3 James McAvoy

ACTOR

The Golden Globe nominee, star of Atonement, is an ambassador and inspiration to young Scots

"I'M ALWAYS slightly worried that somebody is going to find me out," James McAvoy said recently, "and come along saying, 'Ach, you're not actually as good as you thought you were. You are just a wee boy fae the Drum.'"

It's interesting that he should feel that sort of anxiety. McAvoy has, after all, been the success story of British acting in 2007. I remember in January arranging for a colleague to interview him and having a long discussion with his publicist about whether the magazine would put him on the front cover. It felt like a risk. Was his profile high enough? That seems ridiculous now. In 12 months, he's gone from being a rising talent to a proper star.

If McAvoy is named best actor at the Golden Globes on January 13, it will be exactly a year and a day since the release of The Last King of Scotland. That film, in which he played a young doctor horrified to find himself complicit in the atrocities perpetrated by Idi Amin, brought the actor huge acclaim. The September release of Atonement, for which he has earned that Golden Globe nomination, confirmed him as an international star. It seems certain that he will be nominated for an Oscar, though he says that if this happens, he will eat his own pants. The horrible truth is that there are plenty of fans out there who'd be willing to eat them for him; People magazine has proclaimed him the fifth sexiest man alive.

Sexy seems too blunt and boring a word for him. In a recent interview, Stephen Fry, who directed McAvoy in Bright Young Things, called him "almost pretty" and spoke of his "dirty threat". That's closer to the mark. McAvoy is known as a versatile actor, and partly that's down to having a face that flits between masculine and feminine, vulnerability and hostility. He's only 28 and his features haven't quite settled yet, which makes him hard to predict and interesting to watch. He has been called the new Ewan McGregor (snore) and the new Hugh Grant (groan), but Dustin Hoffman is a better comparison for the similar balance of intelligence, charm and acting chops.

Our panel was unanimous that McAvoy should be named a Scot of the Year, not only to mark the enormous personal success he enjoyed in 2007, but also because his ascendancy will inspire other young Scots that, no matter where they come from, they can make something of their lives.

Interestingly, McAvoy believes that telling children their possibilities are limitless is a bad idea, as it sets them up for a fall, yet his own story is not without fairy-tale qualities. He grew up in Drumchapel, raised by his grandparents after his father left when he was seven. It's an area with a lot of social problems, and for a time he was, by his own admission, "a wee ned".

There must have been something else inside him, though. A decency. Some kind of yearning. When McAvoy was 16, the actor and director David Hayman came to his school, St Thomas Aquinas, to give a talk about Shakespeare, but was heckled by some troublemakers in the class. McAvoy, embarrassed, went up to Hayman afterwards and apologised. He wasn't trying to schmooze him. The idea of networking would not have occurred, and he had no thoughts of becoming an actor, but this chance meeting led to Hayman casting McAvoy in his film The Near Room.

It's important not to romanticise McAvoy's origins, however. Plenty of people grow up on council schemes without getting into bother and go on to lead happy, productive lives. It's not as if he lived up a lum and ate nothing but soot. In fact, McAvoy's grandparents gave him a steady upbringing and instilled in him a strong work ethic. "My grandad still talks like that: if the work's there, you do it," he said. "It's the fear of unemployment."

McAvoy used to think he might join the navy or perhaps the priesthood and work as a missionary in Africa. The main thing was to see the world. Becoming an actor was an accident. Looking back, though, he thinks his parents' separation may have prepared him for the acting life. "I think it made me right to be an actor," he said recently. "Having been around that emotional stuff sensitised me and made me aware of adult issues much earlier than most kids. You stop going: me, me, me."

That's possibly the most revealing thing McAvoy has said to the media. Although he gives plenty of interviews, he seems resistant to public self-reflection, unwilling to – as he sees it – cheapen the significant relationships of his life as a way of promoting his films. So we hear little of his marriage to the actress Anne-Marie Duff, herself a fast-rising star.

They met on the set of Shameless. It was a difficult time in his life. He didn't feel he was a real actor. Getting into the business had been a fluke. Something he did because, well, you had to do something with your life. But he didn't value his work. He felt it was a bit meaningless. What good were you doing? This thinking seemed to affect his self-esteem. He started drinking maybe a bit more than was good for him. Although McAvoy often says that he's cocky, he also seems prone to self-doubt. He's given to saying things like: "I feel on the edge of failure a lot," and, while filming Atonement, he avoided Ian McEwan whenever he was on set for fear the novelist would think his performance poor.

While he was making Shameless, he used to moan that acting was a waste of time. Duff told him to shut up, and that he should either start showing some respect for the job or give it up. It worked. When he won a Bafta, he said in his acceptance speech, "I would like to thank Anne-Marie, because she taught me to respect life, and it took my career to a whole new level." He seems to have decided that actors do have an important function: "They just tell stories because people need to be told stories."

It will be interesting to see what stories McAvoy chooses to tell in the future. His next major role is in Wanted, based on Mark Millar's comic-book series. Out this summer, and co-starring Angelina Jolie, it is an honest-to-goodness Hollywood blockbuster in which McAvoy plays a deadly assassin. In other words, it's yet another big step for the wee boy fae the Drum.

Peter Ross