James McAvoy has admitted that he didn’t have a clue that Split was in any way connected to the 2000 superhero thriller Unbreakable at first. The star is reprising his role as Kevin Wendell Crumb in M Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming third film in the trilogy, Glass, which is out later this week.
But when he first signed up for the trilogy’s second film Split in 2016, McAvoy wasn’t aware of what Shyamalan had planned for his character. “I read the first version of Split that I got sent and there was a little tenuous clue there – if I had been sharper eyed, I’d have seen it, but I missed it. I got into rehearsals and he kept talking about Unbreakable,” he recalled.
McAvoy said that the writer-director kept talking about Unbreakable and its characters David Dunn and Mr Glass, but McAvoy revealed the connection still didn’t click. “And then it became clear, it dawned on me, the veil was lifted and I was like, ‘Oh my God’. Then a few weeks after that, I came clean with him and I was like, ‘Dude, I did not get that at all’,” he told Digital Spy. “I think he realised that the little clue he was giving everybody just needed to be amped up and he ended up coming up with a really cool scene at the end as well.”
For Shyamalan though, the original plan was always for a trilogy and Glass has ended up much like his initial idea, with a few changes here and there. “It always evolves a little bit. Essentially, it was this. It was this guy going to fight this guy to prove this guy’s theory. These three were always tied in that triangle,” he said.
Glass is out in cinemas on January 18.
