There was a time when Dougray Scott found it so difficult to get work he might have given up, except there was nothing else he could do. 'I was unemployed, completely skint, but I just had a sort of belief, and a passion for it,' he says. In conversation, Scott has a distinctly laid-back manner. He seems relaxed to the point that he occasionally loses his train of thought when thinking about his answers to questions, questions like 'How old are you?' 'I should say I'm 28,' he says, 'but I'm not. I don't eh . . .' There is a long pause. 'Sorry, what did you say again?' This attitude belies a sharp mind and a solid Calvinist work ethic. He insists he is 30 at a time when he is 32. He was born in 1965 and was very aware he was older than some of the others in the emerging Scot Pack. 'I like being 30,' he says.
With his looks and his determination, all Scott needed was the right break, and his first starring role in a film was already in the can. He was playing a coke-sniffing Scot in a film from the producers of Trainspotting. But, despite a big nationwide release, Twin Town singularly failed to repeat Trainspotting's success and grossed less than £700,000 in Britain. There was also what was supposedly a co-starring role with Mickey Rourke in the sequel to Nine 1/2 Weeks, but it went straight to video in Britain. He got another chance of stardom with the big-budget Hollywood disaster movie Deep Impact, in which he played the journalist boyfriend of Tea Leoni. Deep Impact was a big hit. His character survived the comet that was threatening to wipe out mankind, but suffered a slashing every bit as vicious as the girl in Psycho and was left mortally wounded on the cutting-room floor. 'I hadn't a very good time on that film,' he says. 'The script that I got sent before I went to do it was interesting. And then I got there and it changed and it kept on changing.' Although Deep Impact was a hit, it did little for Scott's career.
He learned resilience from his father Allan Scott. He idolised his father, who played football for Queen's Park in the '30s and did various jobs, latterly selling fridges to keep bread on the table for his wife and four children. 'His daily reality when I was growing up was to sell enough fridges to make ends meet,' Scott told one interviewer. 'It was a tough existence.' Scott grew up in a poor part of Glenrothes, where some of the locals would 'glass' you as soon as look at you. A name like Dougray would do nothing for your street cred - it was Stephen Scott in those days. He later changed it because there was already a Stephen Scott registered with Equity, the actors' union. French ancestors provided him with his professional name, and presumably with his dark, slightly sullen features. 'There's French on my father's side,' he says. 'That's where the Dougrays come from, Huguenots.'
Like Ewan McGregor, Scott did not get on well at school. 'I was a misfit/ he says. 'The teachers were crap, patronising and orientated towards the middle-class kids.' One former teacher later told a local newspaper that Scott had always been 'an attention seeker and fairly self-centred', attributes which might have made acting an obvious career choice. Scott would have liked to have been a footballer like his father, preferably with Hibs or some other team that paid wages - Queen's Park were amateur. 'I wasn't good enough to be a footballer, so acting was second choice.' His father also provided the inspiration to go into acting. He had acted with the Unity Players in Glasgow, appearing in their most famous production, The Gorbals Story, and in Of Mice and Men. It was not his father's acting background that stirred Scott's interest, but rather a classroom reading of Arthur Miller's classic father-and-son play Death of a Salesman.
'There was a lot of similarity between Willy Loman and my old man and I'm still intrigued by that. It wasn't about, you know, being famous or, you know, that starry thing. I was genuinely interested in sort of stepping inside the skin of other people.' He realised that his father's work as a salesman was in itself a form of acting: 'Watching him get up in the mornings and turning into this cheerful salesman - because no one wants to buy anything from a miserable man -was a lesson for me in how to become another person.' Scott's father died in 1997 and his mother Elma subsequently told a local paper: 'Allan got a lot of pleasure from seeing him on TV, but he'd have been over the moon to see how his film career has taken off.'
Scott did a foundation course in drama at Kirkcaldy College of Technology (later Fife College) and then went to the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. 'It was very easy to get in,' he says dismissively. After drama school, he moved to London, where a life of unemployment was broken by islands of fringe theatre and 'bits of TV'. He attracted glowing notices for his performance as the gay protagonist in Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1992 and the Hampstead Theatre, London, the following year. Marilyn Kingwill of The Times described Scott as 'an actor able to joke without seeming lightweight and sneer without becoming camp' but warned: 'If you shy away from mimed fellatio and the like, stay at home.' He reached a much wider audience, however, as Major Rory Taylor in Soldier, Soldier. Labelled Lad's Army, Central TV's military soap became a long-running hit and Robson Green and Jerome Flynn used their popularity to launch lucrative singing careers. Scott, however, did not want to be tied down. He had missed out on Trainspotting because of Soldier, Soldier and quit after just one series.
