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James McAvoy is opening up about his sobriety journey.

The 47-year-old Split star sat down with Chelsea Handler on her Dear Chelsea podcast for a recent episode and said things changed after the COVID-19 lockdown.

“Before that time in my life, I would never think to have alcohol in the house. I’d never buy it,” he said.

James said he’d “drink like a fish sometimes” when he was enjoying a night out, and would make sure to have beer and wine when people visited him at home, but never had “stuff to make drink-drinks in the house, and during lockdown that changed.”

James said he started drinking alone during the COVID lockdown

Before COVID, he described drinking as “social thing,” but during lockdown he said he would start to drink on his own.

The X-Men star said “it didn’t get like crazy, crazy bad, but I was like, ‘I need to nip this in the bud.’”

James told Chelsea he quit “cold turkey” and it wasn’t a “struggle” at first, but then there were periods where he “struggled more with it,” especially when under “emotional stress.”

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“That’s when I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I could do with a f****** three fingers of vodka,’” he admitted.

Not drinking helped him realize what alcohol was taking away from him

James shared that not drinking has helped him realize how alcohol “was taking away” his ability “to enjoy the little things, the unexciting things.”

“Cause not everything that’s great and fun and enjoyable in life is exciting. It’s not adrenaline-fueled necessarily,” he continued. “But because of the level of sort of adrenaline I was chasing, because I was constantly spiking my adrenaline with a substance. It was making the enjoyable stuff that isn’t adrenalized really hard to connect with.”

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