July 17, 2001
The Scotsman
History in the making

An ancient Greek amphitheatre, open to a Mediterranean sky, and a balmy whisper of a breeze play host to the European première of Dougray Scott’s new film about the wartime code-breakers of Bletchley Park.

The next day Scott, dressed in a cream ensemble of linen shirt, lightweight suit and shades, sprawls his lanky frame on a cushioned seat on the terrace of the palatially discreet Timeo hotel overlooking the Sicilian town of Taormina where Enigma, based on Robert Harris’s best-selling Second World War novel, was presented as part of a film festival.

From Glenrothes, a concrete new town in Fife and his boyhood home, to a temple of the gods in Italy requires quite a leap of imagination in anyone’s book. He’s also buoyed by a meeting on the same terrace of a directorial hero, Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian cinema legend who made one of the actor’s all-time great films, The Battle of Algiers.

Scott, who turns 35 in November, has had time to become accustomed to such switchbacks of fate. Enigma, scripted by Tom Stoppard, in which he plays a brilliant but troubled young mathematician and ace Nazi code-cracker, gives him his first major opportunity to carry a $20 million film rather than sharing the limelight. On screen for most of its 120-minute running time, Scott has romantic interludes with both Saffron Burrows and Kate Winslet.

The actor’s fascination with history has managed to find a military outlet in several of his roles, notably TV’s Soldier Soldier; an early incarnation as Robert Graves in Gilles Mackinnon’s Regeneration; on stage in London in Sam Mendes’s production of To the Green Fields and Beyond , and now Michael Apted’s clandestine period thriller.

Next up he plans to play Fairfax opposite Tim Roth’s Cromwell in Cromwell and Fairfax, a $22 million historical epic set in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which he is co-producing, and is to be directed by Mike Barker. Scott suggests he’s "an incredibly curious person".

"I just love jumping into someone else’s life. It is a relatively cheap way to experience things you would be too scared to contemplate in your own life. That’s really why I became an actor in the first place," he says.

Once Scott delves into a subject, he submerges himself completely. He unearths oddities with the relish of a schoolboy on a voyage of discovery.

"Code-breaking has been around for thousands of years. Do you know that the first codes were painted on the shaven heads of ancient Greek warriors, then they waited for the hair to grow and sent them off. It didn’t work very well, because if they were caught, they just shaved their heads again to get at the message."

Scott kept his curly locks intact for Enigma, but looked a tad emaciated as his character grapples first with a nervous breakdown and then the realisation of subterfuge in the ranks. He shed a lot of weight for the role - including the 22lb bulk he acquired for Mission: Impossible II. He always takes seriously his responsibility to ease under the skin of every character he plays. Mick Jagger was admiring of Scott’s dedication.

"He actually studied the maths that the people at Bletchley used in code-breaking. He’s very serious and intense," Jagger told a colleague who was an on-set observer. The themes of betrayal, both professional and personal, reminded Scott of one of his favourite novelists Graham Greene.

"And I also watched a lot of the classic British war and espionage films from the 1950s such as The 39 Steps, Reach for the Sky and The Dambusters. That is what I liked when I saw the end result: it treats its audience with respect and reveals its hand slowly."

His profile soared in earnest when John Woo hired him as Tom Cruise’s nemesis in the Mission: Impossible sequel, although he had been asked to do Enigma before it came out. "When you do bigger films like that then it enables the financiers to take more risks," he says pragmatically. His favourite actor is Alec Guinness, whose range of roles he envies and admires.

Recently Scott has found himself with little downtime to spend at home in London with his wife, Sarah Trevis, a casting director whom he married last year after being together for five years, and his two-and-a-half-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, Gabriel and Eden.

He has come without them to Taormina after doing some reshoots north of Venice on a contemporary working of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game for director Liliana Cavani with John Malkovich in the title role.