The gamble seemed to pay off when he won a co-starring role alongside Mickey Rourke in the sequel to Nine 1/2 Weeks, variously known as Love in Paris, Another 9 1/2 Weeks and 9 1/2 Weeks 2, which perhaps looked a little too much like an arithmetic exercise. The original film, with Rourke and Kim Basinger, had been a stylish, if rather tentative, foray into designer S&M, but the sequel was just a mess. Rourke is haunted by the memory of lost love, or lost sado-masochism, and spends the film mumbling, wandering around Paris and wondering whether he can reignite the flame with someone else. There is hardly any narrative, and what little there is is difficult to follow; characters flit in and out without much explanation as to who they are. Scott is fifth on the credits, but this role is smaller than his role in Regeneration. He is the boyfriend of Rourke's girlfriend's assistant. Although it cost £10 million to make, the film went straight to video in Britain. The script was written by another Scot, Mick Davis, but ethnic solidarity is not enough to prevent Scott from dismissing it as 'shit'. 'I didn't do it for any other reason than to work with Mickey Rourke,' he says. 'He's a terrific actor.'
Television was still proving a more regular source of employment. Scott appeared as guest star on an episode of Highlander, playing an immortal like Connery did in the original film, and he was Lewis McHoan, a smarmy stand-up comic, in BBC Scotland's prestigious mini-series The Crow Road, an adaptation of a novel by lain Banks, centring on McHoan's younger brother's search for his missing uncle. The role presented Scott with one of the biggest challenges of his career - getting up in front of a room full of 150 extras in Glasgow and making them laugh. He spent weeks studying his favourite comic Eddie Izzard and went to see him and Lee Hurst at the Comedy Store in London before having a go himself. He admits it gave him a buzz, but does not see comedy as an alternative career.
Twin Town should have been his big film break. It took Scott back to Wales, where he had trained, though he was playing a Scot in the film. Twin Town was set in Swansea and was originally called Pretty Shitty City, a phrase taken from Scott's character's tirade againt poetry. Although it was directed by Kevin Allen, the executive producers were Andrew Macdonald and Danny Boyle, producer and director of Trainspotting, so there were high hopes. The film begins with a scene in which two young joyriders prang Scott's car. 'They are fucking dead, fucking dead as fuck,' he fumes. The joyriders do a drugs deal with a couple of pensioners who have just been to the chemist. Scott and his friend do a deal with a big-time operator they meet at the railway station. It turns out Scott is a policeman, who supplements his salary by selling coke. The joyriders live in a caravan with their dysfunctional family. Their father works for a roofing contractor who lives in a house called the Ponderosa. Initially the film struggles to pull the various strands together and bears more resemblance to the work of Mike Leigh than Danny Boyle. It begins to gel after the father has an accident at work and his sons demand compensation. In a scene that echoes The Godfather, they leave a poodle's head in the boss's bed. Scott agrees to kill the boys' dog and ends up killing their whole family by mistake. From that point onwards the film works as a dark comedy-thriller and Scott proves a decidedly loathsome villain. His handsome features are undermined by a gold chain round his neck, garish shirts and hair brushed straight forward in defiance of normal definitions of the phrase 'hair style'. But what is more interesting here is the mean-spirited menace behind the good looks - beating up a kid who spits on his car is just the beginning. Bigger stars would worry about their image.
