James McAvoy reveals how he almost didn’t get his award-winning role in Split

James McAvoy almost lost out on what would become a career-defining role, but another A-list actor dropping the role first gave him the opening he needed to star in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split.

When it comes to certain movie characters, it’s hard to see anyone fill their shoes like Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies.

However, some of these iconic castings may not have come to be if not for the universe intervening and that’s exactly how McAvoy got his slot in one of M. Night Shyamalan’s best films.

While appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor revealed his role in Split wouldn’t have happened if Joaquin Phoenix had kept the part, “I think he ditched it like two weeks before they started shooting. It was really last minute. The script was well put together, so a lot of it was pretty clear what I actually wanted to do straight away.”

He continued, “He’s an amazing actor. I think he’d give a very different performance to the one I did. Sometimes, coming in last minute is the best way.”

Split, a follow up to Shyamalan’s 2000 quasi-superhero movie Unbreakable, followed three teenage girls as they were kidnapped and held hostage by Kevin, a man who has 23 distinct personalities.

McAvoy went on to explain how finding each character shown on screen was a bit of a challenge at time as “Patricia came real quick, Dennis came real quick, [and] Hedwig took a little while.”

Thankfully, Shyamalan was flexible about fine tuning each of the personalities because a new actor was now in the driver’s seat. McAvoy recalled one such change explaining, “Night actually said to me, ‘I want you to give Hedwig a speech impediment.’ And I was like, ‘What, just at the last minute? You want me to just go for it?’

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“‘And he was like, ‘Yeah, we need to try something.’ So, we did it in the read through and after one scene of doing it, we’re like, ‘Done!’”

The casting change ended up being mutually beneficial for both McAvoy and Shyamalan as Split is now considered by Rotten Tomatoes to be the duo’s second best movie in each of their body of work.

McAvoy even won several awards for his portrayal of Kevin including Best Actor in a Leading Role at the ALOS Awards and Best Villain by the Seattle Film Critics Society.

For more, check out all the best horror movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best horror movies on Disney Plus.