Parenting & Family Quote by James McAvoy

McAvoy’s fondness for Mr. Tumnus lands because it’s not framed as prestige or craft-bragging; it’s framed as permission. “I got to play my favorite character in children’s literature” is the kind of unguarded fan sentence actors are usually trained to sand down into something more respectable. He doesn’t. The subtext is that the industry’s hierarchy (serious roles, awards bait, tortured masculinity) often treats joy as a minor key. Here, joy is the point.

The line “You don’t get the chance to do that in other jobs” quietly widens the frame from actor-as-artist to actor-as-worker. It’s a reminder that acting can be a weirdly ordinary job with a wildly abnormal perk: occasionally your paycheck comes with a childhood wish attached. That contrast makes the sentiment culturally legible even to people who don’t care about method or box office. Most work asks you to become competent; this work occasionally lets you become someone you adored.

Context matters: Narnia was mid-2000s franchise filmmaking at peak earnestness, when studios were still selling “family fantasy” as a sincere cultural event rather than a self-aware content pipeline. Tumnus, a gentle, compromised figure who chooses decency over fear, is also a safer kind of vulnerability for a leading man to celebrate. McAvoy is really praising a rare thing in adult life: a role that doesn’t just advance a career, but reconnects you to the self who first learned how stories feel.