One of the reasons Scott has successfully evaded typecasting is that he managed to appear in such a wide range of roles before establishing any definite image. So few people saw Twin Town that he could make Ever After without audiences wondering, even if only subconsciously, whether he was about to smash the glass slipper into Cinderella's face. Ever After was planned as a feminist reinterpretation of Cinderella, with the feisty young heroine's power coming not from a fairy godmother, but her own strength of personality. The story is set in sixteenth-century France, the central character renamed Danielle and magic replaced by science, with Leonardo da Vinci in place of the old dear with the wand and pumpkin. Danielle was played by Drew Barrymore, who starred in ET at the age of six and came through years of drug abuse to establish herself as one of Hollywood's leading young actresses two decades later. As the stepmother there was Anjelica Huston, representative of another formidable Hollywood dynasty. But for the male lead the makers were ready to take a chance on an unknown. Scott screen-tested for the part along with other hopefuls. 'I suppose I was sort of nervously excited when I met them, but I wasn't over-awed by it,' he says.
Scott read up on the Renaissance period, went horse-riding, practised fencing and is probably the first actor in any Cinderella production to draw inspiration from Edward and Mrs. Simpson - he was interested in Edward's rebellion against tradition and his determination to put love first. 'I wouldn't call myself a Method actor. I've listened to actors saying, "Oh yeah, I've fuckin' spent six months doing this or six months doing that." All that matters is what's on the screen. I know a lot of actors who don't do any preparation and who are fuckin' brilliant, you know. I choose to research because I find that hugely enjoyable and it stops me from being bored. I try to understand someone's life as much as possible.' He has never been a loafer - when he was on the dole for a lengthy period he spent his time on educational visits to churches.
Ever After was indeed the feminist version of Cinderella: Scott's Prince Charming (actually Prince Henry) needs Cinderella to climb a cliff to work out the direction to his castle and to save his life when he is threatened by gypsies. But he is an impressive figure on the royal tennis court and cuts a dash in long hair, gold crown and purple velvet cloak. Ever After won Scott a legion of dedicated female fans, though more cynical viewers may have balked at his attempts to articulate his feelings for Danielle. 'I feel as if my skin is the only thing keeping me from going everywhere at once.' You don't find dialogue like that in Trainspotting or Twin Town. But Scott delivers it with the same conviction he had as the bent policeman in Twin Town or Robert Graves in Regeneration.
Between the production and the release of Ever After, Scott made three films in Britain, the partner-swapping drama This Year's Love, with Douglas Henshall, Jennifer Ehle and Catherine McCormack, the sequel to Gregory's Girl, and a short called The Proposal, which he did for Equity minimum because he liked the script. Ewan Morrison, the writer-director, considered Scott's 'quiet brooding intensity' right for the role of a writer, pitching an idea to Patsy Kensit's producer. It shot in four days, mainly at Glasgow Airport.
This Year's Love is a witty, contemporary spin on La Ronde, set in contemporary London, with the characters moving from partner to partner in pursuit of sex, love and friendship. Scott is an impoverished Scottish artist. He sounds like Ewen Bremner's character in Trainspotting slowed down from 78 r.p.m. to 33 1/3 and reprised the stubble and lank, greasy hair from Twin Town. One of the appeals of the film is that the characters are not the usual affluent lawyers, editors and creative types that crop up in Hollywood romances, but the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary urban life. Scott plays a philandering charmer, who regards his art as a process beginning with the painting, continuing with the sale and concluding with the horse race on which he bets the proceeds. Scott learned to paint for This Year's Love and the strangely elongated dog in the auction scene is his own work. 'People were saying, "That painting is fuckin' terrible." And I'm like saying, "That's my painting." They're like, "No, it's not." I said, "It is," and it was, really. It wasn't a bad painting. It was quite funny, but . . .' And he lets the sentence drift away on a cloud of cigarette smoke, perhaps thinking better of pursuing the subject of his artistic talents any further. The painting is terrible - if it had been any good, the scene would not have worked.
In real life, Scott was not looking for love. He had a long-term relationship going with Sarah, a casting director, though he dislikes talking about his private life to the media. They had been together for most of the '90s and had twins, bearing the wonderfully biblical names of Gabriel and Eden (a girl), at the beginning of 1998. 'The babies are absolutely gorgeous and I have my hands full as a nappy-changing father,' he said in 1998. 'It is fascinating to see them learning things from the moment they are born.' Scott doted on them, flying home from shooting an ABC television mini-series in Turkey, Arabian Nights, just in time for their first birthday party.
