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’

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 (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.