James McAvoy Explains the 'Joys' of Doing 'Bad Stuff' Onscreen as an Extreme Villain (Exclusive)

The 'Speak No Evil' actor enjoys "playing with the audience’s moral center" in movies

Why is James McAvoy so good at playing bad?

Speak No Evilstars the Scottish actor, 45, as a domineering husband and father with some sinister secrets. It’s the latest in a string of appearances in horror cinema for the burgeoning scream king, from M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass to Stephen King adaptation It: Chapter Two.

“One of the joys of playing a part like this,” he tells PEOPLE, “is you are putting the audience in an uncomfortable position where they know you're going to do some bad stuff.”

Audiences who have surely glimpsed the movie’s trailer “know it right from the beginning. They bought the ticket because they came for some scary stuff to happen.”

But then, as McAvoy and writer-director James Watkins set out to do, he says, “you make them laugh a bit, or then you make them enjoy you a bit,” says the actor. “You're playing with the audience's moral center and they're enjoying you doing that to them and with them.”

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McAvoy stars in the Blumhouse Productions remake of the 2022 Danish film of the same name opposite Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy as an American couple whose visit to an Italian country house descends from socially awkward to off-putting to dangerous. All is not as it appears, it becomes apparent, with Paddy’s wife (played by Aisling Franciosi) and mute son Ant (Dan Hough).

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“The horror in this film isn't just the scary stuff or the violent stuff, it's the squirm stuff,” says McAvoy with a grin. As with other Blumhouse films, Speak No Evil is “crowd-pleasing, it is entertainment, and yet it's underpinned by real social observation and sometimes something to say about society as well.”

The X-Men star adds that Watkins and the cast “had to walk a tightrope the whole time” to set the movie’s squirm-inducing tone.

As Paddy probes the limits of socially unacceptable behavior, he explains, Mackenzie and McNairy’s characters are caught in a more subtle trap than is typical in horror cinema. “Trying not to be judgmental, trying to be politically correct, makes us forgive a lot in this world,” McAvoy points out.

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Asked how his loved ones feel about playing such wicked characters, McAvoy says, “Film work and TV work never comes home with me.” (One exception, he admits: a 2013 run in the title role of Macbeth on London's West End. “From what I hear,” he recalls, “I was not the most fun person to live with at that point.”)

Nevertheless, he relies on wife Lisa Liberati and their two kids to find “an okay balance” and decompress. “Swimming pool with family, making a Sunday roast from scratch, friends hanging out, a couple of drinks,” he says. “Just some chilled time.”

Speak No Evil is in theaters now.

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