James McAvoy has revealed he “nearly died” after a medical procedure to biopsy a lung shadow went badly wrong.
The Scottish actor, 45, detailed the harrowing experience during an appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, explaining how a routine cancer check turned into a life-threatening emergency. McAvoy told Shepard that doctors had spotted a shadow on his lung and performed a biopsy to determine whether it was cancerous. The test came back negative, but the procedure itself was botched, leading to a catastrophic collapse.
“I had a lung puncture because they needed to test… They saw a shadow in my lung. So they wanted to biopsy it to see if it was cancer. And it wasn’t, so that was great. But that was botched and I nearly died,” McAvoy recalled on the podcast.
The actor said he was at home alone two days later when his lungs collapsed in bed during the night. He spent two to three weeks hospitalized as medical staff struggled to clear the resulting complications. When conventional methods failed, doctors prepared for an extreme surgical intervention.
“They eventually, they tried everything to clean it out. Nothing was working. So they were like, ‘We’re going to need to cut you open big style. Go in with like soapy, dish soap basically and just like clean you out. Scoop it all up,'” he continued.
McAvoy was filming an X-Men movie in Montreal when he began the grueling physical recovery. He had already committed to portraying The Beast for the majority of Glass, the 2019 sequel to Split, and knew he faced a tight timeline with only four or five months to transform his body.
“And Glass, unlike Split, I was The Beast like most of the movie and I was just outside in broad daylight as well. So you know, you don’t have much cool studio lighting to give you like… So I was like I’m really going to need to go for it,” he added on Armchair Expert.
The actor brought in Swedish trainer Magnus Lygdback, whom McAvoy described as looking “like a Viking,” to join him in Montreal. For the first four weeks after his hospitalization, Lygdback focused on rehabilitation rather than muscle building.
“I could walk but I couldn’t run, couldn’t cycle, couldn’t jog, couldn’t anything,” McAvoy said. “And I was on set every day as well doing crazy hours as Charles.”
McAvoy requested one of the trainers who “make you look like a Greek figure from mythology,” and Lygdback eventually helped him pack on 16 pounds of muscle after the initial functional movement phase. The trainer regulated McAvoy’s diet and trained him “just right” to achieve the imposing physical presence the role demanded.
The actor, however, issued a cautionary note about the experience. He became “addicted” to the intensity of the exercise regimen and the size he achieved, a mindset he later had to abandon. When he took another role in 2024, the extreme training no longer suited the character, and his directorial debut with California Schemin’ further reduced his available gym time.
California Schemin’, which stars Samuel Bottomley and Séamus McLean Ross as Scottish rap duo Silibil N’Brains, opened in UK theaters in April and arrived in US cinemas on October 9. The biographical musical has earned a 93 percent certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
McAvoy remains widely recognized for his chameleonic performance in Split and Glass, where he portrayed a man with dissociative identity disorder across multiple distinct personalities including Dennis, Patricia, Hedwig, The Beast, Kevin Wendell Crumb, Barry, Orwell and Jade.
