Saturday Night Live
James McAvoy & Meek Mill
January 26, 2019
James McAvoy is one of those actors who so seamlessly disappears into his roles that it can sometimes be hard to remember what, exactly, he has actually been in. And in fact, I had to go over to IMDB to look up his credits and confirm that he had been in The Chronicles of Narnia and wasn’t just doing an impersonation of someone else doing Mr. Tumnus in one of last night’s sketches. And though he’s best known for serious roles like Atonement, Split and the young Dr. Xavier in the X-Men movies, it turns out McAvoy has quite the comic timing and presence and was a complete natural as host of Saturday Night Live. I expect he will be back.
But here’s a question I have after last night’s episode: did the writers have some sort of challenge amongst themselves to see how many different accents they could make McAvoy do? By my count there were roughly 8 different accents McAvoy was asked to pull off: generic American, over-the-top Scottish, German, Philadelphian, British, Southern, urban/rap, and bad fake Southern. That’s a lot! That’s more than they ask other hosts to do! Was it some sort of game to see how many different accents they could come up with and that he could pull off? Or did he just decide to add accents to certain characters for flair? These are the sorts of things that wake me up at 4:17 in the morning, I’m not even kidding.