Dougray Scott, dressed in a casual shirt and jeans, is cool and relaxed on a humid London afternoon.  He's spent the best part of the day chatting about his latest movie, the World War II thriller, Enigma, in which he stars with Kate Winslet.  So the tall, slim Scots star is entitled to feel just a touch tired, particularly since the weather is so clammy.  But Dougray greets freetime with a smile and a firm handshake, and agrees to miss his lunch break so that we can talk.

The new movie, based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris and about the breaking of the Nazi secret code, is the latest in a run of high-profile movies for Dougray.   It follows on from Ever After, the Cinderella story in which he partnered Drew Barrymore, and Mission: Impossible 2, when he swapped punches with Tom Cruise.

In Enigma, Dougray plays a boffin who is Britain's best hope to solve the mystery of the Nazi code and Kate Winslet is one of the girls in Bletchley Park who helps the hero win the day.

"It's an adventure story set in such a sexy time, with young people determined to live for the moment," says Kate who was pregnant at the time the World War II movie was filmed.  At one stage in the movie Kate's character is also expecting a baby.   "She actually had to be padded out in a scene because she was not pregnant enough!", reveals Dougray.

The leading man, who comes from Fife in Scotland, spent weeks before the cameras rolled getting prepared for his screen performance.  Playing a boffin on the edge of a breakdown, meant that the star, who wasn't exactly chubby, had to get even thinner.

"I went from 12st, 8lb to about 11 stone, and that was hard work," he says.   "How did I loose the weight? Plates of cabbage soup, a low-fat diet, a lot of exercise and will power.  Will power was the most important."

The result is that in Enigma, with his 1940s short back and sides, Dougray looks positively gaunt.  "And then I lost weight again for Ripley's Game," he says about the movie he has just made with John Malkovich.  "Now I want to play someone fat.  I'm going to play Dylan Thomas at some point and I'm waiting to see when we could do the film.  It might mean eating a lot of ice cream!"

Although he's in a playful mood, Dougray takes his work very seriously.  He underlined that by spending weeks researching the code breakers of Bletchley Park before he starting filming Enigma.  "I worked on it for over five months," he says.  "One day it all just seemed to click in my head and I could see it all clearer than ever.  So now I understand the mechanics and can operate and Enigma machine."  He jokes that a bonus from all that research is that he will be better at working out crosswords now.

Apart from the brain power that was required, Dougray also had to be a bit of an action man again.  He had done lots of physical stuff, of course, in the second Mission: Impossible adventure when he was riding motorbikes, firing guns and doing fight sequences as the bady guy to Tom Cruise's secret agent.

"But what was very interesting in Enigma was that you don't expect that sort of stuff from this character, he can't be an action man," Dougray informs us.   "So I had to find a way of doing any action that involved this character so that it was believable.  For instance when he punches someone he rubs his sore hand afterwards."

A couple of the sequences that focused on the physical side of things came when Dougray had to swim away from a submarine and also when he raced along a railway platform to catch a train.

"Some of that scene in the water was shot in a tank in the studio but other stuff for it was done off the west coast of Scotland," he says.  "So I actually had to jump into the freezing water .  But they looked after me and made sure I was warmed up as soon as I came out of the water.  And of curse, I had a wet suit under my clothes - I'm not mad!"

He shrugs when freetime wonders how many times he had to hurtle along the platform after the train.  "I'm actually quite a fast runner, though you might not realise it.  So I love running and I enjoyed doing that scene."

He agrees that all the research, the dieting and then the action sequences made for a rather demanding film shoot.  "It does take a lot out of you.  On top of everything I had to see the world through this character's eyes.  That was a challenge.  But I'm not complaining.  You do these things because you are an actor and I enjoy it all.  Ultimately all the effort is very rewarding."

Right now Dougray is reaping the rewards of being an actor in demand.  But he stresses that it is not the size of the cheque involved that persuades him to do a movie.   "I will not do something unless I feel committed to it because making a film is a lot of work and I like to get it right," he says.  One project that he is keen to do is Fairfax and Cromwell, which will be set at the end of the Civil War.

Dougray was also impressed by the effort that Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, one of the film's producers, put into getting Enigma made.  "He bought the rights and stuck with the project," he says.  "Before filming began he made all the actors a compilation of the music of the period, to help set the mood."

When freetime talks about Enigma, the modest Scot chooses not to dwell on his own performance but rather to praise how the film looks.  "It think it is a great film, which takes film-making back to the 1940s and 1950s," says a grinning Dougray.   "We filmed a scene in Trafalgar Square really early on a Sunday.  It looks fantastic," says Dougray, adding it was like being thrown into a time warp.   "It reminded me of classics like Brief Encounter and Hitchcock movies.  It's a marvelous type of film-making, of the type I haven't seen for ages.   I'm really proud to have been involved."

©2001 OK! magazine

- Thanks to my pal Marla of Admiring Kate for the interview!