James McAvoy Got Buffed For Wanted

Posted on June 19, 2008

James McAvoy endured quite a training regimen for his role as a nerd turned assassin in the new film, Wanted. He talked to SciFi Wire about his diet and workout regimen for the film.

In the movie, based on Mark Millar and J.G. Jones' comic-book series, McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, a depressed office worker who is recruited by Fox (Angelina Jolie) into a shadowy organization of assassins called the Fraternity, led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman). In the film, Wesley starts out as pasty and anxiety-ridden, but morphs into a killer with superhuman abilities.

"I had to eat like a Trojan to keep the weight on, because you're doing 12-13 hour days, and you're doing a lot of stunts during the day anyway, and you're doing a lot of fighting during the day, so it's like [a] workout," McAvoy said. "And then you've got your workout at night. So I was just eating enough for, like, four people. And then, of course, when I stopped doing all of that, I stopped eating all of that, I stopped going to the gym, it dropped. It just disappeared in weeks. I was so disappointed."

Women gasping when he took his shirt off, eh? No wonder he's unhappy that the new physique disappeared the minute he stopped his herculean training effort.

McAvoy says it was gone in a couple weeks. He says, "It took me a couple of months to get into shape for this film, and it took me, like, a couple of weeks for it to all disappear. I'm not joking, I lost 90 percent of the weight really quickly."