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Trainspotter takes outside track

Preview showings for television programs have the traits you might expect of a lap-dancing performance. You sit in the dark, watching. Then the lights come up and the same glamorous people you've just witnessed in states of arousal and disrobement amble up to ask if there's anything they can help you with.

If, like me, you're an innocent bystander, this can be beguiling. Otherwise you're an actor, happy to discuss the insights you brought to the role of Third Morgue Attendant.

But, if you're somewhere in the middle, like Kevin McKidd, known to most as Tommy-from-Trainspotting and now star of Channel 4's sexy lawyers series, North Square, you're very far from comfortable indeed. You watch proceedings - the mixing-and-mingling, the air-kissing, the Bolly-quaffing - with peeved disdain.

He isn't an easy cove to figure. McKidd isn't too keen on all this fuss and bother, he says. He will talk the Rada handbook stuff for a while, about how it's the work that counts, and how events like this might compromise him as an actor. Then he will set off on a grumpy back-track that details how poncing around pretending to be someone else is a strange way of making a living.

"What's my motivation?" is the joke question associated with actors. McKidd asks it in a wider sense. "I've forgotten why I got into acting in the first place," he says. "I've just ended up here somehow, and now it's what I do to make ends meet. It's better than a real job, I suppose."

Actors are a fiendishly selfabsorbed bunch and you wouldn't put it past one of them to affect diffidence just to seem more enchanting. But there is something in McKidd's bearing - edgy and distracted while his peers are swapping numbers and demolishing the vol-au-vents - that suggests he would like to be somewhere else entirely. In Camberwell, probably, continuing to decorate his house for his son, Joseph, born four months ago to McKidd's wife Jane.

When a gaggle of his co-stars trip by and announce they're off to the private member's club, Soho House, McKidd requests I ask more questions to give him a pretext for not going along. "Hanging out with actors is not my idea of fun," he says.

McKidd will primarily be remembered for his turn as the bodybuilder-turned-junkie in Trainspotting. The doomed Tommy was the film's emotional Geiger-counter, the physical manifestation of the degradation the other principles had visited on themselves yet somehow side-stepped, a character whose death scraped the bottom of the moral barrel and also ensured the film would never get an airing on the Disney Channel.

If McKidd's performance failed to attach lustre to his name it might be because he missed the publicity photo-shoot - the poster made icons of McGregor, Carlyle, Bremner, Miller and Macdonald. McKidd was sunning himself in Tunisia, after making two films, Trainspotting and Small Faces, back to back.

"Given what later happened with it, yeah, I was depressed that I'd missed out. I used to get a lot more upset about these things. These days I'd be more depressed if I thought being on a poster made a difference about myself as an actor.

"Otherwise, I'm happy with Trainspotting. It's a good calling card. Before that, I had to do awful things like audition for a video camera holding up a piece of card with my name on it, like a criminal. Now, because the Americans know Trainspotting, I usually get to see the director himself.

"I still don't get the job but at least I see the director."

If nothing else, his portrayal of Tommy established the kind of terrain McKidd would come to comfortably inhabit. He has made life's losers his stock-in-trade. In his gloomier moments you suspect he thinks he is drawing on a considerable well of personal experience until you remind him how charmless it is to hear working actors complain about the business when 93% of colleagues are unemployed.

He concedes the point, and also accepts he certainly had a habit of landing in broadly similar, downtrodden roles: in Small Faces and the BBC series Looking After Jo Jo he played would-be gangsters thwarted by their own naivety and hubris; in The Acid House, he was a battered, pram-pushing husband.

He's been moving in different directions more recently. Perhaps there were personal resonances in Mike Leigh's Gilbert and Sullivan bio-pic Topsy Turvy, in which he played a Scottish thespian who only trod the boards to keep his family. In Channel Four's television adaptation of Anna Karenina he was cast as Vronsky.

"I must just have one of those faces," he says, and indeed he has, a blonde-lashed blank canvas on which stunned bemusement is convincingly projected.

"It's funny," he says, "If I'm out on a Friday night, I get drunk guys coming up, shouting, 'Hey, it's Tommy from Trainspotting.' On a Tuesday morning in the grocers you get old women pointing and saying, 'Anna Karenina, right?'."

In North Square McKidd also reprises the role of a man well accustomed to getting the fuzzier end of life's lollipop. The 10-part series, set amid the comings and goings of a Leeds defence chambers, initially styles itself as a kind of This Life of the silk and the woolsack, shakily shot, edited by an epileptic, crammed with urgent fumblings in toilet cubicles, much energetic smoking and dialogue like "You're a smug bastard, Alex. Now cut the crap".

But it quickly blossoms into something altogether more engaging. McKidd again plays the moral thermometer: the decent guy who gets what everyone else has coming to them. He is cast as a familycentred barrister who would love to cut the crap but who falls victim to a spurious racial slur action brought by a jealous rival.

The cast has obviously been assembled with an eye towards demographic inclusiveness, though McKidd says he is unphased to be playing the obligatory rough-Scotsman-with-a-heart. Or, as one of his colleagues puts it in the series: "William Wallace with a bee in his wig".

As good as North Square is, though, you get the impression McKidd's heart lies in cinema rather than television. He talks vividly of his time working with Mike Leigh, a director who endears himself to actors by getting them to write his scripts in extended improvisation sessions. He also recently auditioned for the X-Men movie: true to form he didn't get the part but he met some people more important than the tea lady.

As a teenager growing up in Scotland he believed acting was something "for ponces" and instead poured his energies into singing for a rock band. But a summer job with the Bedlam Theatre turned his head. McKidd dropped out of an engineering degree at Edinburgh to take up a drama course at Queen Margaret's College.

His big break came when he was picked up by the powerful agency ICM fresh out of college. "That was lucky because I really didn't want to be stuck in the Scottish acting rut," he says.

"Back home, the actors are either stagnant or flippant. They've been doing the same thing since the year dot, they clock on at 20 and clock off at 60. Either that or they're knocked out to be doing 10 lines in Taggart. Acting in Scotland is a bit like a branch of the Civil Service."

But even now, after several years at the sharper end, he struggles somewhat to define what exactly acting gives to him. "I dunno, really," he muses. "It's like a warm feeling, the knowledge of completing a task, the satisfaction of a job well done. I can't describe it any better than that. Though I suppose a joiner would probably say the same thing.

"I've done this long enough to know that it's a bit like the guy in the Barras selling the Incredible Soapy Sponge that absorbs more water than other sponges. You're always selling yourself, you're always striving to be something you aren't.

"I've known a lot of people who've fallen down the slippery slope because they've believed it all means something big and important. I don't think it does, it's just a decent job."

On cue, one of McKidd's more glamorous co-stars sidles up on her way out the door to Soho House. "Kevin!" she trills. "Kisses!" The actor obliges and she wiggles off. "You work with someone for five months and they think you're going to be friends for life," he mutters. "It's weird."

As requested, I quickly think up a few more questions to keep McKidd in his place. The actress turns back: "Oh, and Kevin - have a nice baby!" He waves and gives her the sharpest of smiles. "Will do. Have a nice life."

North Square starts on Wednesday, October 18, at 9pm on Channel 4

Sunday Times 8 October 2000

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