Like light

Do you know how many photographs of James McAvoy I have on my computer?





So many.



When, as a senior in high school, I developed a terrible crush on Adrien Brody, I tortured myself with the knowledge that it was completely inappropriate because I was so old. Even as I bought an autographed photo of Brody on eBay and cut pictures of him out of magazines, tried to follow his supremely boring lovelife on the internet and traveled alone to a movie theater about forty-five minutes away from my house on the El to watch the middling pre-Brody-Oscar streetlife movie Love The Hard Way, I felt guilty. I was eighteen! I was way too old to, you know, discover that Brody's mother was acclaimed photog Sylvia Plachy, buy a bunch of her hardcover collections on Amazon, and try and cultivate a correspondence with Plachy about how much I enjoyed her work so that we would be best friends when I moved to New York for college and I would become her protegee and she would introduce me to her charming, single son...

You see the way my mind works. But I was eighteen. I was still allowed a little bit of that. Being a senior in high school with a crush on a translucent-nosed Oscar-winner was way more okay than being a first-year master's candidate BitTorrenting British TV like State of Play and Shameless just so I could take screenshots like this one:



It's fitting that I have yet to see The Last King of Scotland, one of McAvoy's more famous efforts, but I have sat through all of the Children of Dune miniseries (what an intersection, my favorite pale Scot playing my favorite post-human Messiah's son!) and the aforementioned "middling James McAvoy vehicle" Starter For 10. Oh man, I should definitely see Rory O'Shea Was Here, the fun-quadripalegic movie whose more restrained UK title was Inside I'm Dancing. That looks right up my alley.

Also, I saw Wanted in a movie theatre in the Czech Republic. Twice.

Why the outpouring of sudden McAvoy love, aside from my inescapable preoccupation with this scene from Atonement?



(Not original, I know. But understandable.)


The Guardian has a Proust Questionnaire-like Q&A with McAvoy up on their website, and honestly, the whole thing is just a bit much for me to bear. I just got out of this crush, McAvoy. Don't drag me back in.

My favorite of his responses:

When were you happiest?
When I was 15 or 16 - I slept really well then. Now I sleep on a bed of anxiety-tipped nails.

What is your most treasured possession?
My lightsaber - it's well cool.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
Freckles.

What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
Boomer or Athena from Battlestar Galactica.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?
To when dragons roamed the Earth.

What does love feel like?
Like light.

Be still, my heart.