Since leaving drama school, Scott had been based in London, where he shared an agent, Lindy King, with Ewan McGregor. But he was spending a lot of time north of the border and jumped at the chance to work with Bill Forsyth on his belated sequel to Gregory's Girl. 'He's like the guy who started the whole "independent" thing,' says Scott. 'He is to me a genius.' John Gordon Sinclair reprised the role of Gregory, as awkward as ever and still lusting after schoolgirls, though, given that he is now a teacher, his fantasies no longer seem as charming and innocent as they once did. In kilt and sculpted beard, Scott plays industrialist Fraser Rowan, a childhood friend of Gregory's, who returns home and opens a computer factory. 'He's a lonely, complex character who argues that his factory may be producing instruments of torture for the Third World, but that he also gives money to African charities,' says Scott. 'Actually, I like Fraser.' Forsyth says: 'Fraser is an unsympathetic character, but the film demands that he's liked by the audience. That's easy to do if it's a genre piece -you create the nice baddie. It demanded a more subtle performance and so I was very pleased when Dougray Scott was interested.' Gregory's Two Girls works well as a companion piece to the earlier film and comic examination of mid-life male sexual angst, but Scott's role is underwritten and the sub-plot involving suspicions that he may be manufacturing hi-tech torture equipment drew comparisons with the Famous Five.
The Crow Road, Regeneration and Gregory's Two Girls all shot in Scotland; This Year's Love filmed in London with Scottish lottery money and two Scottish stars. 'I love Dougie (Henshall), he's a great actor,' says Scott. 'There are a lot of Scottish actors who are emerging. John I know and like. Ewan I know . . . The film industry has suddenly emerged again and there's a possibility that a lot of actors can work in this country and you don't have to go to America . . . says me who's just come back.' Scott's impact was by no means confined to Scotland.
Few saw Twin Town, but fortunately Tom Cruise was one of them. Scott, as ever, was playing it cool after being hand-picked by one of Hollywood's leading stars to appear as the villain in what looked like a sure-fire hit - Mission Impossible 2. The original had been the third highest-grossing film of 1996, behind Independence Day and Twister. 'Well, aye, it's a huge movie, isn't it?' he told me, without a hint of excitement in his voice, in August 1998, not long after signing up for the project. 'If the work's good, then the work's good and other people can worry about the scale of it. It's not my job to think how much money is being put into a movie. My job is to get the character right and if I started worrying about it, then I'd be a nervous wreck.' He maintains he assesses every project on merit, though it is hard to reconcile this principled stance with the fact that Mission Impossible 2 did not have a script. Scott described it as a 'leap of faith on both sides'. A succession of writers wrestled with the script without satisfying Cruise, who was the film's producer as well as its star. On the other hand, the original film had grossed $440 million worldwide, with video rentals and sales and television revenue on top, the sequel would have a budget well into six figures and it did not take a genius to work out it was going to be huge. Scott had been given a basic outline of the plot. 'There's two main characters in the film: there's Tom Cruise's character and there's my character/ he said. 'So who needs a script?'
Mission Impossible was an enormously popular television series in the '60s, fondly remembered for the introductory scene in which the mission is outlined by a tape recording which then self-destructs. Team leader Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) was always given the choice of whether to accept. Of course, he always did. Phelps was leader of the Impossible Missions Force. An American agency dedicated to saving the world from Communism and organised crime, in that order, it included Martin Landau as a master of disguise, electronics wizard Barney Collier (pushing back the frontier for black actors in mainstream television) and hard man Willie Armitage. Leonard Nimoy joined later. The pace varied from breakneck action to slow, meticulous moments, where we could appreciate the skills of the protagonists. There were gadgets and a catchy theme tune to rival Bond and the show ran for over 150 episodes through the second half of the '60s and into the '70s.
In the 1996 film Cruise played the Landau role, albeit under a different character name. It began with the familiar recorded mission statement and theme tune, but shook viewers out of their complacency by wiping out virtually the whole IMF team not long into the film. It was at the same time a master stroke and a huge problem - where do you go from there? The film became a one-man show with Cruise trying to solve the murders. It was a reflection of the times that instead of trying to infiltrate Communism he should end up breaking into the CIA. The film contains many excellent set-pieces, none better than the heart-stopping one in which Cruise is suspended on wires above a touch-sensitive floor, though one critic suggested the plot came close to being Mission: Impenetrable and the denouement in which the traitor is revealed as Jim Phelps (played here by Jon Voight) was deeply unsatisfactory for followers of the original series - a bit like telling Christians that the Pope had become a Satanist.
