the difference between McCoy crisps just by smelling them.

Luckily the Filth star was a good sport!

Despite the challenges of playing a character with dissociative identity disorder, James McAvoy was thrilled to reprise his role of Kevin Wendell Crumb and revisit all his favorite characters in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass.

As introduced in 2016’s hit film Split, Crumb’s multiple personalities develop after his father disappears and mother starts abusing him.

Of the 24 different personalities he plays as Crumb in Split and its sequel Glass, McAvoy especially loves transforming into Miss Patricia, a controlling matriarch.

“She’s real kinky, and devout, and pious, but kind of longing to be touched at the same time. Which is sort of achingly sad and dead fun to play,” McAvoy tells PEOPLE.

Additionally the Scottish actor enjoys jumping into Crumb’s other main identity, Hedwig, who identifies as a nine-year-old boy.

“He just doesn’t really recognize barriers or boundaries, and it allows him to be pretty inappropriate with anybody and everybody,” he says of Hedwig.

To prepare his body for the film, McAvoy revealed the grueling work it took to bulk up.

“I had a really good trainer, who made me eat like a beast, and made me lift a lot of weights,” he says.

The movie also reunites Bruce Willis, 63, with his Unbreakable costar Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price).

In addition, Unbreakable alums Spencer Treat Clark (Joseph Dunn) and Charlayne Woodard (Mrs. Price) will also be back, as will Split‘s Anya Taylor-Joy (Casey Cooke). Sarah Paulson is a new addition to the cast, as Dr. Ellie Staple.G

M. Night Shyamalan has ventured into the land of cinematic comic books with his latest offering, Glass, where he manages to flip the idea of hero and villain.

It’s something he’s played with in Split, another film in this trilogy, but to combine three of his major characters (The Overseer, Mr. Glass and Kevin Crumb — and The Horde), you’re left to sympathize with them all.

So when ESSENCE attended the New York City purple carpet premiere for Glass last week, we asked the stars of the film to tell us about the different qualities that make up heroes and villains.

“A hero is doing something for the greater good of society, working in mankind’s favor. Villains try to get to whatever nefarious ends he may have by whatever means necessary,” Glass star and former ESSENCE cover star Samuel L. Jackson told us.

We all know exactly what a villain is because they’re currently running our country. You know what? Let’s just let Spike Lee tell it!

“A villain is a person who has 800,000 federal employees working for free,” he told ESSENCE. “That ain’t a hero!”

Check out more from the red carpet above to see what else Jackson and Lee, as well as Shyamalan, Sarah Paulson, James McAvoy and more.

I’ve been really busy lately and have collected loads on James from news articles to photos but all the articles I have collected are from Glass, Men’s Journal and It. So I will be posting those. Most of the photos I have uploaded for now. Replaced a lot of them recently if you took a look. So here’s the first of many articles

Glass: James McAvoy’s guide to the Horde

In Split, M. Night Shyamalan’s surprise 2016 sequel to Unbreakable, James McAvoy introduced the world to the Horde, a group of twenty-four personalities that all inhabit the body of Kevin Wendell Crumb. Now, in Glass, the third film of the trilogy, Kevin is back, and so is “Dennis,” and “Patricia,” and “Barry,” and “Hedwig,” and, of course, “The Beast.”

McAvoy was kind enough to walk us through a few of his favorite personalities, and the approach he took to bringing their character “to the light.”

Kevin

Kevin appears the least of all the main characters. He’s a guy that’s suffered extreme physical and sexual abuse his entire childhood, and at an early age, started to dissociate and fragment. He wouldn’t have been able to survive, to cope, personified on their own. Managed to overcome at times in his life, to function and be productive but, I think that he’s basically receded, and he’s regressed, and he can’t cope. He doesn’t want to be alive.

And so the rest of the group has to keep him out of consciousness because when he gains consciousness he’s really ready to commit suicide, and that’s just a really fucking sad place to be.

He’s probably one of the closest to me — him and Barry were the closest to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a suicidal person and I’ve never been abused, thank god, but I can identify with him, and I can empathize with his need to just give up and check out. I’ve not felt like committing suicide but I’ve felt like that before, just wanting it all to go away—can’t cope, can’t deal.

Hedwig

Jessica Kourkounis/Universal Pictures

Hedwig was born when Kevin was 9. I think things were real real real real bad around about that age; I think he had been getting a lot of physical and sexual abuse at that point, and before that time, it was less confusing for Kevin. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was right about that time he started to understand the true implications of what was happening to his body and what was happening to his mind by his family.

