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The Big Interview: No Kidding...

... he declined to appear on the Trainspotting poster to go on holiday. But Kevin McKidd survived. And, says Imogen Edwards-Jones, he's finally given up drugs to rub some stubble in Bedrooms and Hallways.

Kevin McKidd is quite unlike most other precocious Brit-flick acting talents. For a start he is very charming: there is none of the usual surly, limp-wristed, floppy-handshake behaviour, peculiar to those thrust into the limelight less than six months after they left drama school. In fact, as I walk into the appointed club to meet him for mid-morning coffee, he leaps out of his chair, smiles a wide and generous smile and hangs well back when it comes to seat-choosing. With curly blond hair, the palest of blue eyes and transparent Boris Becker eyelashes, McKidd is an unlikely looking film star, let alone a glamorous male lead.

Yet he is the star of the new, very racy and very funny romantic comedy Bedrooms and Hallways and has ditched his hefty Highland accent for the more mellifluous, Blairite tones of a homosexual furniture restorer living in the trendy environs of Hoxton in east London. Playing against his usual junkie typecasting, 25-year-old McKidd has managed to pull off one of the more dramatic reinventions in modern British cinema.

"I really enjoyed it," he enthuses, sounding genuinely elated. "it was such a change. Normally I do things on Glasgow housing estates, set in horrible sh*ty places. It was a joy to play a terribly middle class, terribly affluent person who has enough time to worry about his sexuality rather than how he was going to get bread in his mouth."

His film debut was as the mealy-mouthed hardman Malky Johnson in Gillies MacKinnon's Small Faces in 1995. It was, however, later the same year that McKidd hit the big time, playing Tommy, a junkie who later dies of Aids, in the film Trainspotting.

"All I get is Trainspotting, Trainspotting, Trainspotting. Imagine how much worse it would have been if I were actually on the poster," declares Kevin, sounding surprisingly stoical about what some people think was the biggest mistake of his so far flawless career. Instead of being one of the faces that languishes on a thousand bedsit walls, McKidd elected to go on holiday to Tunisia with his girlfriend (they have since split up) rather than hang around during the long hot summer of 1995 for a boring photo-shoot. The shoot turned into "that poster" and possibly one of the most effective film advertising campaigns of recent years. "I'm glad I didn't do it," he insists. "I genuinely am glad. At the time I was p*ssed off, but now I'm glad. I'm getting the benefits within the business and I don't have to deal with all the other stuff." Probe more deeply about the "other stuff" and it is evident what he means: the glee with which everyone wants Ewan McGregor's theatrical endeavours to fail and the way Jonny Lee Miller's thespian outings are raked over with a fine tooth-comb. "To have that pressure and to have people really scrutinising you must be terrible," he says.

McKidd has spent most of his four-year career specialising in playing low-lifes who either deal in, take, or die of drugs. He played a pusher with Aids in the 1998 BBC television drama Looking After Jo Jo, and a shelf-stacker who is forced into marrying his heavily pregnant girlfriend, in another Irvine Welsh film, The Acid House, which was released earlier this year. "i don't know what it is," he grins, as he contemplates the grubbiness of his previous roles. "Maybe I'm good at being corrupted in films; it seems to happen all the time. Either that or I've got a face that make people want to f*ck up."

But Bedrooms and Hallways is different. Set in and around some of London's more beguiling loft apartments, with a sharp and witty script and fashionable costumes, it is a story of the nature of men, plumbing the depths of their sexual identities. Directed by Rose Troche, it co-stars Simon Callow, Harriet Walter, Jennifer Ehle, James Purefoy as Mckidd's love interest, Brendan, and Tom Hollander as his minx of a flatemate. The action centres on a men's group where everyone bonds in an attempt to discover their maleness, During one session Mckidd's character Leo, admits, shockingly, that he is attracted to Brendan and all hell breaks loose. After a weekend away, a relationship ensues, with profound consequences for all concerned.
"There is an awful lot of rumpty pump in it," says McKidd. "Tom Hollander's a very queeny gay. But I'm dull gay, wet Wednesday afternoon gay, sitting and doing a jigsaw puzzle gay. Everything happens to my character so everything else around him is completely nuts. The script is funny and totally different from anything else I'd done. It's a romantic comedy that could make a few of my mates, who could be classed as a bit homophobic, laugh and say: ' Wow, I thought that was funny, so probably my attitude to homosexuals is different to what I thought it was.' It doesn't ram it down your throat but it makes you laugh, so you go: 'Hold on a minute, it's no so bad then.'"

McKidd's obvious enthusiasm for the film is also bound up with his shock at being given the part in the first place. He is the first person to admit that the story of middle-class English boys worrying about their masculinity doesn't exactly have his name written all over it. "I was amazed that they offered it to me," he says. "There are so many average looking, average middle-class male actors in London who could do this part. Apparently I was unflashy. She [Rose Troche]wanted me just there, checking it out, rather than being a show-off." He adds almost confidentially, " I know it's an ensemble piece but getting the chance to play a lead part was great, because it's actually very difficult playing a lead. I really wanted to see if I could do it. It's not an easy thing."

