For his upcoming role in Universal’s 2022 remake of the Danish thriller Speak No Evil, James McAvoy knew he had to capture a very specific, toxic masculine energy. To create his ruthless patriarchal character Paddy, McAvoy turned to perhaps one of the most toxically masculine characters in the world today: social media star and current defendant Andrew Tate.

“I thought I could exploit the character because he thinks he’s a certain Andrew Tate from the west of the country,” McAvoy said in a recent interview with Empire.

He later added of his character: “He says something like, ‘I’m going to show you what it’s like to be a man again.’ But he has a kind of polite face that’s not quite Andrew Tate, but more the gloss of ‘I’m not one of those guys.’ (Paddy) challenges you: ‘Do you have a big enough dick to have a drink with me?’ Or: ‘Sorry, this is too much for you because you’re not real enough.'”

The original film, directed by Christian Tafdrup, is about a Danish family on holiday in Tuscany, where they meet and befriend a Dutch family. The Danes agree to visit their new friends in the Netherlands months later, but the trip doesn’t go quite as they expected.

In the remake, directed by James Watkins, Halt and Catch Fire stars Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy play an American couple who travel with their daughter (Alix West Lefler) to the lavish country estate of a British family, played by McAvoy, Aisling Franciosi and Dan Hough, for a short vacation from which they are all desperate to escape.

“They wanted something that was a little bit agricultural,” McAvoy said of merging the character with her setting. “I had two big visual references. The first was the Australian term ‘bogan,’ which can be associated with a certain level of toxic masculinity. And the other was the character Rooster from ‘Jerusalem,’ played so brilliantly by Mark Rylance.”

As the trailer and images show, McAvoy has put on quite a bit of muscle mass to convey his character’s physically menacing appearance. However, McAvoy also tried to give him a disarming softness.

“Even though he’s all manly and he throws his dick around, he’s just a little bit more gentle,” McAvoy said. “Almost like Ray Winstone in ‘Sexy Beast’: ‘I don’t mind having my belly sticking out because that’s how comfortable I feel as a man fucking.'”

“Speak No Evil” will be released in theaters on September 13th by Universal Pictures.