And that became harder to accept as he became older and more aware of the world, so at that moment, Hedwig was born, who had an indomitable spirit and had an ability to be in the craziest of environments, even incarcerated in a mental hospital and restrained, and have guns pointed at him, and still be just a kid looking for the fun. And that’s why that part of Kevin dissociated. It couldn’t survive as part of the whole, but it dissociated and became a separate person. He would come into Hedwig and block it out.

The central thing was to go, all right, that’s the key, primary characteristic about him: he’s looking for fun, no matter how dark the situation is. What was doubly interesting about him was that he was the only character who’s in a state of arrested development. He’s not allowed to age. It’s so important for the collective that they’ve got someone there who can remain childlike. So I thought what would be very interesting for him would be if he felt bad about that, if he felt slightly resentful about that, and he was trying to act like one of the older boys. That’s where his physical life came from. His lisp was just something that [M. Night Shyamalan] threw in one day in rehearsal. He said, “Try him with a lisp.”

Dennis

Dennis has a huge barrel chest, and he breathes really slowly in and out through his nose, and so I thought, I’m going to use that. And that kind of gave me a lot of the physicality for Dennis. But the great fun of playing Dennis was playing Dennis pretending to be Barry in Split. That didn’t happen in Glass. 

Barry

Barry was probably my favorite character to play, but really Dennis pretending to be Barry was my favorite character to play—very straight, not unintelligent but someone with a very limited worldview trying to play an overtly gay and effeminate man. You ended up getting a straight white dude’s version of that. And actually what I enjoyed about that was I found Dennis quite enjoyed slipping into that mode, and I think he found it quite liberating and quite enlightening.

Patricia

Universal Pictures

She was born around the age of 14 when Kevin was having real problems with his religious faith and his Christianity because he grew up in the church. And what was bad about that, was that I think it had been a source of constant strength for him, but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was like, “Fuck this. None of this stuff would be happening to me if there was a god out there.” He lost his faith, and it was very important for him to have that faith because it was a crutch for him to lean on. So instead of losing his faith, that part of him that had the capacity to believe and hope in a higher power coming to save you—that dissociated and became Patricia, so her prime characteristic is faith and the unflappable capacity to have faith.

She was almost like a nun, but I thought it would be kind of fun in Split if she was a nun, she’s celibate, but as her faith kind of warps and transfers to the Beast, then she’s married to her belief in the Beast. She’s still celibate, she’s never had sex. She’s a woman in a man’s body and she can’t transition because she shares it with a ton of men, and I just thought it would be interesting if she wanted to be touched. You’re always looking for conflicts, whether that’s between you and another character or, even better if there’s conflict within the character. So someone’s celibate, it’d be real interesting if they really wanted to get laid. I was thinking the whole time she’s fantasizing about being touched. Especially in Split, less so in Glass because her faith has finally, truly been shaken.

In Split, you get a real kinky sense, even though she doesn’t do anything or ask anything of anyone. That was my fun little secret about her, that she was sexually fantasizing at the same time wanting to be as devout as possible.

Orwell

We had 23 in Glass and 3 of them got cut in the edit. Orwell was never in the script. I don’t know why, but Night never found a place for Orwell, and I was like, “Come on, we’re going to do 23 and we’re going to leave one behind?”

The Beast

Universal Pictures

For the Beast in the first movie, I tried to get in shape really quick, but I can only go so far. We didn’t have much time to get ready, only had a few weeks. And really I was just running about in the dark at the end of the movie, so it wasn’t that big a deal. And we had nice lighting and all of that. This one I said to Night, am I going to be playing the Beast a lot or just a little, and he said, “A lot.” And I said, “Am I going to be indoors or outdoors? Am I going to be in a nicely lit studio where you can make me look ripped with lights or am I going to be in daylight?” And he was like, “You’re going to be in daylight.” I’m like “F—king hell.”

So I had a guy called Magnus Lygdback who is really talented—he does Gal Gadot and he did the Skarsgaard [Alexander] guy for Tarzan and all that kind of stuff. So he really knows how to put muscle on quick. Had him when I was doing Dark Phoenix and he made me eat a ton of food and work out five and six times a week, really intensely and hard but really specifically. And he came with me to Pennslyvania and was there every single day helping me work out which muscles I had to work out for which shots I was in.

Because that’s the thing: I wasn’t trying to get a superhero body. It was really important I had a body that backed up the scary nature of this animalistic nature. He isn’t human, he’s more alien and animal than he’s human and the physicality had to be scary.

“Percival”

My new favorite is a new one, a guy—I called him “Percival,” he didn’t have a name in the script. I think for him there was a time in Kevin’s life where the world was becoming too much again and so he dissociated into someone who experienced life in the third person so that he narrates what is happening to him rather than experiencing what is happening to him. And I thought that was just an interesting, f—ked up to a life that’s too much.

‘Glass’ is currently in theaters.