James McAvoy Makes His Directing Debut With California Schemin’
He’s best known for his roles in films like Atonement and X-Men, but James McAvoy is now stepping behind the camera and has directed his debut movie. California Schemin’ follows two up-and-coming rappers who move to LA to break into the music industry- but completely fake their accents and backgrounds so they can be taken seriously. While their bold and audacious scheme ends up working better than they expected, they know it’s surely only a matter of time before they’re found out. Here’s everything we know:
What is California Schemin’ about?
McAvoy is one of the best-known Scottish faces in cinema, so it’s not surprising that his debut film tells a (true) Scottish story. California Schemin’ is based on the real-life exploits of Billy Boyd (also known as Silibil) and Gavin Bain (aka Brains), from Bain’s book California Schemin’: How Two Lads from Scotland Conned the Music Industry. Samuel Bottomley (Somewhere Boy) plays Billy, while Séamus McLean Ross (Outlander: Blood of my Blood) plays Gavin, who we meet as they’re struggling to get their career off the ground. The big obstacle they find is that their Scottish accents and backgrounds aren’t taken seriously by producers, and they are told they just won’t get anywhere in rap as they are. So Billy and Gavin decide to throw caution to the wind and decide to try faking it till they make it by constructing fake identities.
Both adopt American accents and make up fake backstories for themselves- and suddenly find that people start taking them seriously. Naming their act Silibil N’Brains, they go from signing a record deal to appearing on MTV, with everything going their way. But as they gain ever more notoriety, both are paranoid that it could all come crashing down. Having been desperate to leave their dead-end jobs, the prospect of returning to normalcy is unthinkable, and their deception starts to cause friction between the two close friends. In real life (spoiler alert perhaps), the two eventually did get found out after three years, but McAvoy’s film promises to chart their rise, fall and redemption in all its zaniness.
What else do we know, and who else stars?
McAvoy himself appears in a role, while Lucy Halliday (who’s also set to appear this month in The Testaments) plays Billy’s girlfriend Mary, who encourages them to go ahead with their scheme. James Corden is also set to appear in the film as a music executive that Billy and Gavin encounter on their way to fame. You can see how it all plays out when California Schemin’ releases in UK cinemas tomorrow.
