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Everyone's talking about... Kevin McKidd

Trainspotter turned barrister

Lorién Hayes

Kevin McKidd stands out. The white curls, blue eyes, pale ageless face (he's 27). He secured his signature part as the doomed Tommy in Trainspotting after director Danny Boyle spotted him in Gilles MacKinnon's Small Faces . It wasn't the first time he'd been picked out. A few years earlier, having ditched an engineering degree at Edinburgh in favour of drama, maverick political theatre director John McGrath pulled McKidd out of lectures and gave him his first professional job at Glasgow Citizen's Theatre.

McKidd's ability to be both voluble and vulnerable helped kickstart his career with a number of parts as tough working-class Scots. (In fact, he grew up on a council estate near Inverness, the son of a plumber and a secretary.) But now he's donning a wig and gown to head the cast of Channel 4's new Leeds-set drama about barristers, North Square.

His career ascendency hasn't been straightforward. He was the only member of the Trainspotting team not to appear on the poster campaign and it's been claimed the hit Brit film led him into the DSS rather than the A-list.

McKidd says he chose a place in the real sun, as opposed to the metaphorical one.'I'd never been abroad and both Small Faces and Trainspotting required I look really ill, so afterwards I bought a 250-quid package deal and went off to Tunisia. I remember being shocked when I saw the others on the billboards on return to Waterloo. I thought, "You idiot, what have you done." But in the end it doesn't matter, I played the role in the film.'

And though he watched co-stars Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle prosper he's pragmatic. 'It was depressing watching everyone else going off to do other stuff but they'd all been acting for yonks. You have to have a body of work behind you before you get some consistency of employment going.'

McKidd certainly has that now. He was the leading man in Rose Troache's Bedrooms and Hallways, performed Gilbert and Sullivan in Mike Leigh's Topsy Turvy and perfected a rakish swagger as Vronsky in C4's Anna Karenina. Reunited for a third time with Karenina co-star Helen McCrory in North Square, McKidd sees his character Billy as a chance to emulate his hero. 'I'm a Jimmie Stewart wannabe with an expanding waistline. I tried to model Billy on him a bit, little Jimmie Stewart touches. That's what I'm good at, as opposed to doing a De Niro.'

McKidd, now a husband and father, says his latest role is in keeping with where he's reached in life. 'I was really intense and political for a long time,' he says. 'I wouldn't speak to journalists and if I spoke about myself at all I felt compromised and beat myself up about it. Since I've had a child everything's come into a different perspective... All the anguished artist thing has lifted because I'm happy.'

Five things you should know about Kevin McKidd

1 He besieged his agent with phone calls insisting she put him up for a part as a stormtrooper in The Phantom Menace .

2 Last year he worked as a mountain bike courier and in a pub as a Bloody Mary chef.

3 His favourite film is Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

4 His view of the current British film scene is 'Brit gangster patronising bollocks. Films for Sun readers.'

5 His wife Jane had their baby, Joseph, in Leeds while McKidd was filming NorthSquare.

· North Square starts on C4, 18 October

Film Unlimited 1 October 2000

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