Band of Brothers co-stars mocked James McAvoy for one reason: the new boy had more lines

James McAvoy spent his first day as a professional actor being laughed at on the set of Band of Brothers. He told the story on Monday's Watch What Happens Live, during Andy Cohen's "Spill the IMDb-Tea" segment, with fellow guest Peter Krause next to him. One of the actors in his scene, McAvoy said, got a few mates to stand there, "point at me and laugh at me, for like three minutes".

He would not say who. Cohen put up a cast photo of eight men, and McAvoy confirmed the culprit was somewhere in it. He did rule out David Schwimmer, who was not in the photo, so the internet can leave Ross alone. Asked to rate the job overall, he gave it a nine, except "that day it felt like a two".

Nine, 10 months for one line

The interesting bit is that McAvoy does not think it was about him being a nobody straight out of acting school. He thinks it was about the script.

"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."

— James McAvoy, on Watch What Happens Live

Band of Brothers was a ten-part HBO series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, shot in England with an enormous ensemble. Most of that ensemble played the men of Easy Company in the background, for months, waiting for a moment of their own. Here is the arithmetic as McAvoy described it:

• The regulars: on the job for "nine, 10 months", sometimes with one line in one episode and the next one ten episodes later.
• The new boy: booked for a single episode, with "an arc and scenes" and "tons of lines".
• The welcome: three minutes of pointing and laughing on day one.

Petty? Absolutely. Unheard of? Hardly. Anyone who has ever been the new hire with the better desk knows the feeling, just without the uniforms.

The episode he was cast in

Here is where it gets properly awkward. McAvoy's only episode is the fourth, Replacements, in which he plays Private James W. Miller. It aired in September 2001, and it is exactly what the title says: the veterans of Easy Company, back in England after D-Day, taking in new men who were not there for Normandy and are made to feel it.

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Miller gets mocked by a veteran early in the episode for wearing a unit ribbon from battles he was not there for. He is killed later in the same episode, near Nuenen in the Netherlands.

The cast of a series about brotherhood greeted its new boy exactly the way its own fourth episode does.

Method acting nobody asked for, then. To be fair, not everyone joined in. McAvoy said Dexter Fletcher and Robin Laing pulled him aside on that first day with a simple "Come hang with us, man". It is a fair guess that they are why the job still scores a nine.

Since then McAvoy has played a young Charles Xavier, Kevin and his 23 personalities in Split and Macbeth in the West End, so the pecking order sorted itself out. A quarter of a century on, he still will not name the man in the photo. That makes one person on that set who kept his lines to himself.

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