Actor James McAvoy is one of the stars of the new time-loop adventure game Twelve Minutes, a top-down thriller that sees you try to piece together the events of a nightmarish night to break the 12-minute cycle you’re stuck in and change the outcome. But, it turns out McAvoy’s not only turned his talents to acting in games – he’s also a long-time fan of playing them, too. So much so that he once melted a copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion because he just enjoyed it so darn much.
That’s according to an interview with Forbes in which the actor, known for his roles in Atonement, the X-Men movies, and the His Dark Materials series, chats about Twelve Minutes. McAvoy recalls a time back in 2007 when he was filming Jane Austen biopic Becoming Jane and was super into Bethesda’s RPG game Oblivion, which launched the year before. “That was a kind of game I’d always been into as a kid: role-playing games, Zelda, Secret of Mana, all that kind of stuff,” he tells the site. “Like, I love fantasy role-playing games.”
Unfortunately, it seems his love of Oblivion was making those early-morning calls to get onto set for filming a little tricky, though. “So I’m over there in Dublin. I’m, like, having to go to bed at 10pm, because I’m getting up at 6am every morning, and I’ve got tons of lines, and all that kind of stuff. And I’m just staying up until four in the morning just playing Oblivion.”
At one point, Forbes reports, McAvoy turned in at 8pm one night during filming and played right through to the early hours, going to bed at 5:35am the next morning. His car then beeped its horn only ten minutes later, and he thought, “‘Oh my god, I need to do something,'” as he tells the site.
“So I got up and I got the disc out of the Xbox 360 and I turned the gas hob on,” he says. “I just put the disc on it and just watched it sort of, like, singe and melt a little bit. And I was like, ‘Right, we’re done, we’re over, never again!'” The site says that this also marked a decade-long step away from games altogether for the actor, though he’s since developed a love for games like Fifa and Call of Duty: Warzone, with the latter providing a great opportunity to hang out with his pals, especially during the pandemic.
“We now talk every two or three nights, playing Warzone and we talk about life, love, everything while getting absolutely annihilated by 12-year-old children from other countries,” he tells the site. “It’s been a bit of a lifesaver during the pandemic when we couldn’t hang out. We’ve been actually spending way more time than we ever did before the pandemic. It’s been amazing.”