California Schemin'
2025 film directed by James McAvoy
California Schemin' (stylized as California $chemin') is a 2025 biographical musical film directed by James McAvoy in his directorial debut. The film stars Samuel Bottomley and Séamus McLean Ross as Scottish faux-American rap pairing Silibil N' Brains, Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, and is based on Bain's 2010 memoir California Schemin': How Two Lads from Scotland Conned the Music Industry.
California Schemin' premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September 2025. It was released theatrically in the United Kingdom by StudioCanal on 10 April 2026, and will be released by Magenta Light Studios in the United States on 9 October 2026.
Plot
The film tells the true story of Silibil N' Brains, a rap duo from Dundee who, for three years, pretended to be American in order to be taken seriously by the record industry.
Cast
Samuel Bottomley as Billy "Silibil" Boyd
Séamus McLean Ross as Gavin "Brains" Bain
James McAvoy as Anthony Reid
Lucy Halliday as Mary Boyd
Rebekah Murrell as Tessa
James Corden as a music executive
Jennifer Winn as Hayley
Production
James McAvoy was reported to be directing a film about faux-Californian rap duo, Silibil N' Brains, otherwise known as Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd from Dundee in Scotland, in October 2023.
The film is produced by Danny Page of Homefront Productions and Michael Mendelsohn of Patriot Pictures. It is based on Bain's 2010 memoir California Schemin': How Two Lads from Scotland Conned the Music Industry (which was later re-printed as Straight Outta Scotland) and adapted by Elaine Gracie and Archie Thomson. Samuel Bottomley and Séamus McLean Ross were cast to play Boyd and Bain. McAvoy also has a small role in the film.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “California Schemin'” as 2025 film directed by James McAvoy. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2025 film directed by James McAvoy. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q130907514. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2010, 2026 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “California Schemin'” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.