April 20, 2003
The Age
Hollywood?  I'd rather be on the golf course
by Elizabeth Grice

Among the potted palms and leather furniture of a small west London hotel, Dougray Scott looks as if he has blundered on to the set of an E. M. Forster novel on his way home from a football match. He is in jeans, boots and a heavy greatcoat, which he declines to take off. It's not cold, and its main purpose seems to be to conceal a bilious green Hibernian FC sweatshirt, of which he is both proud and apologetic.

His great love is football. "I was never good enough to be a professional player, unfortunately, but that would have been my ideal." With a little more skill in central defence, Scott, the star of Enigma and Mission: Impossible II and now, Ripley's Game, would have been lost to the big screen. But, at 36, he would surely have been retiring from the beautiful game by now, instead of being immersed in a bewildering number of big roles and being touted as a future James Bond.

He takes up an almost horizontal position in an armchair and talks in a low, unpunctuated Scots monotone, as though he may be about to go to sleep. Exhaustion suits him.

Just when it seems he and the coat are becoming indistinguishable, there's a topic that makes him seem almost animated. He is describing how to kill someone.

"If you shoot from behind, you go for the base of the brain stem, because that's instant death," he says, jabbing the back of his neck. "If you get someone in the heart, and they've got a gun in their hand, they can take a shot back. You've got about 20 seconds. From the front, I would shoot right there (between the eyes). Then, of course, there are the vital organs. The most painful one to go for is the stomach. Dreadful." He looks rather pleased with his expertise.

Scott has just finished making two films that require him to play a hired assassin - in The Poet, he is a former Russian special forces soldier, and in Ripley's Game he is a terminally ill stooge - and he has become adept with weapons.

"I spent a lot of time on the rifle range to perfect my marksmanship. I'm a pretty good shot, yeah, as it happens."

Scott's research methods for his roles are famously thorough. Creepy, even. Not only does he know exactly where to place the bullet, he also knows how to make the bullet, precisely what it will do on impact and how long the victim will take to die.

For Enigma he studied the maths that Bletchley Park code-breakers used. Filming for his next big film part begins next spring, but already he is thinking himself into the skin of Dylan Thomas. He has started to put on weight for the part; he has read all the books, listened to all the poetry readings.

For the Dylan Thomas biopic, Scott will be revisiting Wales, which he knows and loves. He went to the Welsh College of Music and Drama and, after pursuing the life of a struggling actor in London, returned to Swansea to make Twin Town, the film that was expected to do for Wales what Trainspotting did for Scotland, but instead brought Dougray Scott to the attention of Tom Cruise - and so to Hollywood.

Young British actors tend to treat Hollywood like a form of prostitution. It's part of the pose. But it doesn't take long to realise that Los Angeles is genuinely not his preferred habitat.

"I would get suffocated by living in LA. These people live, breathe, eat, drink, sleep movies. It's too much for me. I like other things as well. I've turned down a lot of films in America. Considering the amount of money you get offered, it shocks me sometimes at how easy it is for me to say no."

Scott has just flown back from seeing his mother in Fife. "When I was young, I couldn't wait to get away. Fife's a strange, quite inward-looking, claustrophobic sort of place, but there's an enjoyment you get out of being a Fifer that's hard to explain. The rest of Scotland is different. Fife is quite peculiar in its strangeness. I adore it."

His home now is Hammersmith, West London, where he lives with his wife, Sarah Trevis, a casting agent, and five-year-old twins, Gabriel and Eden, but Scotland still exerts a huge pull. The Scots, he says, are much too canny to treat him like a prodigal - "They don't like you to get above your station, neither should you" - but he gets invited back to hand out awards and play the chieftain at his local Highland games.

Scott's background is socialist working class - "not rich, but with a great richness and warmth of spirit that was given to me by my parents". His mother was a nurse; his father played football for Queen's Park and acted briefly, but with four children to feed he spent most of his life travelling round Scotland selling fridges.

"My father never pressured me in any way. All he wanted was for me to be happy. My mother loves everything I do, as mothers do. She is very proud of me. All my family are. But I am proud of them, too."

He preferred sport to school work but a "Protestant work ethic about exams" got him good grades. Golf is still his favourite form of relaxation.

"In Scotland, it's a big working-class sport and a wonderful game for young people to get involved in. It's a great mental discipline - like acting, in a way. You really have to be in the moment; to concentrate. I play a lot because I find it gives me a great release. I forget about who I am."

Scott is ambivalent about celebrity, not particularly loving or loathing it. He finds it useful for charity work, but avoids places where he knows he will be photographed and dislikes drawing attention to himself. "It's a strange kind of life. The more you do, the more people want to know. Sometimes, you sit on your own and wonder: how much do people know about me? That's why you get guarded."

Ripley's Game is now showing.

Copyright © 2003 The Age Company Ltd.