112602 Scotsman

The way Dougray Scott is explaining things, sobriety is the least essential requirement for the most poetic of screen roles. "You don’t have to be a drunk to play Dylan Thomas, you do what feels necessary," he says. "But it helps to know how it feels to be drunk."

Preparations seem endless. Trips to the poet’s old stamping grounds in Swansea and Laugharne; a visit to his last great watering hole, the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, New York. Just for the odd one, he can assure you - "I don’t really drink much like Thomas."

If a beery rigmarole is just part of the screen actor’s life, Scott’s attention to detail still impresses. He will play the poet in Jagged Films’s The Map of Love, which begins shooting in the spring, and is already mugging up on other aspects of the poet’s life, perfecting his lilting chapel voice and Churchillian declamatory style. He’s even putting on the pounds to get himself up to regulation bardic weight.

The actor has been here before. For last year’s hit Enigma, Scott lost around a stone to play the ascetic hero Tom Jericho. He delved inside his character’s psyche too, devouring books on codes and calculus, to understanding the mindset of the code-breakers who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

His approach lends him appeal to his employers and Scott seems prodigiously busy. He is starring in two adventure movies awaiting release, as an assassin in The Poet and - opposite John Malkovich - as a reluctant hitman in Ripley’s Game, premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

There’s more. Already, private views of To Kill a King, an English Civil War drama, have been screened and as producer and actor he is shooting a black comedy, The Bum’s Rush, in Tomintoul. He has been pencilled in as the lead in an adaptation of this year’s Iain Banks novel, Dead Air.

He educates himself through all these characters, he says, as if he picks their lives off a skip and takes them home to try them on. In this vicarious way he has learnt more about the world than through any formal education.

Take Thomas. Scott has taken his knowledge of the Welshman well beyond "O" Grade celebrity status. If, for example, it’s suggested that, at 37, his good looks hardly resemble the porky features of the poet, he counters with a little extra knowledge. "No, no, he was quite angelic-looking - at least that was the perception of him as a young man."

That’s Scott - intelligent and antsy with an opinion of his own. He recognises a journalist legitimately can be interested in his story, but he talks only on his own turf (a hotel near Glenrothes) and to his own timings (one hour, max). Then, from the off, he is impermeable to any notion an outsider might venture about his life and career.

Would he accept, for example, that, as an actor, he’s drawn to characters who ultimately fail, and it’s that failure which makes them interesting? The achievements of Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell in the English revolution, played out in To Kill a King, were overturned on Cromwell’s death; Thomas drank himself into oblivion.

No, it seems he wouldn’t accept that at all. "One person’s failure is another man’s hero," he declares. "Cromwell and Fairfax, for a lot of people at that time, and for years after, they were heroes. For other people, they were the men who ruined the country. But it’s their aspirations which make them attractive, they were tempted to do something extraordinary that had never been done before in their lives - it was risky. They never saw it as failure."

And before you can say: "well they wouldn’t, would they?" he launches into a defence of Thomas, a man he admires uncritically. "Where I’m from, Dylan Thomas is a great success, the man who revolutionised poetry. He wouldn’t have called it failure, he had an extraordinary time. And his poetry survived - he became more famous the deader he got."

A fourth character he was drawn to, Willy Loman, he acknowledges to have been a failure. Loman is the tragic hero of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. When, as a teenager on the Woodside estate in Glenrothes, Scott heard a recording of Lee J Cobb in the part, it inspired him to become an actor. Loman, he says, carried an echo of his late father, Allan, a rep for Lec refrigerators: "I liked that because I felt close."

There’s another theme linking the characters and the work he admires - an undercurrent of socialism. As a young man, his father was a member of Glasgow Unity Theatre, and played in Of Mice and Men, Juno and the Paycock, The Gorbals Story and Men Should Weep. It is surely more than chance that draws Scott to similarly substantial, anti-establishment roles?

Again, it’s not quite so simple. "I’m drawn to people who have interesting lives," he says. "I don’t sit down and think I want to play this or that character.

"I read a script and if it starts to seep into me I feel more inclined to explore whether I want to do it. I don’t have a chart on my wall. You want to be able to get something out of it, you want to have your eyes opened and to learn."

But finally he admits a point. "I am left wing. I’ve been a socialist since I could remember what politics were. I supported Labour, LPYS, Militant - we were all in at some point - which I found inspiring and then disillusioning. I found it quite bullying in the end."

