Age: 47
male
James McAvoy (born April 21, 1979) is a Scottish actor. He made his acting debut as a teen in The Near Room (1995) and appeared mostly on television until 2003, when his feature film career began. His notable television work includes the thriller State of Play, science fiction miniseries Frank Herbert's Children of Dune and the channel 4s BAFTA award-winning series Shameless (British TV series) He has performed in several West End productions and has received four nominations for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor, and has also done voice work for animated films including Gnomeo & Juliet, its sequel Sherlock Gnomes, and Arthur Christmas. In 2003, McAvoy appeared in a lead role in Bollywood Queen, then in another lead role as Rory in Inside I'm Dancing in 2004. This was followed by a supporting role, as the faun Mr. Tumnus, in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005). His performance in Kevin Macdonald's drama The Last King of Scotland (2006) garnered him several award nominations, including the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. The critically acclaimed romantic drama war film Atonement (2007) earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination and his second BAFTA nomination. He later appeared as a newly trained assassin in the action thriller Wanted (2008). In 2011, McAvoy portrayed Professor Charles Xavier in the superhero film X-Men: First Class, a role he reprised in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Deadpool 2 (2018), and Dark Phoenix (2019). McAvoy starred in the crime comedy-drama film Filth (2013), for which he won Best Actor in the British Independent Film Awards. In 2016, he portrayed Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with 23 alternate personalities, in M. Night Shyamalan's Split, for which he received critical acclaim, and later reprised the role for the sequel Glass (2019). Since 2019, he has portrayed Lord Asriel Belacqua in the BBC/HBO fantasy series His Dark Materials.
The story begins with our protagonist waking up inside a nautiloid, a dimension-crossing illithid flying ship. They are implanted with an illithid tadpole, parasites that enthral and transform people into creatures known as mind flayers; however, before the transformation is complete, the ship comes under attack from githyanki warriors and their red dragons. The protagonist is freed during the fighting and steers the damaged ship back to Faerûn, where it crashes. As the protagonist searches for a way to remove their parasite, they encounter other survivors of the wreck, all likewise implanted with tadpoles: the githyanki fighter Lae'zel, the Sharran cleric Shadowheart, the high elf vampire Astarion, the human wizard Gale, the human warlock Wyll, and the tiefling barbarian Karlach. Meanwhile a deadly cult which follows a mysterious entity called the Absoulte has started to gain traction and spread across Faerûn, and coincidentally seems to be the source of the recent rise in tadpole infections.
