James McAvoy is opening up about a near-death health scare he experienced before filming the movie Glass in 2017.
“I had a lung puncture because they saw a shadow in my lung, so they wanted to biopsy it to see if it was cancer, which it wasn’t, which was great,” McAvoy, 47, said during his Monday, October 12, appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast.
“But that was botched, and I nearly died,” the Scottish actor continued. “I was at home two days later, my lungs just collapsed in bed one night, and I was on my own as well, so it was crazy.”
McAvoy said he spent “two or three weeks” in the hospital being treated after the botched procedure.
“They tried everything to clean [it] out — nothing was working,” he recalled. “So they were like, ‘We’re going to cut you open, big style. Go in with, like, dish soap, basically, and just, like, clean you out, scoop it all out.'”
After his hospitalization, McAvoy said he worked hard to get back in shape to film Glass, the sequel to 2016’s Split, in which he plays Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with dissociative identity disorder who kidnaps and imprisons three teenage girls in an underground facility. Glass explores Kevin’s personality known as The Beast, a cannibal who has superhuman abilities, including wall-crawling, enhanced strength, speed, durability and agility.
“Unlike Split, I was the Beast [for] most of the movie, and I was just outside in broad daylight as well,” he recalled. “So I was like, ‘I’m really going to need to do the real thing. I’m going to need to go for it.’ I remember saying, like, ‘You’re going to get me a trainer.’ … I’m going to need somebody that can make [me] look like a Greek f***ing figure from mythology.”
McAvoy continued, “The guy that worked with me was amazing. … For the first four weeks, he rehabilitated me. I could walk, but I couldn’t run, couldn’t cycle, couldn’t jog. … He did a lot of rehabilitation and functional movement, and then put the pounds on me really fast.”
McAvoy previously shared his experience with Men’s Journal in 2019, admitting that the health scare made him reconsider what kinds of roles he would take in the future.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slagging off my industry,” he said at the time. “I love my job. Love it. … But there’s got to be more balance.”
