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The One Who Missed the Train

Kevin McKidd would have become one of the best-known faces of the 1990s, beaming down from student bedroom walls throughout the land, were it not for a cheap two-week holiday to Tunisia in the summer of 1995. He had a part in a low-budget British film, then went to north
Africa, leaving the rest of the cast to do the promotional shots for the poster. The film was Trainspotting.

It was hailed as the best British movie of the decade and the poster became the most celebrated British movie poster of all time, securing a place in the nation's consciousness for Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewan McGregor. McKidd remained "the one that got Aids", "the one with the thick, blond, curly hair" and "the one who wasn't on the poster".

"At the time I was like 'Oh, man, you stupid bastard for going on holiday, you've really missed the boat there'," says the 25-year-old from Elgin, munching a ham and cheese sandwich in a corner of the lounge of the elegant Berners hotel in London.

"But as time went on and it was reaching saturation point, I realised, for the work I want to do in my career, I'm better off. I want to do lots of different stuff. I'm happier just being in the film and just having done my job, rather than being a kind of pop image."

McKidd subsequently played a drug dealer with Aids in the BBC television drama series Looking After Jo Jo and he returns to Irvine Welsh territory in his new film The Acid House, which opens on New Year's Day. But he is determined not to be stereotyped in a world of drugs, petty crime and squalor.

His latest projects could not be further removed from Welsh's milieu. McKidd plays an opera singer in Mike Leigh's forthcoming film about Gilbert and Sullivan, and he has the title role of Britannicus in a production of Racine's play set in Nero's Rome, co-starring Diana Rigg. Its London run has ended and he is about to go with the play to New York, his first visit to America.

McKidd grew up in a council house on the outskirts of Elgin. His father was a plumber and McKidd took up acting because he was useless at football (in common with the rest of the Trainspotting cast). "I was a fat wee kid," he says, "and I just couldnae kick a ball."

He remembers the buzz he got from making the audience laugh in a primary school play and decided his future lay in acting when he saw ET. "I used to lie in my bath and imagine a huge limo turning up the cul-de-sac where I stayed. And then Spielberg gets out and knocks on my
front door."

But when McKidd left it was not for the bright lights and razzmatazz of Hollywood, but the nuts and bolts of an engineering degree in Edinburgh. "I had no intention really of doing engineering," he says. "I just wanted to get away from Elgin."

His parents thought he should try "something sensible" before committing himself to acting. So he did engineering for part of one term, then got a place on the drama course at Edinburgh's Queen Margaret College.

He was nearing the end of his third and final year when John McGrath cast a new production of Neil Gunn's The Silver Darlings at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow. For the ead he wanted someone young and blond from the north of Scotland: enter McKidd.

McKidd went straight from drama school to the Citizens' Theatre to the books of one of Hollywood's leading agencies. Duncan Heath, from International Creative Management's (ICM) London office, was a personal friend of McGrath. He came to visit him, saw the play and immediately offered to represent its young star.

McKidd's film debut, as hard man Malky Johnson in Gillies MacKinnon's Small Faces in 1995, was quickly followed by Trainspotting and the role of Tommy, who takes heroin only after being chucked by his girlfriend and ends up dead.

Despite missing out on the poster, McKidd has not been short of work. "It's been three years of back-to-back stuff," he says.

In The Acid House, McKidd is again the decent guy surrounded by deprivation and degradation as the lead character in A Soft Touch, the middle episode of three short films strung together to make a feature.

"A Soft Touch sounded so different from Trainspotting, I thought 'I have got to do this', " he says. "[The director Paul McGuigan] was doing A Soft Touch with a documentary kind of feel, trying to make it very realistic, rather than heightened in a cinematic sense." The character, Johnny, who stacks shelves in a supermarket, is forced to marry the heavily pregnant Catriona (Michelle Gomez), a monstrous creation who subsequently neglects her baby and abuses her husband mentally and physically. Johnny takes it and comes back for more.

A Soft Touch is sandwiched between the film's two comic episodes. The brutal sex and violence make for uncomfortable viewing.

McKidd researched the role by driving through from Glasgow to Niddrie in Edinburgh, where he watched young fathers in tracksuit pants pushing prams around. But the main inspiration for the character was McKidd himself.

"Sadly there was a lot of myself in that," he says. "I'm a bit of a pushover when it comes to relationships. I think everybody is capable of that kind of weakness, that fear of being alone or whatever it is that makes you stay when you know you should go."

McKidd does not have a girlfriend and lives in his three-bedroom house in Camberwell alone, except for two goldfish he was given as a present. "Those are the only companions I have at the moment," he jokes.

But he is not short of admirers. He graces the cover of the British edition of Premiere this month and is off to pre-record the New Year's Day edition of The Big Breakfast, before going to New York. With so much happening in his life, McKidd will soon catch up with his ormer colleagues who made it on to the poster.

Sunday Times 20 December 1998

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