December 2, 2002
Daily Telegraph
'Hollywood?  I'd rather be on the golf course'
by Elizabeth Grice

He kissed Kate Winslet and tried to kill Tom Cruise, but can he get under the skin of Dylan Thomas? Elizabeth Grice meets Dougray Scott.

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 his unusual devotion to the greatcoat gives a feeling of impermanence, as though he's just passing through. 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. There is plenty of time to admire his flat-lidded stare, indolent but watchful as a bird of prey, and to wonder if he will make it through the next hour. Exhaustion suits him.

Just when it seems he and the coat are becoming indistinguishable, there's a topic that propels him forward and 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, alongside John Malkovich and Ray Winstone, 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. The breathing technique you use with rifles is quite similar to yoga. You breathe in and breathe out and just before you lose your breath, you take a shot. It steadies the heartbeat, so you are as still as possible."

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, how it travels through the body, precisely what it will do on impact and how long the victim will take to die. He has studied ballistics and has questioned soldiers at an Army base in Germany about assassination techniques.

"Army guys love to talk about guns and rifles and ways of killing people. And when you're playing a character, you want to know everything. What way would you go in to kill? How would you get out after the shot? It's like being a kid: there are no boundaries to your imagination. You educate yourself, send yourself on countless assignments."

For Enigma, Tom Stoppard's screen adaptation of Robert Harris's novel, in which Scott gets to kiss a frumpy Kate Winslet, he studied the maths that Bletchley Park code-breakers used.

Filming for his next big film part doesn't begin until the 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. He is collecting anecdotes from people who knew the Welsh poet and has learnt from a woman who endured his drunken advances that "he was a very sloppy kisser".

Scott is big and beautiful. Dylan Thomas was neither. Could it be a problem?  "I don't look like a lot of the people I play when I start. It's a spirituality you are searching for. I could get a prosthetic, to look as much like him as possible, but the most important thing is the voice and the attitude and his spirit. Besides, he wasn't fat when he was younger. He was very angelic."

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, playing a psychopath bent on world domination in Mission: Impossible II.

Young British actors, especially ones who weren't invited back, tend to treat Hollywood like a form of prostitution. It's part of the pose. But it doesn't take more than 15 minutes in Scott's company to realise that Los Angeles is genuinely not his preferred habitat.

"The only reason to be there is to talk about films," he moans. "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."

Recently, he put up £80,000 to keep afloat his Civil War epic, To Kill a King, in which he plays the military mastermind Thomas Fairfax to Tim Roth's Oliver Cromwell. "We had problems with the financing and the film sort of went down for three weeks. I was a producer as well, so I felt a certain responsibility to make it happen. We'd spent two and a half years on it and the film was too good to let go."  It's due for release next year.

Scott has just flown back from seeing his mother in Fife. She still lives in the house in Glenrothes where he grew up, and he cherishes the continuity this gives him with his former life. "The older I get, the more I like the town. 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, 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 kilted chieftain at his local Highland games.

"I enjoy fitting in to the natural rhythm of that culture - going to the pub, playing golf with people I've played golf with for years. You can't escape the fact that you're well known. That's just part and parcel of being an actor who does films. But it's nice just to sit in my house with no one bothering me and to be who I am."

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 with the Glasgow Unity Theatre but, with four children to feed, 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."

Scott was christened Stephen. As another Equity actor already had that name, he adopted his middle name, Dougray. He preferred playing football, golf and tennis to school work but a "Protestant work ethic about exams" got him good grades. Golf, he says, gave him something to do, instead of hanging about on street corners, and it's still his favourite form of relaxation. He plays off a handicap of 10.

"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. It's more exhausting mentally than physically. 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 generally 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."

More important than money or fame, he says, is being able to "play roles that I feel are opening up a box of beautiful life. I don't want to sound like a luvvie here, but sometimes, the roles choose you. They appeal to what intrigues you at that moment in your life."

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.