Actor James McAvoy has confessed in an interview that his love for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion became a real problem when filming Becoming Jane.
The interview with Forbes reveals that McAvoy was captivated by Oblivion, playing it long into the night when he was due on set early the next morning. He explained how, in playing Anne Hathaway’s love interest in Becoming Jane, he would have to get up at 6AM every morning, but wasn’t managing to sleep at a reasonable hour.
“I’ve got tons of lines, and all that kind of stuff,” he explained, “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.’”
He told the story of one particular incident that led to the destruction of the disk, saying “I went to bed at 5:35AM, 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!’”
After this, McAvoy says he swore off video games for the better part of a decade but returned to FIFA and Call Of Duty to bond with his children and friends.
The star says it’s how he has dealt with isolation over the lockdown. “During the pandemic, me and my boys, we’re all 40-something dudes with gray hair, bald spots, and all sorts of shit. We now talk every two or three nights, playing Warzone and we talk about life, love, everything while getting absolutely annihilated by 12-year-old children from other countries.”
McAvoy’s interview with Forbes, aside from the focus on Oblivion, was to discuss his love of video games given his inclusion in Twelve Minutes, a time-loop puzzle game in which he provided voice acting.
Jon Bailes described Twelve Minutes in a four-star NME review as “A smart take on the time loop concept” and “a game that wants to irritate”.