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- The Guardian, Friday 25 April 2003
Should it be taken as proof of a lacklustre season that the world's most famous Hibs fan leaves it to the Guardian to raise the topic of his favourite football team? The actor Dougray Scott, whose contemporaneous love of golf as much as his professional charisma has invited comparison with a young Sean Connery, is tolerant of sports-related probing. "That I adore Hibs has been well documented," he says, with some bemusement. "It's a bit tiring talking about it. I do love Hibs but I didn't mean it to get out of hand. People have this image of me dreaming about the lineup for the next game. It's not like that."
Scott is not, it must be said, deeply exercised by his celebrity fan status. An equable character, without airs, he displays a cool estimation of how seriously to take how others see him. But what is and is not in the public domain about himself and his family remains a tender subject for the 37-year-old, following a tainting and unpleasant episode in the autumn of 2001 when the release of his film Enigma coincided with a rash of speculation about his relationship with his co-star Kate Winslet.
Winslet's marriage had unravelled, and she would soon announce her devotion to the director Sam Mendes. But for a brief period Scott was the talk of the steamie, his public appearances with his own wife, the casting director Sarah Trevis, pulled to pieces by the media. He doesn't come across as a naturally nippy sweetie. But there's a palpable frustration still when he talks about the difficulties of ringfencing his private world.
"You can't control what people want to speculate on, or what they ask you when you're doing press. But I have a private life, and it's very important to me to keep that separate. My children [five-year-old twins Eden and Gabriel] never asked to be in the public eye. I want them to have as normal an upbringing as possible."
He has experienced intense intrusion into his private life, he says. "The amount of people I wanted to punch. What's the name of that stupid presenter on GMTV? They had something on there about me kissing my wife [at the Enigma premiere] and they got body language experts on the programme to analyse it. It was just so far away from the truth."
"I just didn't engage," he adds, "because once you engage you're opening yourself up to a conversation about 'what did it mean?', 'what was it all about?' You have to take a step back and remember who you are. I'm not going to engage in a conversation of a very private nature in public.
"There are people who court publicity all the time, who manipulate it, and sometimes you don't feel too sorry for them. But lives can be ruined, for ever, with the kind of intrusion that goes on and it's not healthy for a society to be so obsessed with people's personal lives. It's bonkers."
In the moments between these sporting and tabloid obsessions, Scott has of course succeeded in establishing a rather successful acting career. After television work including The Crow Road, the well-received adaptation of the Iain Banks novel, his memorable role as a cocaine-addled copper in the Welsh independent film Twin Town brought him to the attention of Tom Cruise, who subsequently cast him as his near nemesis in Mission: Impossible 2.
On the cusp of becoming one of the country's most bankable male performers, Scott is still staunch in his choices. He talks through the mishmash of projects he's got on the go: The Bum's Rush, a low-budget Scottish affair made via his own production company Hero Films, with a first-time writer and director; a possible adaptation of Robin Jenkins's second world war classic The Cone Gatherers; a Dylan Thomas biopic awaiting the financial green light.
Doesn't it wear him down, the multiple researching, the funding farragos, the lack of routine? Yes, in a word. "But it's either that or doing the films that are certain to go ahead but your heart's not completely in." His professional decisions have been pretty instinctual, he says. "I shied away from a lot of mainstream work after Mission: Impossible, but I really wanted to do Enigma, and I really wanted to do Ripley's Game [a follow-up to The Talented Mr Ripley, also starring John Malkovich and Ray Winstone]. It's what you feel you can't walk away from."
This sentiment manifested itself most obviously during the making of the English civil war drama To Kill a King. Directed by Mike Barker, one of Scott's partners in Hero Films, it ran into severe financial difficulties midway through shooting. The actor, who had also been working as an associate producer on the project for two years, put up £70,000 of his own money to ensure that it was completed. Unusually, To Kill a King is a British film without any public funding - Barker noted that he had to add an additional 30 seconds to the producers' credits because so many people had chipped in £50 here and £100 there.
