James McAvoy Recalls His Awkward First Meeting with Childhood Crush Jennifer Aniston: 'It Was Rough'

James McAvoy said on 'Watch What Happens Live' that he fumbled his introduction to Jennifer Aniston at a party in Los Angeles in his early 20s

James McAvoy had an awkward first encounter with Jennifer Aniston.

While McAvoy, 45, appeared on Watch What Happens Live on Wednesday, Sept. 11 to promote his new horror-thriller movie Speak No Evil, the actor told host Andy Cohen and fellow guest Edie Falco that Aniston, 55, was his celebrity childhood crush while he grew up in Scotland.

"I did meet her and it wasn't great," McAvoy said, when Cohen, 56, asked if he's ever met Aniston. "Not because she's not great," he added, clarifying that he was awkwardly introduced to Aniston at a party in the early 2000s, when McAvoy was just starting out as an actor and Aniston was at the height of her Friends fame.

"I was like 22 in L.A. and I met Lucy Liu, and Lucy Liu was really nice to me," he recalled. "She was like, 'Come meet my friends!' And there was a big circle of her friends and one of them happened to be Jennifer Aniston, and just as she was like, 'Hey guys meet my new friend James,' instead of saying that, she got pulled aside by like a guy she went to high school with."

Related: James McAvoy Explains the 'Joys' of Doing 'Bad Stuff' Onscreen as an Extreme Villain (Exclusive)

McAvoy recalled that Liu quickly got caught up chatting with an old friend and left him with her friends before really introducing him to anybody. "I was just left standing with all these people going like, 'Hey, what's up, I'm new in town. So you're Jennifer Aniston and you're in Friends," he said.

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"It was like that — it was rough," McAvoy added, after pantomiming to imply that Aniston and other party attendees did not engage with him after Liu left the group. "But she was lovely." 

Related: Justin Theroux Says Ex Jennifer Aniston Is 'Still Very Dear' to Him: 'I Feel Protective’

Two decades removed from that awkward encounter, McAvoy costars with with Mackenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi and Scoot McNairy in Speak No Evil, a thriller about a couple who visit newly-made friends in England. The movie is a remake of the 2022 Danish film of the same name.

“The horror in this film isn't just the scary stuff or the violent stuff, it's the squirm stuff,” he recently told PEOPLE of the movie, adding that it is “crowd-pleasing, it is entertainment, and yet it's underpinned by real social observation and sometimes something to say about society as well.”

Speak No Evil is in theaters now.

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