James McAvoy Says Belting Out Belinda Carlisle Song Was 'a High Point’ of Filming New Movie “Speak No Evil”

Singing Belinda Carlisle will be a highlight for audiences, quipped James McAvoy, “when you hear how bad my voice is”

James McAvoy unleashes his inner pop star in his new movie.

Speak No Evil, in theaters Sept. 13, features the Scottish actor, 45, as a dominant husband and father with more than a few secrets to hide. But when singing Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” he lets it all out.

“I got to sing some Belinda Carlisle, which is really a high point when you hear how bad my voice is,” McAvoy quipped at a special San Diego Comic-Con preview screening of the movie on Friday, July 26.

“You'll be like, ‘Wow, they let him do that on camera,’ ” he added dryly. “Yeah, that was probably the high point for me.”

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McAvoy stars opposite Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy as an American couple whose visit to an Italian country house evolves from off-putting to menacing thanks to McAvoy’s character Paddy. All is not as it appears with his wife (played by Aisling Franciosi) and mute son Ant (Dan Hough).

Directed by James Watkins, the Blumhouse Productions movie is a remake of the 2022 Danish movie of the same name. “I didn't see the original until after we finished this one on purpose,” McAvoy told PEOPLE exclusively later at Comic-Con.

“It's really just about creating something that came naturally from your response to the material rather than, ‘Hey, that was a great movie.’ Luckily I hadn't seen it. Otherwise, I think it would have been more difficult [to film]," he added.

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Davis, 37, agreed that she “had no anxiety” in tackling a new version of a recent classic. “When you do a version of Shakespeare, if you do a new version of King Lear or Macbeth, you never treat it as a remake. It's like your own spin on it," she said.

Director Christian Tafdrup’s Danish Speak No Evil “is a movie that was great and deserved to be reinterpreted because it was so great," Davis added. "And I think doing it with a different set of couples with different cultural touchstones and anxieties really made it its own, fresh thing.”

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As for potential upcoming projects, McAvoy responded with enthusiasm to the idea of Charles Xavier, his character in the X-Men movies.

“I think you'll definitely see Charles making an appearance [in the Marvel Cinematic Universe],” he teased. “That's up to those guys, and they're so good at doing what they do and planning these things out and calibrating what comes when, that they know when that will be.”

Speak No Evil is in theaters Sept. 13.

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