James McAvoy has spent three decades becoming one of the most reliably unpredictable actors in Hollywood, shape-shifting from fauns to sociopaths to telepaths with the ease of someone who fundamentally refuses to be pinned down. He’s played a flute-loving mystical creature in Narnia, a dissociative-identity-disorder sufferer with 24 distinct personalities in Split, and a nihilistic, self-destructive cop in Filth.
But through it all, he has harbored a secret ambition: to direct. Now, at 46, he has finally made that leap with California Schemin’, a film about Scottish rappers pretending to be American, and it turns out that thirty years of preparation creates a director who knows exactly what he’s doing—and exactly how much he still has to learn.
McAvoy has wanted to direct since he was sixteen, a desire born from his very first film set experience. As a teenager, he talked his way onto David Hayman’s film The Near Room thinking he would be making tea, only to be handed a script and told to audition.
Walking onto that set with zero acting experience, he found himself “consciously aware of creative decisions being made around me and thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that, I’d do this…'” He held onto that thought for thirty years, watching directors succeed and fail, learning from the greats like Joe Wright (Atonement) while mentally cataloging what worked and what didn’t.
The scripts that came his way as a potential director were uniformly depressing—”bad versions of Ken Loach movies” about Scottish housing estates filled with unemployment and despair. McAvoy, who grew up on a council estate in Glasgow, recognized the reality of those stories but didn’t want to wallow in them. “I wanted to tell a story about people from a background like mine, that I recognised and understood,” he explained. “People with limited opportunities, near horizons and a kind of in-built humility.
But I also wanted to make a film that was entertaining, still had emotional impact and still confronted the obstacles and the realities that people from that kind of low-income background face.”
California Schemin’ tells the true story of Silibil N’ Brains, a Dundee rap duo who, after being laughed out of a London record label for their Scottish accents, returned claiming to be Americans from California—and got signed. It’s a story about performance within performance, about the sacrifices artists make for success, and about the specific discrimination Scottish people face when their accents are deemed too “exotic” or difficult for mainstream audiences.
McAvoy has experienced this firsthand; he recalls directors asking him to “tone down” his Scottishness, even when playing Macbeth in Macbeth, “The Scottish Play.”
Directing, it turns out, is harder than acting. McAvoy describes the experience as “the most stressful experience of my life,” noting that his “unpaid workload has doubled” as he now reads scripts as both an actor and a director. The hardest part was the constant interruptions—just as he would prepare for his own acting moments, someone would approach him about porta-potties or actor availability for scenes they hadn’t shot yet.
“I was on my way into my action-and-cut moment, and I’m getting somebody telling me about the porta-potties for tomorrow,” he laughed. “Then I watch my performance and go, ‘Has anybody got any notes for me, because I think that was fucking brilliant!'”
Despite the stress, he has already lined up his next directorial projects, though he admits he might return to acting and “never direct again” or vice versa. For now, he’s proud of California Schemin’, a film that manages to be funny, aspirational, and authentically Scottish without falling into the traps of poverty porn or misery tourism. It’s the work of someone who has spent thirty years learning how to tell stories, finally getting to tell his own.
Experience the debut—see California Schemin’ in theaters starting April 10 and witness James McAvoy’s long-awaited transition from in front of the camera to behind it.
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