James McAvoy has said that starring in The Ruling Class is "the hardest thing" he's ever done.
Speaking exclusively to Digital Spy at today's Olivier Awards nominees announcement, the 35-year-old actor added that some of the play's anger had got "into [my] bones" and that some of his other work had been "chamber pieces that weren't actually what theatre is".
"It's an angry play," he explained to DS after learning he was shortlisted in the Best Actor category for his performance as Jack in the revival. "No matter how funny and how light the play is – because for the first half of the play it's incredibly light and bubbly before it goes incredibly dark and violent.
"No matter how light it is, it's anger running through it. And it seeps into you. It gets really into your bones, actually.
"So it is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's also the hardest thing I've ever done simply because I've got to do singing, dancing, unicycling, playing the flute, sword fighting, crucifixions, backflips and fighting monsters and fighting puppets… so all that stuff's really hard. But that's why I wanted to do it – because it was hard.
"Because I felt some of the other stuff I'd been doing was nice chamber pieces that weren't actually what theatre is.
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"I think theatre is a sacrificial process," he continued. "I think the first piece of theatre was when they sacrificed a lamb or a person in front of other people and that's sort of the route of theatre.
"Like the route of fine art is cave drawings and the route of novels and great literature is the first scribblings of writing or whatever… but the route of theatre is, I think, human sacrifice.
"So every time you go on stage you've got to feel like people are giving something up and leaving something on stage of themselves and this felt like this would give us the opportunity to do that."
The X-Men actor described being nominated for an Olivier Award alongside Mark Strong, Tim Pigott-Smith and Richard Armitage as "a huge honour".
The nomination for The Ruling Class is the third time McAvoy has been shortlisted for an Olivier Award in his career.
"Third time lucky hopefully, I don't know," he joked. "I've got my work cut out for me. I think just to be included by the panelists and then the members of SOLT is such a huge honour.
"I always say this but it's true – it's just nice to be included actually. Because there's tons of people out there who are giving equally if not better performances who aren't going to get nominated who don't even get near it – for what reason we don't know.
"So you've got to always take nominations with a pinch of salt at the same time as going 'Yeah, man, I'm pure chuffed!'. So I'm very very very pleased."
The Olivier Awards take place on Sunday, April 12.