Brian De Palma directed the original and Oliver Stone, director of JFK and Platoon, was lined up for the sequel, but he departed because of delays caused by Cruise's involvement in the neverending Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut. John Woo, the Chinese director of Face/Off, was on board by the time Scott became involved. Scott worked out throughout the summer of '98 to get into shape for a November start, but the project was further delayed. It was shrouded in secrecy to rival The Phantom Menace and there were continual rumours of problems and disagreements, including the suggestion that Woo was about to walk out over money. In February 1999 he attended a press conference in Sydney to formally announce that the project would shoot at Fox's studios and on location in the Sydney area, starting in March. The budget was put at $130 million , though rumours persisted that Woo wanted more and the following month there was an announcement that the project had been postponed, though executives insisted it would be only a short delay. There were reports that Woo was finding Cruise difficult to work with and that the star-producer had picked up a few hints from Kubrick on perfectionism. 'Cruise is just a supreme control freak with little or no discernible personality - not mean really, just as cold and as domineering as they come,' said one source. And the script was still not finished. But by May filming was under way, with a story that involved stopping a deadly virus falling into the wrong hands and a cast that included Cruise, Scott, Ving Rhames, reprising his Luther Stickwell character, Thandie Newton, Anthony Hopkins and Brendan Gleeson - Hamish from Braveheart. Friction continued during shooting, with key Australian crew members being replaced as a result of personality differences and differences in working practices. There was friction too with local residents in the Ithaca Road area of Elizabeth Bay when the production requisitioned parking spaces and locals let their vehicles' tyres down. Despite the size of the budget, Woo had to use Australian locations to double for the film's Spanish sequence.
Scott maintained Mission Impossible 2 would not make him rich. 'British actors don't make a helluva lot of money in Hollywood, that's why they employ us,' he says. 'As soon as I finish it, I'll come back to the same position I'm in now.' But there were suggestions in the industry that the laid-back modest actor was all an act and that Scott had become increasingly starry. He was no longer prepared to talk to journalists who phoned him, with all interview requests being referred to his agent, a character who figured ever more prominently in his conversations.
It certainly did not look like he would be back where he started after Mission Impossible 2 when it was announced he would star as the comic-book superhero Wolverine in a live-action version of X-Men. Keanu Reeves, Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe had all been linked to the role and Scott's casting was greeted with amazement in Hollywood, where he was known only as the prince in Ever After. It was rumoured that X-Men director Bryan Singer had to overcome strong opposition within 20th Century Fox. Wolverine is the most popular character in the X-Men, who each have a distinctive superpower, such as flight or telepathy. Russell Crowe, star of LA Confidential and Gladiator, was a serious contender for the role. He turned it down, leading to a widespread search for the right actor, during which Singer said: 'Wolverine's cool, he's funny, he's angry a lot, he doesn't know why ... He has great love, a lot of love, but it's all trapped inside. I'm looking for a guy who is that character, who is Wolverine.' Confirming Scott's casting, Fox president Tom Rothman said: 'Bryan was incredibly demanding over who could play the character. Dougray has the charisma, the physicality and the intensity.'
X-Men began filming in September 1999 in Toronto and should have provided lucrative work through to the end of the millennium. However, Scott was still in Australia filming Mission Impossible 2, which was running way over schedule. A shoulder injury did not help and curtailed his filming for a few days. Fox held the position open for Scott for as long as possible before finally calling in an unknown Australian, Hugh Jackman, as a replacement, with filming well under way. It was a huge blow for Scott, but one that stemmed from the happy situation of being in such huge demand in the first place. Mission Impossible 2 was originally scheduled to come out at Christmas 1999 but the delays forced Paramount to put it back to summer of 2000. Despite the setback of X-Men, Scott had every reason to believe that the new millennium augured rather well for his future film prospects, after so many false starts. 'My ambition is to be happy, to work with good writers and good directors,' he says. 'To me that's success - getting up in the morning and being excited about the work that you're doing. And that can manifest itself either in a small film or a huge movie. The last thing I expected to do was Mission Impossible 2 with Tom Cruise, which is exactly why I did it. It's a challenge.'