There were also plenty of other aspects to the role that McKidd found not so easy, such as lots of long, passionate kissing with the enviably handsome James Purefoy. "I now understand why women ask men to shave so much," he grins. "It really is a pain in the a*se getting stubble burns." He strokes his cheeks in mock empathy. "Actually, to be honest, I find it more nerve wrecking doing a sex scene with a woman than I do with a man. It's more obvious that you don't want to go too far, you want the girl to feel comfortable. But with James it wasn't that difficult, he's straight and I'm straight, so we both knew there was no, um, well... you know. So in a funny kind of way it was less embarrassing kissing a block. He was a bit much on tongues though. It was probably not my most enjoyable moment of the film, but it wasn't too bad. He ate extra strong mints."

Kevin McKidd has come a long way since he lay in his bed in a council estate on the outskirts of Elgin in north Scotland, dreaming of Steven Spielberg discovering him. "I always thought I wanted to be Eliot," he explains. "I wanted to have an alien as a mate. I wanted to be in a Spielberg movie and hang out with E.T. because he was the coolest thing I'd ever seen."
The son of a plumber and a secretary in a lemonade factory, who is now the administrator of a disabled children's theatre company in Elgin, McKidd, the youngest of two brothers, had an impoverished working-class upbringing. With no artistic influence, he fell into acting as a result of athletic inadequacy. "I couldn't play football because I was really fat," he explains patiently. "I was a big beefer. When i was 14, I shot up and lost it, but before that I was very short and dumpy." He pauses and winces slightly. "Ask my mum if you don't believe me. The first time I went on stage was during a school play and everyone laughed, either because I was fat, or because I was being funny. I wasn't sure. Anyway, it was a good buzz and I just knew that's what I wanted to do."

His parents were less than keen. They wanted him to do something grown up that had a future. So Kevin, by way of appeasement, did engineering for part of one term at Edinburgh's Queer Margaret College [Wasn't it University of Edinburgh? -G] in 1992 and then switched to the drama course. "As soon as it started to work they were very supportive," he remembers. "they are really cool people," he adds. "They said: 'Look, we married young, had kids young, we never had the chance to know what we could have done, so make sure that you give it a stab.'"

He managed more than a stab. In 1995, during the last year of his course, he fortuitously landed the lead in John McGrath's production of Neil Gunn's The Silver Darlings at the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow. From then on McKidd was in demand, moving straight from The Silver Darlings to Small Faces and from there to Trainspotting and so on. In a bid for self-improvement he has been treading the boards, most recently last year with Diana Rigg, in the title role of Britannicus at the Albery Theatre for the Almeida, which transferred to New York for two weeks. "I'd never been to the States before so that was brilliant," he enthuses. "The whole thing was wonderful, there were queues around the block and everyone kept coming up to me in the dressing room afterwards and saying: 'You were totally... totally...' And I was going: 'What? Totally what?' No one ever said what it was."

Now living in Camberwell with his new fiancee, Jane, McKidd's New York experience has made his move to London less disorientating. "It makes London feel small," he says. "I felt quite intimidated by London until I went to New York. I've been living here for a year and I still find it hard to adjust. Everyone knows your business. People come up to me and 'Oh yea, you were in New York, weren't you?' In Glasgow everything goes on behind closed doors, whereas here, knowledge is power."

McKidd's move to London seems to have worked and he has achieved a lot in an extremely short space of time. All the risks he has taken seem to have paid off, even the slightly dubious movie of starring in The Acid House. Not an obviously good one in the light of the ridiculous success of Trainspotting.

"Initially I didn't want to do it," he admits, running his hands through his hair. "I was worried about type-casting. It's rehashing old territory, and all that. Then I spoke to the director and he told me how he wanted to shoot it and I just liked the ideas."

He genuinely laughs at the idea that actors are able to plan or choose any element of their career. "That's b*llocks." he laughs. "People say 'I chose to do this role. I chose to do that role.' B*llocks. Most people, unless you're doing really well, are offered a role and you say all right, I'll do it. In the end, you don't want to get too obsessed withy our career plan. The last thing you can do is say: 'I have done that. I've done this. What I really need to play is a 25-year-old Asian with haemorrhoids."

It is surely only a matter of time before the siren calls of Hollywood come down the line. But would McKidd like to go across the pond? "If there was some big action film then I'd do it. But I don't have a six-pack and I'm not stunningly good looking, so I'm not leading man America status."

If he thinks he's not quite to Spielberg's taste, then what will he do in the next half decade, until he's 30? "Anything where I don't have to be Scottish," he laughs. "I'd love to be able to get a job, big enough to pay off my parents' mortgage. I haven't made enough money to be able to do that, but I'd love to. I'd love to say: 'I know I was a pain in the a*se as a kid, but there you go.' But I don't know if that'll ever happen." So any more inopportune trips abroad planned? "Oh no," he laughs. "I'm going to make myself available for any kind of publicity this time around."

Bedrooms and Hallways is on general release from April 9

The Times (Metro) 27 March 1999

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