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Having a field day

When he had finished filming Trainspotting, Kevin McKidd decided to go on holiday to Tunisia with his girlfriend rather than stay for the publicity shoot. The enormity of what he had done only hit him when he returned to Waterloo Station after his trip to be confronted by the 50-foot high images of his co-stars Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and Kelly MacDonald.

"I was gutted when I saw the posters," McKidd says of what was one of the most successful marketing campaigns in the history of British cinema. "Now it's one of those archetypal student posters, and I'm not on it."

Still, four years after he first caught sight of those giant billboards, McKidd is philosophical about his error - in fact, in hindsight he actually thinks it might have been to his advantage. "Now I reckon it hasn't done me any harm," says the actor. "In fact, I'm glad I didn't do it. All I get is Trainspotting, Trainspotting, Trainspotting. Imagine how much worse it would have been if I was actually on the poster. I'm getting the benefits within the business, and I don't have to deal with all that other stuff."

Thanks to his lower profile, McKidd has been able to avoid being typecast as a junkie hard man and carve out a more varied career for himself. After playing a string of often violent losers in films such as Small Faces, Looking After Jo Jo and The Acid House, the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy from Elgin, Aberdeenshire was certainly in grave danger of being saddled with a 'stitch that' image. "I landed a lot of parts as scumbags on run-down Scottish estates. Maybe I'm just good at being corrupted in films. Either that, or I've got a face that people want to mess up."

Now, however, he is being cast in roles that require skill at acting rather than Stanley knife-wielding. "There's a real stigma when people just see you as a Scottish actor, rather than an actor who happens to come from Scotland," he says. "It would do my nut in to play another scummy Glasgow guy because I feel as though I've done it before. It's good to keep doing different things."

And McKidd is certainly doing that. In the last year alone, his parts couldn't have been further removed from a yob on a deprived Scottish estate. He has played the title role opposite Dame Diana Rigg in a well-regarded production of Racine's Britannicus in London's West End and on Broadway, a sensitive gay man in the film comedy, Bedrooms and Hallways, a pretentious opera singer from Gilbert and Sullivan's original company in Mike Leigh's acclaimed Topsy Turvy, and the smouldering romantic hero, Vronsky, in Channel 4's moody adaptation of Anna Karenina.

To underline his versatility, McKidd is now starring in North Square, a lively new legal drama. He plays Billy, a hip young barrister based in Leeds. Taking time out between scenes, the 27-year-old is currently putting up his barrister brogues and reading a Penguin Classic. When I arrive, he jumps up to greet me like a long-lost friend (I have only met him once before). His manner is open, friendly and - here's a relief - defiantly un-thespian.

He laughs that in North Square "it is good to be on the other side of the fence for once. It's nice to play someone representing a criminal rather than the criminal himself." McKidd's performance convinces because it is spare and unshowy; it exhibits no trace of "look at me" flamboyance. "If I'm over-emoting or trying to be a clever-clogs, it just doesn't work," he reflects. "Some actors go in for that thing of 'me, me, me, aren't I great? Look, I can change my emotions just like that.' But actually what punters want is a solid performance. What I do well is to play normal people who are pulled out of themselves and into extraordinary situations.

"Once you step out of the bounds of reality, the performance gets in the way. The best compliment I can have is if someone comes up to me and says, 'you're Malky from Small Faces. You evil bastard.' That's good because they're seeing the character rather than the acting."

McKidd reckons that he learned to be more pared-down - and therefore more plausible - from Mike Leigh, who directed him in Topsy Turvy. "Mike has a radar that senses bulls**t from a hundred paces," he chuckles. "Until I met him, I cared about how I was perceived and how to get to the next stage of my career, but he taught me that's just vanity. He makes you realise that in order to play a part really well, you have to not give a damn about what other people think.

"There's a lot of ego flying around in this business, but all that fluff is not real; what's real is playing a scene truthfully. A lot of people act for reasons of lifestyle; they think it's a good way to meet girls. Playground stuff. To be true to your character, you have to put all that 'I want to be loved' stuff to one side."

The last thing McKidd wants is a reputation as a professional celeb, known more for his readiness to turn up for the "opening of an envelope" than for his acting. He says that life in the limelight is "not for me. I don't think about stardom. I don't have acceptance speeches already written out."

McKidd is also kept honest by his close-knit circle of friends outside the business. "I can't ever take myself too seriously because there is a whole swathe of people who would say 'shut up, you prat' if I ever did," he says with a self-deprecating laugh. "It's easy for the job to take over your life, but you have to remember that if you don't have a life, you haven't got much to bring to the job anyway.

"I've got my own life away from actors because it gets boring just talking about the jobs you didn't get and your waistline - 'oh my suit's getting a bit tight' type of thing. As an actor, you mustn't take yourself too seriously. My acid test before a scene is 'will my mates take the mickey?"'

Perhaps McKidd remains so grounded because he doesn't come from a 'luvvie' background. The son of a plumber and a secretary at a lemonade factory, he grew up on an estate on the outskirts of Elgin. As an eight-year-old, he was seized by the desire to act after watching ET. "I wanted to be in a Spielberg movie and hang out with ET because he was the coolest thing I'd ever seen," he recalls.

Soon, like the lovable alien, McKidd was dreaming of escape. "I thought, 'I need to get out of Elgin fast or I'll end up being stuck here forever.' I'd have become a plumber like my dad." Instead, he left to study drama at Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh. Within two months of graduating in 1995, he won his first major role, as the local gangster Malky, in Small Faces. The same year, he was jet-propelled into the big time because of Trainspotting.

Success hasn't turned his head, though. "I never thought I'd be in a West End play," he says, the amazement clear in his voice. "And I still can't believe it when I go to a screening and see myself up there. I'm just this kid from Elgin."

McKidd has married a London woman, Jane, and moved south - he was fed up with travelling down for auditions - but he remains deeply connected to Scotland. The ringing tone on his mobile plays Scotland the Brave - "what else could it be?," he laughs - and he says that since the birth of his son Joseph earlier this summer he is keen to return north of the border as often as possible. "I love the place," he sighs, "it's so important to me. I really want my son to have a relationship with Scotland."

The birth of his first child has only reinforced McKidd's already strong sense of family. "When he was born, I felt as though the world wasn't the same any more. I remember walking out of the hospital after the birth, seeing people catching buses and carrying on with their everyday lives, and I felt like an alien."

The baby was born in a Leeds hospital during the North Square shoot, and McKidd is adamant that his wife and son will come with him wherever he is filming. "I'm not prepared to be detached from my family," he insists. "I'd rather turn down work. You've only got one life, and I don't want to be one of those millions of people who turn round at the end of their lives and say, 'I wish I had spent more time with my family.' If you're not there, then everybody's missing out."

The family will be travelling with McKidd again on what he hopes will be his next job, a film in Poland about a trio of anorak-clad Liverpudlian railway enthusiasts who become unwittingly caught up in the Solidarity protests during the early 1980s. It's a return to trainspotting for the actor. But this time you can bet he'll be on the poster.
North Square is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday

James Rampton

The Scotsman 21 October 2000

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