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Anne-Marie Duff explains why she doesn’t like the term ‘toxic masculinity’

Actor, who is raising a boy, finds the rhetoric around young men ‘frustrating sometimes’

Ellie Harrison
Monday 04 November 2024 04:14 GMT
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Anne-Marie Duff
Anne-Marie Duff (Getty Images)

Anne-Marie Duff has discussed her experience of raising a son, and said she does not like the term “toxic masculinity”.

The Bad Sisters actor, 54, parents a teenage son, Brendan, with her ex-husband James McAvoy, who she met on the set of the British comedy-drama Shameless.

Speaking about bringing up a boy and the discourse around young men, she told The Observer Magazine: “I think the rhetoric around it is frustrating sometimes. Like, I don’t love the expression ‘toxic masculinity’, because masculinity is a describing noun, isn’t it? Is all masculinity toxic? It’s like saying, ‘pathetic femininity’.”

She added: “My worry is that there are a lot of young boys who think it’s innate.”

Duff then pointed to “a very sad story” a friend had recently told her about a 13-year-old boy they knew who was having counselling because he thought there was an inevitability about him becoming a rapist.

“We have to be so careful with our young people,” she said.

Duff and McAvoy were married from 2006 to 2016. In a 2022 interview with The Independent, she said that Shameless, which followed a dysfunctional working-class family, changed her life. “The weird thing about that series was that it got me other work that you would never imagine…” she said.

“It was an enormous facilitator. I met my ex-husband and we had a child. It was a life-changer for me, and I am very grateful to it. But also what I love about Shameless was that it was a show about poverty, it had a sense of connection to the real world.”

Duff’s other notable roles include Queen Elizabeth I in The Virgin Queen and John Lennon’s mother Julia in Nowhere Boy.

McAvoy and Duff in 2015
McAvoy and Duff in 2015 (Getty Images)

In the black comedy Bad Sisters on Apple TV+, which is returning this month for a second season, she plays Grace Garvey, a woman with an abusive husband whose sisters become alarmed as she becomes more and more distant.

The Independent’s Amanda Whiting gave the first series five stars in her review, writing: “Sharon Horgan’s dark, bonkers comedy will have you rooting for a clan of murderous women.”

Bad Sisters season two arrives on Apple TV+ on 13 November.

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