He plays a picture framer inveigled into committing a murder, who is suffering from leukaemia. Again he looks gaunt and haunted on screen. He was also under pressure to finalise the Fairfax-Cromwell project which he’s now pursuing in London.

Scott clearly has now earned his place in the tartan acting pantheon alongside the Carlyles and the McGregors, as well as internationally being able to give the Jude Laws of the film world a run for their dosh. They’ve all done their blockbusters too, but Scott has no wish whatsoever to become another rent-a-baddie. He has become well respected in a relatively short time, first breaking in as Major Rory Taylor in the Soldier Soldier television series, as the corrupt cop in the "Welsh Trainspotting" Twin Town and the romantic lead to Drew Barrymore in Ever After. He never wooed Hollywood: the casting directors came after him.

Ironically, Twin Town, which opened doors in the US within the industry and brought him to the attention of Tom Cruise among others, took him back to Swansea where he spent some of his youth on an acting course at the Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Originally he took the plunge with a foundation stage course at Kirkcaldy College of Technology, just down the road from Glenrothes where his parents put down roots after moving from Glasgow.

He displayed no great academic inclinations, but was drawn into youth theatre and school productions of musical shows such as Calamity Jane, West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof. Then an ambitious teacher decided to stage a production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer which gave Scott an inkling of the possibilities of great drama.

"Then I read Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and I could recognise that world. My dad, who died five years ago, had been a salesman for the last 30 years of his career. There was a real connection between that person writing on the other side of the Atlantic, me reading it, and recognising that family and their world. It was a powerful stimulus."

It was only after he decided on his career path that he discovered his father and his uncle had both been actors with the Socialist theatre company Glasgow Unity in the 1950s.

"He told me about it, and I could see that the technique of being a salesman and an actor were not that dissimilar: the ability to transform yourself every morning. It is a good lesson in covering up your feelings: no-one wants to buy from someone who looks depressed."

When he broached the subject with his career teacher, he was told to concentrate on finding a proper job.

"He told me to join the navy or go into the dockyards, but I managed to find out about the course at Kirkcaldy. Then, because my parents didn’t have any money, the grant authorities suggested I attend the council-run college in Swansea because it was cheaper than London."

He was delighted to escape to Swansea. "Swansea was bigger and a bit wilder and rougher than Glenrothes, but there were plenty of similarities," he says.

His theatre roles have been varied - from his first job in Snap Theatre’s touring production of To Kill a Mockingbird, to the Traverse production of Unidentified Human Remains, which transferred to the Hampstead Theatre, and then the run of To the Green Fields and Beyond.

His least rewarding experience was as an object of Mickey Rourke’s jealous wrath in the sequel to 9 1/2 Weeks, Paris in Love - but at least it gave him the opportunity to work in Paris alongside the legendary hellraiser ("he wasn’t in the least") and his Scottish collaborator Mick Davis.

"It was not a great film by any means ... not intellectually challenging," says Scott whose role did not involve any sexual athletics to rival the star. "The steamiest part of the action for me was wearing a pair of leather trousers," he says.

Scott has yet to find a character with whom he can harbour a close affinity.

"Sometimes it is easier to play someone who is far away from you. Of course there are elements of yourself every time. I suppose Lewis in Crow Road is one that people assumed was most like me because I didn’t change my appearance that much - he has an incredible sexual confidence, a worldly sense about women and draws people towards him. He doesn’t seem to have to try too hard to achieve anything. He’s not like me at all," he says firmly.

Scott has defined the greatest danger to his craft as becoming blasé. "You lose the passion, and then it shows in your work," he says. "And the other quality I’m not going to lose is being bloody-minded. That’s the way I seem to have been since I was very young - coming from Glenrothes you had to be."

As he lounges back to survey the tranquil scene as the Sicilian sun sets over the curving bay of Taormina, being bloody-minded would seem the last item on his agenda.

Enigma is released on 28 September. Dougray Scott will attend the Edinburgh International Film Festival screening on 18 August. Ripley’s Game is released later this year.