The end result is a sturdy and engaging work, which gives flesh to the hitherto unexplored relationship between Oliver Cromwell, played by Tim Roth, and his general, Thomas Fairfax, played by Scott. Set in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of Charles I at Naseby by the rebel New Model Army, it focuses on the disintegration of Cromwell and Fairfax's friendship as their competing visions of the country's future emerge. Fairfax is torn between his desire to temper Cromwell's increasingly extremist rule and the concerns of his wife, Lady Anne, who remains loyal to the monarchy. Played by the luminous Olivia Williams, Anne's influence over her husband's decision-making is intelligent rather than bosomy. It's a real joy to see a woman in a historical drama who is not solely on board for the purpose of modelling corsetry.
Fairfax's contribution to these events has been severely diluted over the centuries, says Scott. "He created the New Model Army. He was its general and a military hero, and he later played a significant role in the reconstruction of the country." It was this undiscovered quality that attracted him to the script, he says. "Because nobody knows anything about him, you are given free rein. You have to work out what it was that was so attractive about Fairfax. He was quite introverted. He wasn't particularly comfortable with being a leader of the parliamentarians. He was quite shy in some respects. But when he went into battle it was said that his spirit took over and he became a different man."
Essentially, To Kill a King takes an extraordinary period of history - the only time that England has had a republic - and renders it as a buddy movie. And it works. "The relationships are played out very realistically," says Scott. "I'd never read anything like it before. You're always looking for things that are going to push you and stretch you. You're jumping into the unknown and that excites me. [The writer Jenny Mayhew] captured this wonderful friendship that stretches at different points but comes back together again. So by the time all the shit happened [with the funding] I'd been involved in it for so long that it would have broken my heart to see it fall apart. It was just bloody-mindedness."
Having a substantial investment in a film inevitably results in a different attachment to the work, he says. "But the whole point of being an associate producer is that you're involved in the process afterwards. Ultimately, all I want is for it to be critically well-received. It was a difficult film to make and it's not similar to anything that's around at the moment."
Scott is a great-looking man, though one senses not so familiar with the mirror that he can't see past it. He's pleasant rather than charming. He says that he has always felt like a bit of an outsider, but counters that what comes across is a pretty grounded sense of self.
"From my childhood, I always had a feeling of being quite introverted and shy, and you create a world around that. I had two older sisters, my brother was 10 years older than me, and I felt separated. Maybe shyness does that to you, because you can't quite connect. So acting was great, to jump into someone else's skin, and be what you can't be normally." His social skills are a lot better these days, he says, deadpan.
"What you try and do as an actor is know other people incredibly well," he says, "but it always comes back to you, whether it's a similar experience you can relate to or how you might react in a given situation. You have to be very honest with yourself about who you are and the choices that you would make in your life, in order to understand how different that character is from you. So you do have to know yourself. Which is funny when you spend a lot of your time trying to know other people."
He grew up in Glenrothes, an industrial town in Fife, and describes his background as working class, "rough sometimes, not others, happy sometimes, not others. I was happy to get away at the time but I love going back. It's where I was brought up and I've got a lot of great memories from there." He's keen to scotch any romantic notion of the poor boy finding an escape through art.
"A lot of people had a lot worse upbringings. Acting was about taking me out of my shell because I was quite shy. We did musicals and drama at school, but your idea of acting came from watching Hollywood movies which seemed like a million miles away."
Then something happened that brought it all close up. "It was reading Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. My dad was a salesman for years and I was blown away by the similarities to my own world. The gap was bridged, and that was the genesis of my love of acting. It wasn't about wanting to be a star, it was about communication."
From that moment on, he just knew. "Other people told me I couldn't. My first lecturer said, 'You're never going to be an actor.' I am," he says with quiet force. Scott trained at the Welsh College of Music and Drama, and suffered the requisite years of unemployment before breaking through. "Something inside you keeps you going. This is your path. It's right." And there was nothing else he could do, he cracks, lest he sound too spiritual. "This is it. I'd better get some work because otherwise I'm fucked."
· To Kill a King is released on May 16, and Ripley's Game on May 30.
