How many times have we just said “one more round” or “a few more minutes” only to find out that we’ve been gaming till the crack of dawn on a work night? It turns out that famous people are no different. James McAvoy was once so hooked on playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, that he had to destroy the disc in order to keep his work from suffering.
McAvoy was recently interviewed by Forbes where he talked about his role in the recently released 12 Minutes. During the interview, he recalled an incident from 2007, while shooting for Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway. McAvoy spoke of how his partner at the time gifted him an Xbox 360 and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. As a kid, he was always into role-playing games, especially if they involved fantasy.
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“So I’m over there in Dublin,” he said. “I’m, like, having to go to bed at 10pm, because I’m getting up at 6am every morning, and I’ve got tons of lines, and all that kind of stuff. And I’m just staying up until four in the morning just playing Oblivion. And I was thinking, ‘This game is sending me to Oblivion.’”
McAvoy then made the rookie mistake that we’ve all made and regretted the next day. He got in from his shoot at 8 pm and proceeded to play Oblivion through the night.
“I went to bed at 5:35am,” he said. “My car beeped its horn outside at, like, 5:45. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I need to do something.’ So I got up and I got the disc out of the Xbox 360 and I turned the gas hob on. I just put the disc on it and just watched it sort of, like, singe and melt a little bit. And I was like, ‘Right, we’re done, we’re over, never again!’”
Elsewhere in the interview, McAvoy spoke about his venture into the world of video game voice acting. “I just want to do good acting–I just want to do good roles. It doesn’t matter whether they’re on stage, in front of the camera, or on someone’s computer. When I finally got the script, it was a no-brainer–it was an easy decision to make.”
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