James McAvoy recalls his first day on the set of Band of Brothers and says a co-star bullied him.
During a visit to Bravo‘s Watch What Happens Live while playing “Spill the IMDb-tea,” McAvoy made the revelation while keeping mum about the names.
After being shown a photo of the HBO series, McAvoy took a closer look at the image and said, “Hold on, let me just see, is he in there? No, I don’t think he is in there. Ah, yeah, he is.”
“All right, so, I’m not going to tell you who it was,” he added. “[But] … one of the guys in that picture decided to bully me, on my first day as a professional actor out of acting school! So he got him and his buddies to just stand and point at me and laugh at me, for like three minutes.”
McAvoy explained that the scene he was shooting involved “a ton of actors,” adding, “It was one of those scenes with everybody in it, and we’re in a bar. And I had a scene, and all these guys were, like, in it for nine, 10 months, and you get one line in one episode and one line 10 episodes later. They were all pissed. And I come in for one episode, and I’ve got an arc and scenes. I’ve got tons of lines.”
The actor noted that his co-stars Dexter Fletcher and Robin Laing reached out to him and told him, “Come hang with us, man.”
McAvoy rated his experience on the Band of Brothers set saying that “a part from that day it was a nine, but that day it felt like a two [out of 10].”
Bravo host Andy Cohen said he would get the tea from McAvoy during the commercial break but the actor said that he would not confirm who it was. However, McAvoy did not that it was not David Schwimmer as he was not in the photo the put up on screen.
The photo in question featured Donnie Wahlberg as Carwood Lipton, Kirk Acevedo as Joe Toye, Scott Grimes as Donald Malarkey, Philip Barantini as Wayne A. “Skinny” Sisk, Neal McDonough as Lynn “Buck” Compton, Adam James as Cleveland O. Petty, Frank John Hughes as William “Wild Bill” Guarnere, and Ross McCall as Joseph Liebgott.
Band of Brothers was a 2001 drama series created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and based on the Stephen E. Ambrose’s non-fiction book of the same name.
Watch McAvoy’s interview in the video below.