A British family welcomes an American family to their idyllic farmhouse for the weekend, but the dream vacation soon turns into a nightmare in Speak No Evil. Playing the role of the charismatic, alpha-male host and head of the family Paddy is BAFTA award-winner James McAvoy(known for his role as the young Charles Xavier in the X-Men universe), who was immediately intrigued when director James Watkins pitched him the role. “Blumhouse has done so many kinds of movies, but they’re mostly known for the horror genre, and they’re exceptionally good at it,” says McAvoy. “But reading the script, what kept me going after page three was the fact that these characters felt like real people and that it was based on things that we can recognize in the real world.”
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Director James Watkins thought only of James McAvoy when looking for who to play the complex role of Paddy. “Paddy must charm us even while being on the edge of horrifying us, and James knows how to walk that line,” Watkins says. “I watched him in the film Filth and was mesmerized: his character is horrible, but James somehow takes us with him. A lesser actor would have lost us. As well as a movie star, James is a brilliant stage actor. Exploring Paddy, he not only mines his own experience but taps into a deep well of classical resources: Iago, Richard III, Mephistopheles. I don’t think anyone else in the world could have played Paddy as well as James. His understanding of psychological and emotional space—of mapping tiny shifts on an emotional gradient—is second to none. He was the first and only actor I approached.”
The character’s layers and deep-rooted darkness cloaked over by masculinity and charisma was a fascination for McAvoy. . “Paddy holds to an older, traditionalist expression of manhood,” says McAvoy. “James Watkins and I really leaned into that aspect of him as we fleshed out who Paddy is and what he means to the story and to the culture, giving him some mythic heft with timely resonance. Here’s this man’s man, beholden to some ancient idea of masculinity, living in the countryside, living off the land, or so you think. It all seems so wholesome and earthy. And yet this is ancient England that we’re talking about, and there’s darkness in the land; there’s a history of violence and bloodshed and horrible things in that dirt, and so there’s evil in that earthy masculinity that he’s romanticizing and selling.”
Paddy’s strong personality made him a fun character for McAvoy to embody, but he was also aware of the importance of nuance in playing a man with a powerful personality. “Paddy is incredibly entertaining and he’s always performing,” McAvoy says. “But you have to be careful playing a character like that, because then it can become a showy turn, and while that could be very effective for an audience, it doesn’t necessarily have a lot of truth to it. We were always working to ground the character in real history, motivation and desire, and to earn the revelations of his true nature. As much as Paddy is this likably mercurial, counter-cultural figure, there’s real darkness in him, and it’s always there for the audience to see.”
A tense, hair-raising thriller awaits as Speak No Evil arrives in Philippine cinemas on September 11, from Universal Pictures International.
