When actors claim that doing Shakespeare is hard, they probably weren’t referring to the likelihood of getting injured on stage. But James McAvoy was recently so roughed up during performances on Macbeth at London’s Trafalgar Studios Theater that he had to turn to physiotherapy sessions to get healed.
“It’s an incredibly physically violent play in its language and we felt that it should be physical, and at times, [as] violent as the language suggests so that it doesn’t just become about poetry…But the physicality of the play matches it in intensity,” McAvoy said in an interview with British chat show, This Morning. “And as such, we’re all falling to pieces. We all had cuts and bruises, we have all been to the physio two or three times. I keep punching a door in it and I let that heal up and then suddenly I ended up punching another guy [actor] and I hit his armour and that cut me up. But it is good fun though.”
Here’s hoping McAvoy’s upcoming role in X-Men: Days of Future Past isn’t quite so dangerous.
