James McAvoy hasn’t enjoyed his many sex scenes with beautiful women, said Mickey Rapkin in Elle. The Scottish actor has been filmed in bed with some of Hollywood’s most glamorous actresses, including Rosario Dawson, Kerry Washington, and Angelina Jolie. But the staged encounters in front of a film crew, he says, are always uncomfortable. “It’s so awkward,” says McAvoy, 34. “I mean, sex is a nightmare in real life until you meet the person you click with. When you’re pretending, multiply that anxiety by a thousand. You’re in the middle of a scene and you’re like, ‘Oh, no. Is my breath weird?’ Or, ‘Oh, no. She’s nice, but does she think I’m trying to cop a feel?’ I’m not, I’m just trying to do my job.” Growing up in Glasgow, McAvoy planned to be a Catholic priest, not an actor. “I wanted to be a missionary,” he says, “but girls [became] a bigger part of my life around the time I lost interest in the priesthood.” Even as a teen, he found that he knew how to woo women. “What I figured out—that my friends didn’t—was you have to talk to women like you’re not constantly trying to have sex with them. That seemed to work.”
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