James McAvoy Compares His Take on Professor Xavier in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS to Sir Patrick Stewart’s

As far as I can tell, we’re all pretty much on board with James McAvoy as Matthew Vaughn’s choice to play a younger version of Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class.  But Sir Patrick is a fine, fine actor — classically trained and all that.  McAvoy has his work set out for him in crafting a performance that lives up to Stewart’s Professor X in the initial X-Men trilogy.  The Scottish actor seems up for the challenge, confident enough to joke, “I’m basically going to try and bury Patrick’s performance.”

He followed up with more serious discussion of his approach, how he’d like to link his Xavier to Stewart’s by the end of First Class.  Hit the jump for his precise comments, in both print and video form.

McAvoy explained what he hopes to accomplish over the course of the film in an interview with MTV:

“I think the fun about these films, when you go back and you either reboot or do a prequel, is you get to see how people became who they are.  That means that you have to do them differently and by the end of the movie you have to do them the same way. The interesting journey is what happens to them, what changes them, what makes them evolve — not just mutate, but emotionally and psychologically evolve.

I would suggest by the end of the movie and the start of the next movie, it’ll be more like what Patrick does. Or maybe not. Maybe it will still be in a period of flux, if there is a new movie.”

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Makes sense to me.  I appreciate how matter-of-factly he speaks about the project as multiple films.  Makes me wonder just how much McAvoy, Vaughn, the producers (specifically Bryan Singer), and other key cast members (say, Michael Fassbender) have talked about the big picture.

If you’d like to know more about the film, our most comprehensive look came from Singer himself earlier in the summer.  And as promised, here’s the video of the McAvoy interview.