
Our cover gentlemen may have killer credentials, but neither has mass murdered the box office…yet. Running and gunning together in Wanted, the two are finally shooting for the stars. Duck down!
By Nate Denver
Photographs by James Dimmock
James McAvoy and Common, two talents well familiar with critical accolades know the answer: Kudos are good for you and they’ll satisfy your hunger, but they’re not sugary sweet.
For a young man with a young screen career, McAvoy could not be more lauded. The 29-year-old Scotsman received British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations for The Last King of Scotland and Atonement. Across the pond, the latter also earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor. His co-star, rapper-turned-actor Lonnie Rashid “Common” Lynn, 36, has several Grammy nods (and one actual gold phonograph) under his belt. He’s only appeared in a handful of movies, but his albums Resurrection and Be are certified rap classics. Despite the kudos, neither McAvoy nor Common has enjoyed the sweetness of blockbuster success.
But this summer, all that is set to change thanks to Wanted, the cinematic adaptation of Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’s graphic novel of the same name. Rife with guns, sex, violence, more guns, and then some bigger guns just in case, Wanted is a criminally minded epic that tells the tale of Wesley Gibson (portrayed by McAvoy, despite originally bearing an uncanny resemblance to Eminem in the comic), a pencil-pushing corporate cog who discovers innate superpowers that make him an ideal assassin. He links with a guild of like-minded individuals, including Fox (Angelina Jolie) and the Gunsmith (Common). Needless to say, mayhem ensues and mad blood doth spill. But in the meantime, Complex caught up with the critical darlings to discuss nihilism, superpowers, and Common’s beef with white boys on the Bulls.
Common: I’m an advocate for hope and I always feel like there’s hope; I don’t know why, that’s just what I believe. I don’t know if it’s my spiritual belief that makes me know it’s always hope, but I definitely didn’t feel that Wanted left no hope.
Common: Prague, dude, I had a good time. It was one of the funnest times of my life. Just hanging out, filming, working, and relaxing; I sat by the river, looked at the bridge, and drank wine. We’d go out...
James McAvoy: Sangria. [Laughs.]
Common: [Laughs.] Yeah, drinkin’ sangria, just kickin’ it. We even went go-karting.
Common: [Laughs.] We all misuse power at some point or another. Some of the times I get power, I see myself misusing it. If I had powers, I would do my best to do right in the world, but like James says, you’re gonna mess up a little bit, do something sneaky. But overall you just wanna do right. That’s what life is.
Common: Yeah, I think I would want to be able to create anything with my mind, so if I visualize it, I can create it. So that means I can do a lot of shit.
James McAvoy: Cool, man. I think time travel or teleportation, that kind of thing.
Common: Yeah.
“I was sitting alone in the screening room watching it, and the whole time I’m thinking, Please don’t suck! I actually couldn’t enjoy it for the first 40 minutes because I kept thinking, OK, this is where the good stuff stops and it starts getting shitty, but the director maintained it all the way through. He brought real weight to it. Even the shots at times are exactly like [the original book]. On set it was like walking around the panels of the comic. And the voice-over is exactly the captions from the comic. So I’m actually quite stunned, because I was thinking about the movie as a separate entity and I was pleased with how much it matches up. Originally, it was like being a sperm donor. Giving this thing up, I just provided the sperm. It was going to take on a life of its own, as far as I was concerned. But this was kind of like meeting up with the kid years later and we look identical and we run the same course. [Laughs.] It’s great.”