Atonement star James McAvoy swears he’s not really as busy as he seems. Starter for 10 hit theaters in early 2007, Atonement’s finishing out the year as one of December’s big releases, and McAvoy’s been in the spotlight recently with the release of the trailer for Wanted, an action pic he stars in alongside Angelina Jolie. McAvoy also nabbed the number 5 spot on People magazine’s 2007 Sexiest Man Alive list.

So, yes, 2007 has been a very busy year for the Scottish actor.

Atonement is generating the same sort of awards buzz Last King of Scotland did last year, which means McAvoy needs to gear up for what should be another busy awards season. “I don’t know if anybody’s ever ready for another award season,” joked McAvoy about the prospect of Atonement earning award nominations. “It’s kind of like Christmas. It seems to get earlier and earlier every year, and I’m ready for whatever happens. Do you know what I mean? If it gets a lot of nominations, fantastic. If it doesn’t get any, then I hope we wouldn’t be any less proud of the experience we’ve had. I know we’re all very proud of this film.”

McAvoy’s got a lot to be proud of with Atonement. He tackled a very challenging character and pulled off what critics are acknowledging is a terrific performance. “His angelic kind of character was something I didn’t identify with because I’m not an angel,” said McAvoy about getting into character. “I kind of found him difficult to recognize as a member of society and therefore play him truthfully because he was so good.

It wasn’t until I really kind of accepted the potential that someone like that could exist and I started kind of identifying with the character and falling in love with the character, you know, and that took about a week of rehearsals of me playing it quite badly I felt.”

For McAvoy, playing such a ‘good’ guy isn’t quite as easy as it looks. “That was one of the biggest challenges also [about] playing someone so good, what he is as an actor is he’s not going to be interesting enough, so you keep trying to make him more interesting. That’s when you kind of f--k up because human beings are interesting, and bad acting is people trying to make them more interesting, you know? That’s one example of bad acting anyway, and that was something I had to watch I didn’t fall into doing.”

There’s a scene in Atonement in which his character, Robbie Turner, types a letter to Cecilia Tallis (played by Keira Knightley) which contains raw sexual thoughts and explicit language. But even that wasn’t dirty enough to tarnish his character’s angelic qualities, according to McAvoy. “I think the best thing in the world is the fantasies of doing things like that, so I don’t see that as anything that taints him in any way. I think that makes him more human. It makes him more like us,” explained McAvoy. “I think the letter that he writes to her is shocking but it’s not bad. It’s not untrue and it comes from a place, a desire to communicate love and that’s a good thing.”

McAvoy called Knightley, his love interest in Atonement, a fantastic girl. “We connected quite early and quite quickly,” revealed McAvoy. “I realized that we were there to back each other up and we had someone willing to kind of fight for each other if we needed it. And also we realized artistically speaking we were very much on the same page from day one. And when that happens you feel quite safe. You feel like you have a collaborator you know and someone you can really bounce off of, so it was great working with Keira.”

Being so comfortable with his co-star helped when it came time to film a few pivotal scenes. McAvoy points to two scenes in particular that were a little difficult to shoot. “The scene in the tea room where they see each other for the first time in six years, that was incredibly difficult. Also the scene where we lambast ‘middle’ Briony [played by Romola Garai] and we really give her a tailing. That was quite difficult actually because you don’t want — we could have gone further, or I could have gone further, but you don’t want to take up all the emotional space. You want to leave some of the emotional space for the audience to feel something. If you’re just standing on stage crying the whole time, you know the audience kind of just goes, ‘F--k.’

Actually, that was the same thing with the big Dunkirk tracking sequence —the big 5 minute short. [It was] very easy to get carried away with the emotion of the recreation, the evocative nature of something like that is very easy to get carried away with. It would have been wrong for the actors to get carried away with that, I think, because soldiers at that time in the middle of that experience some of them would be - but not all of them would be - crying their eyes out and all that kind of stuff. And then it was quite hard as an actor to not to feel the loss, to feel the pain, to feel the waste of what happened on those beaches in 1940-1941. It was just incredible for me. It was just about holding back and being a bit like a soldier in one way and going, ‘This is war. This is madness.’ But at the same time going, ‘This is my job as well,’ and somehow holding back that distance from your character.”

Knightley and director Joe Wright previously teamed up on Pride & Prejudice, however Atonement marked the first time McAvoy worked with the director. “I think his vision is 360,” McAvoy said of director Wright. “Directors have to have multi-tasking abilities and you have to be able to concentrate in different areas at one time. They all do and some are visual and acting and some of them are acting and script. Some of them are visual and script, and not all of them can always do that. But Joe is 360. He can do it all. He doesn’t understand how to do everybody’s job, but he understands everybody’s job, you know? He tries to figure out what it is about your job that’s important. I mean, the crew as well. I don’t just mean the actors. He applies his storytelling ability to everybody’s department and I think that’s something that’s really special about Joe.”