He’s come round to the notion that the personal is political and finds it hard to stomach when he reads about leaders of the past whose personal politics let them down. He says: "They can’t talk about changing the world for the greater good of society and then treat the people around them despicably."

But should you drop in, by way of agreement, that people have made that very point about Bill Clinton, he takes issue again. "I’m not sure about a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky ... she had a lot to make out of that story. She kept the dress with his semen on it, for God’s sake. But in general, yes, personal politics are important.

"You would certainly want someone who was a socialist to have impeccable manners. Not everyone is perfect, we all have our problems. But at least you can try to do the right thing in your private life."

He is fiercely defensive of his own private life. The tabloids made a meal of his marriage to Sarah Trevis last year and, after rumours (hotly denied) of an affair with Enigma co-star Kate Winslet, the papers ridiculed a very public kiss he offered his wife. Now he says only that he divides his time between his two families, between his London home and his children, and his mother and sister in Glenrothes. Any more information would just be gratuitous, he insists.

Other aspects of his CV are easier to access. His Christian name is Stephen. "Dougray" - of Huguenot origin - is one of his middle names, derived from his paternal grandmother’s family. He attended Auchmuty High School in Glenrothes and trained at the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff.

Since graduation, things have gone well. From the mid-1990s he moved from TV dramas to the movies, from gung-ho service in Soldier, Soldier to bent copper in Twin Town. That film drew the attention of Tom Cruise and Scott found himself cast in Mission: Impossible 2.

Recently he went on record as saying "I love Tom Cruise," a remark he defends, even though it could be construed as the kind of thing a drama queen would say. "I do love him," he protests. "I like him enormously - that’s not a luvvie thing to say. He’s very sweet. I’m not saying that to ingratiate myself - we get on very well."

If his rise has been rapid, there have been continuities through Scott’s career. He was Lewis McHoan in the widely praised 1996 BBC adaptation of The Crow Road. On set, he formed a friendship with producer Brad Adams and discovered respect for the story’s author, Iain Banks.

Six years on, he read Dead Air in manuscript form - "an extraordinary book" - and was a shoo-in for the role of its principal character, Ken Nott, when Adams’s company, Union Pictures, bought the rights. Roger Gray is drafting a script, and, when financial backing is in place, filming could begin next year.

Scott clearly likes Dead Air’s very British line-up, but acknowledges Tinsel Town has served him well. Hollywood is not the be-all and end-all, "but it’s given me many more opportunities than if I hadn’t done those big blockbuster films".

His latest American production, Ripley’s Game, paired him with "a terrific actor" in Malkovich, enabling him to compare and contrast their differing approaches. "John’s very off-the-cuff sometimes, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t prepare or think about it - he thinks a great deal about his work.

"I do a lot of preparation, a lot of research … you’re giving yourself ammunition to be as good as possible. But on the set I try to be as open as I can, so anything can happen, so you can surprise yourself. I don’t come on set thinking: ‘I know exactly what I’m going to do.’ I want to be in the moment, really spontaneous."

Had he anything to learn from an actor of the calibre of Malkovich? "I don’t think you learn anything. But you want to work with someone who’s great because you get better as well. You don’t want to work in a vacuum - acting is all about interacting, about responding, reacting. We worked very well together."

These days, with all the offers piling up, Scott has the luxury to pick and choose between roles; it’s a wonder he can still distinguish between the serious and the schlock in cinema. He can, of course, though the distinction is not clear-cut. He says: "Every film that’s ever made is important, because a lot of people’s passion and lives are involved.

"What annoys me sometimes is the critical reaction to movies - a dismissive five sentences about something that takes five years to make. You can have a critical opinion about it, but they seem to forget that people put their heart and soul into movies, no-one sets out to make a bad movie."

He believes the best films - including some of his own - have the ability to change people’s lives. That, though, does not invalidate all the razzmatazz of Hollywood’s epic productions.

"You live one life. You want to be able to taste many different ingredients of life," he says, defining the actor’s prerogative. "I made MI2 purely for the roller-coaster theatrical ride, which is relevant as well.

"I didn’t do it for my bank balance - although it was good for my bank balance. I took a greater understanding of whether was I able to communicate on a world scale as an actor, and the answer is yeah, I guess."

Obviously, there’s more to it than that. "Yeah. There’s getting to fire guns every day, riding on very fast motorbikes and fighting Tom Cruise. I love all that."