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Addicted to the camera

WILLIAM RUSSELL finds Kevin McKidd keen to further a film career that has taken him from Acid House to opera house

KEVIN McKIDD, the train spotter missing from that celebrated poster - he had gone on holiday - has not missed out on much since. While you read this the 25-year-old Elgin-born actor will be in New York with the Almeida Theatre company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music appearing in the title role in Racine's Britannicus. After their successful West End run with Phedre and Britannicus, Diana Rigg, Toby Stephens, and the rest are at BAM for two weeks. For McKidd it will not be all work. He is not in Phedre and he's looking forward to seeing New York for the first time. Life could hardly be better, although he admits to feeling knackered, having spent most of the past two years working, and six months of the year just ended making the Mike Leigh Gilbert and Sullivan film in which he plays an opera singer.

He says that Britannicus was a hard play to do. "I would not say Racine is my favourite classical playwright, but it is good to have the chance to do him and good that this sort of classical theatre should be a success in the West End, reaching a big audience. The play is written in rhyming couplets, in Alexandrines, and they are not a natural speech rhythm, whereas in Shakespeare the verse is natural. It is quite a challenge because the text is working against you at times."

He says the company has been great to work with, and he enjoyed returning to the theatre after having done so much film work. It was good discipline and you got something to take back to your film acting. Although he wants to work in the theatre, it is film that currently interests him and he wants to do more. Over the past two years he has made Dad Savage, which, in spite of good reviews, did not do well in the cinema but is now out on video; Acid House, the Irvine Welsh trilogy he is currently promoting; Looking After Jo Jo; Rose Troche's Bedrooms and Hallways, and a low-budget film, Understanding James, which along with the Troche film was the audience favourite at the London Film Festival. He also spent two weeks in Morocco working on Gillies Mackinnon's Hideous Kinky, a role with one line which he took to his agent's horror, since he had been the lead in his previous film, because he and Mackinnon go way back. He has been in three Mackinnon films, notably Small Faces, and enjoys working for him, even if the parts keep getting smaller. Mackinnon told him the part might not seem a lot, but he would be able to make something of it. He also fixed the schedule so McKidd had two weeks in Morocco to shoot the scene.

As for working for Leigh, like every actor who has done so he would do it again at the drop of a hat, even although the whole process completely takes over your life. "It is the only time you get as an actor when you develop your character, your dialogue, and are not dictated to by a script," he says. "It is drawn up, but he is incredible. He operates by his own rules, which is unique in this business where people watch what they are saying, what is going on. He cuts through all that. If you are asked by Mike Leigh to work for him you don't turn him down. I thought - am I going to be able to do this? I am going to try. You find it in yourself, and it is a real confidence builder." Although he can sing - his auntie, a stalwart of Elgin G&S productions, was particularly thrilled at his getting the role, he says - he did get proper training because it is "quite hard stuff" to sing.

He moved to London at the beginning of the year, largely because he realised that the Leigh film was not going to be a normal eight-week shoot but would take over his life for at least six months, and the timing seemed right to leave Scotland. London, he says, is quite a daunting place, and it has been good to be so busy. To date he has made 10 films, starting with Small Faces, but accepts there is no guarantee that will continue. Acting is a precarious profession. But he wants to do more film as opposed to theatre. "Film is a whole new world, whereas I have been on stage since I was a wee kid," he says. "Film acting is like trying to learn the piano. It is a skill thing. It is only now I am beginning to know my film acting and I am kind of obsessed with it at the moment because I feel myself starting to improve."

He liked the fact that the Acid House role - he plays a weakling husband bullied by the thug upstairs who seduces his wife - although written by Welsh, was different from the one he had in Trainspotting, a film he is grateful to. It opened doors, and he could show it to his grandkids and say: "I did this when I was young."

The Herald 5 January 1999

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